I present an ontology of criteria for evaluating theory to answer the titular question from the perspective of a scientist practitioner. Set inside a formal account of our adjudication over theories, a metatheoretical calculus, this ontology comprises the following: (a) metaphysical commitment, the need to highlight what parts of theory are not under investigation, but are assumed, asserted, or essential; (b) discursive survival, the ability to be understood by interested non-bad actors, to withstand scrutiny within the intended (sub)field(s), and to (...) negotiate the dialectical landscape thereof; (c) empirical interface, the potential to explicate the relationship between theory and observation, i.e., how observations relate to, and affect, theory and vice versa; (d) minimising harm, the reckoning with how theory is forged in a fire of historical, if not ongoing, abuses—from past crimes against humanity, to current exploitation, turbocharged or hyped by machine learning, to historical and present internal academic marginalisation. This work hopes to serve as a possible beginning for scientists who want to examine the properties and characteristics of theories, to propose additional virtues and vices, and to engage in further dialogue. Finally, I appeal to practitioners to iterate frequently over such criteria, by building and sharing the metatheoretical calculi used to adjudicate over theories. (shrink)

This paper advocates for making epistemic interests a central object of philosophical analysis in epistemology and philosophy of science. It is argued that the importance of epistemic interests derives from their fundamental importance for the notion of objectivity. Epistemic interests are defined as individuated by a set of objectives, each of which represents a dimension of the search for truth. Among these dimensions, specificity, sensitivity, and productivity are discussed in detail. It is argued that the relevance of productivity is often (...) overlooked in debates about the ends and means of science. A definition of the objectivity of inquiry is proposed that takes the notion of epistemic interest as its starting point. (shrink)

If we cannot define science using only analysis or description, then we must rely on imagination to provide us with suitable objects of philosophical inquiry. This process ties our intellectual findings to the particular ways in which we philosophers think about scientific practice and carve out a cognitive space between real world practice and conceptual abstraction. As an example, I consider Heather Douglas’s work on the responsibilities of scientists and document her implicit ideal of science, defined primarily as an epistemic (...) practice. I then contrast her idealization of science with an alternative: “technoscience,” a heuristic concept used to describe nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and similar “Mode 2” forms of research. This comparison reveals that one’s preferred imaginary of science, even when inspired by real practices, has significant implications for the distribution of responsibility. Douglas’s account attributes moral obligations to scientists, while the imaginaries associated with “technoscience” and “Mode 2 science” spread responsibility across the network of practice. This dynamic between mind and social order, I argue, demands an ethics of imagination in which philosophers of science hold themselves accountable for their imaginaries. Extending analogous challenges from feminist philosophy and Mills’s. “Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” I conclude that we ought to reflect on the idiosyncrasy of the philosophical imagination and consider how our idealizations of science, if widely held, would affect our communities and broader society. (shrink)

I critically analyze Kevin Elliott’s A Tapestry of Values in order to tease out his views on the nature and status of values or value judgments in the text. I show there is a tension in Elliott’s view that is closely connected to a major lacuna in the philosophical literature on values in science: the need for a better theory of values.

This response addresses the excellent responses to my book provided by Heather Douglas, Janet Kourany, and Matt Brown. First, I provide some comments and clarifications concerning a few of the highlights from their essays. Second, in response to the worries of my critics, I provide more detail than I was able to provide in my book regarding my three conditions for incorporating values in science. Third, I identify some of the most promising avenues for further research that flow out of (...) this interchange. (shrink)

Stephen John has recently suggested that the ethics of communication yields important insights as to how values should be incorporated into science. In particular, he examines cases of “wishful speaking” in which a scientific actor endorses unreliable conclusions in order to obtain the consequences of the listener treating the results as credible. He concludes that what is wrong in these cases is that the speaker surreptitiously relies on values not accepted by the hearer, violating what he terms “the value-apt ideal”. (...) I expand on this view by integrating into it Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice. I find testimonial injustice can arise in a manner unanticipated by Fricker, specifically that a credibility excess given to a speaker typically reduces the ability of others in the epistemic community to transmit knowledge, a phenomenon I term “collateral epistemic injustice”. I argue that this possibility entails that receivers have an ethical obligation to assign credibility judiciously. A further consequence of this view is that the value-apt ideal is insufficient. Because audience members have an obligation to assign credibility judiciously, a speaker cannot merely rely on shared values, they must also be open about the extent to which their conclusions depend on those values. Thus, both wishful speaking and obscuring the value-dependent nature of a conclusion makes one an unreliable source of information. Accordingly, other community members have an ethical obligation to ignore a speaker that frequently engages in either. (shrink)

The last couple of decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the notion of inductive risk among philosophers of science. However, while it is possible to find a number of suggestions about the mitigation of inductive risk in the literature, so far these suggestions have been mostly relegated to vague marginal remarks. This paper aims to lay the groundwork for a more systematic discussion of the mitigation of inductive risk. In particular, I consider two approaches to the mitigation of inductive (...) risk—the individualistic approach, which maintains that individual scientists are primarily responsible for the mitigation of inductive risk, and the socialized approach, according to which the responsibility for the mitigation of inductive risk should be more broadly distributed across the scientific community or, even more broadly, across society. I review some of the argument for and against the two approaches and introduce two new problems for the individualistic approach, which I call the problem of precautionary cascades and the problem of exogenous inductive risk, and I argue that a socialized approach might alleviate each of these problems. (shrink)

The following paper argues that issues in paradigmatic proposals for solving the new demarcation problem stem from absolutist assumptions about judgments of value legitimacy. Both the problem of uninformativeness (Larroulet Philippi 2020; Fernandez-Pinto 2014, 2015) and the problem of ambiguous judgments of cases (Hicks 2014; Intemann 2017) are explained by an absolutist pretension contained in one of the main aims of these proposals: providing criteria for differentiating legitimate from illegitimate uses of values, without qualification. After presenting the problems and showing (...) how they stem from that common source, we will sketch a way forward, inspired mainly by Joseph Rouse’s Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty (1996), advancing routes that can allow philosophers of science to evade these pitfalls and engage with scientific practice in a more salutary manner. (shrink)

Kevin Elliott’s A Tapestry of Values is a terrific book, chock full of valuable case studies and incisive analyses. It aims to be useful not only to students of philosophy of science and the other areas of science studies but also to practicing scientists, policymakers, and the public at large—a tall order. And it succeeds admirably for many of these folks. In my comments I suggest what it would need for the rest.