This paper argues that ethical propositions can legitimately be used as evidence for and against empirical conclusions. Specifically, I argue that this thesis is entailed by several uncontroversial assumptions about ethical metaphysics and epistemology. I also outline several examples of ethical-to-empirical inferences where it is extremely plausible that one can rationally rely upon their ethical evidence in order to gain a justified belief in an empirical conclusion. The main upshot is that ethical propositions can, under perfectly standard conditions, play both (...) direct and indirect evidential roles in (social) scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Heather Douglas has helped to set the standard for twenty-first century discussions in philosophy of science on the topics of values in science and science in democracy. Douglas’s work has been part of a movement to bring the question of values in science back to center of the field and to focus especially on policy-relevant science. This first chapter, on the pervasive entanglement of science and values, includes an improved and definitive statement of the argument from inductive risk, which she (...) is single-handedly responsible for rehabilitating and returning to the center of the debate. This statement makes clear the fundamental and absolutely pervasive nature of inductive risk and its import for our understanding of the role of values in science. The chapter also provides a survey of the current field of alternative approaches to ideals for the epistemic role of values in science that is comprehensive and generous, yet critical of each. -/- In these brief comments, I focus on providing an alternative perspective on some conceptual and rhetorical issues in Douglas’s account, specifically dealing with the nature of values and the relation of the descriptive and the normative. This will lead me to somewhat different evaluations of two of the five new ideals for values in science that Douglas canvasses in the chapter. (shrink)

The philosophical or theoretical commitments informing psychological research are sometimes characterized, even by theoretical psychologists themselves, as nonempirical, outside the bounds of methodological consideration, and/or nonrational. We argue that this characterization is incoherent. We illustrate our concern by analogy with problematic appeals to Kuhn’s work that have been influential in theoretical psychology. Following the contemporary pragmatist tradition, we argue that our philosophical/theoretical commitments are part of our larger webs of belief, and that for any of these beliefs to have meaning (...) their content must be informed by our practical engagement with the world, i.e., they are based on empirical evidence, broadly construed. It is this empirical basis that allows us to recognize our commitments at all and rationally to assess and criticize them when necessary. We conclude by demonstrating a rational assessment of the philosophical/theoretical commitments underlying a recent study in the social psychology of religion. (shrink)