Testing Knowledge: Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health

How do we know whether a vaccine is safe and effective, whether an animal bioassay is suitable for predicting that a chemical can cause cancer, or whether a psychological test measures what it purports to measure? When scientific tests are applied for decision-making, methodological debates can easily become a political battleground. In this way, informal and formal regimes of regulation impact on the negotiation of epistemic and pragmatic concerns in the validation of scientific methods. I will present a collaborative research project that brings together historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives on the relationship and dynamics between validation and regulation in the sciences of health. Against this background, I will portray the development and contemporary expansion of an “regulatory ethos of science”. This ethos is characterized by following rules and guidelines instead of challenging them, focusing on testing instead of experimenting, and privileging reproducibility over validity.