Reddit mentions of Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Two pieces that I was reminded of just today might be tangentially useful to you. Heather Douglas is a relatively big name in philosophy of science, part of whose general attitude to the practice of good science is that it cannot reduce to a naive concept of "objectivity". She also argues that at least sometimes good science is not just informed by notions that are naively taken to be the core of "rationality" (as you put it, that's not my words or hers so your mileage may vary), such as e.g. well-designed experiment, plausible inferences, the repudiation of cognitive bias etc.

Failing to consider values which are generally held to be outside the scope of science, and failing to critically examine whether concepts putatively at the core of scientific practice are well-explained or even coherent, could lead you to an overdose of rationality.

http://individual.utoronto.ca/michael_miller/courses/sv_f17/documents/douglas_2000.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20118400

She also has a book on roughly this idea, as it applies to govt. policy

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Policy-Value-Free-Heather-Douglas/dp/0822960265

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You might also be interested in:

William James, "The Will to Believe"

Re-reading Hume on this subject more fully in the 1st Enquiry

Hugh MacDiarmid, who touches on this in "The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" (poetry)

Thomas Carlyle, who satirises an overdose of rationality in "Sartor Resartus" (novel)

And most close to my heart, Laurence Sterne in "Tristram Shandy" (sort of a novel, contains extended ridicule of the rationalistic worldview)

Oh, and also Flann O'Brien, especially in "The Dalkey Archive" (also a novel)

I do philosophy of science policy, and the best book I've found on that is Heather Douglas' Science Policy and the Value Free Ideal. I've heard some fairly hard core policy wonks say it's the only philosophy book they enjoyed reading. It goes over the history of the role of the science advisor in US, and talks about the role values play in science and science policy. It's a fantastic read!