The topics of the conference will cover at least three main issues: what are the different kinds of values involved in science and how are they related? where and how are they involved in science? what consequences follow from the presence of values?

One useful distinction concerning values in science is that between epistemic and nonepistemic values. Epistemic values are those tied to truth, knowledge, and the like. Nonepistemic values have other ends--what is morally or politically good, for example. Various authors suggest that either this distinction cannot be made or is not relevant to issues about objectivity in science. Even if the distinction is coherent and relevant, there further interesting questions about specific values and about how epistemic values relate. Is simplicity an epistemic value? If so, why? How are the many apparent appeals to aesthetic values in science to be understood--are they epistemic? Why or why not? Among the epistemic values, how are values ranked? Can epistemic values conflict? How, why, and with what consequences?

A second set of important questions concern just where and in what fashion values are involved in science (keeping in mind the distinctions made above). Most attention has traditionally been paid to the role of values in confirmation--in moving from data to hypotheses. Values may be involved in deciding how much evidence is enough, how methodological norms such as simplicity are involved, and how competing disserida are balanced. More recent work in the history, philosophy and social studies of science has pointed to other, more subtle ways values may enter. Challenges to the context of discover-context of confirmation distinction open up questions about how values might influence the hypotheses that are pursued or considered live options, even if values have no influence on the inference from data to hypothesis. Related issues concern the place of values in categorization, opening up the possibility that values are involved in how the data are described. Other issues concern the role of moral evaluations in the practice of science to determine the trust worthiness of the work of others, given the apparently inherent role that reliance on experts plays in science. Finally values may involved in determining what science is--in the conception of relevant scientific goals. Aside from these "internal" issues, there is an important set of questions about how values are involved in the use of science--either in public policy advice or in technological application. On all of these issues a further fundamental question concerns the place of social processes in science: to what extent are any of the above possible role of values the result of or the cause of the scientific division of labor, the place of trust, expertise, and authority or power?

The third set of questions asks what conclusions we should draw about science given the answers advocated to the questions described above. A first issue is whether we are warranted in claiming that values (of some specified kind and use) are inevitably or only contingently involved. Of course, there need not be a single answer for all types of values, uses, and sciences. A second fundamental issue is what the presence of values implies about the objectivity, rationality, etc. of science: is the presence of values necessarily at odds with these traits? If not, how do we distinguish between legitimate presence and mere bias? A third related issue concerns the role social processes--division of labor, competing research groups, etc.--concerning values and objectivity.