The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate (...) that the pursued system is promising of contributing to the epistemic goal of robustness of scientific knowledge and of developing into a candidate for acceptance. In order to realize this we will (a) adjust the scope of Bonjour’s standards—consistency, inferential density, and explanatory power, and (b) complement them by the requirement of a programmatic character. In this way we allow for the evaluation of the “potential coherence” of the given epistemic system. (shrink)

Recent philosophical literature has turned its attention towards assessments of how to judge scientific proposals as worthy of further inquiry. Previous work, as well as papers contained within this special issue, propose criteria for pursuitworthiness (Achinstein, 1993; Whitt, 1992; DiMarco & Khalifa, 2019; Laudan, 1977; Shan, 2020; Šešelja et al., 2012). The purpose of this paper is to assess the grounds on which pursuitworthiness demands can be legitimately made. To do this, I propose a challenge to the possibility of even (...) minimal criteria of pursuitworthiness, inspired by Paul Feyerabend. I go on to provide a framework for identifying the contexts in which pursuitworthiness criteria may promote the efficiency of scientific inquiry. I then spell out some implications this framework has for values and pursuit. (shrink)

Recent objections to epistemic permissivism have a metaepistemic flavor. Impermissivists argue that their view best accounts for connections between rationality, planning and deference. Impermissivism is also taken to best explain the value of rational belief and normative assessment. These objections pose a series of metaepistemic explanatory challenges for permissivism. In this paper, I illustrate how permissivists might meet their explanatory burdens by developing two permissivist metaepistemic views which fare well against the explanatory challenges.

A theme of much work taking an ““economic approach”” to the study of science is the interaction between the norms of individual scientists and those of society at large. Though drawing from the same suite of formal methods, proponents of the economic approach offer what are in substantive terms profoundly different explanations of various aspects of the structure of science. The differences are illustrated by comparing Strevens's explanation of the scientific reward system (the ““priority rule””) with Max Albert's explanation of (...) the prevalence of ““high methodological standards”” in science. Some objections to the economic approach as a whole are then briefly considered. (shrink)

One of Thomas Kuhn's profoundest arguments is introduced in the 1970 “Postscript” to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Kuhn is discussing the idea of a “disciplinary matrix” as a more adequate articulation of the “paradigm” notion he'd introduced in the first, 1962, edition of his famous work . He notes that one “element” of disciplinary matrices is likely to be common to most or even all such matrices, unlike the other elements which serve to distinguish specific disciplines and sub-disciplines (...) from one another. This is the element which he calls “values”, which, as he notes , being common to a number of otherwise distinct disciplinary matrices, “do much to provide a sense of community to natural scientists as a whole”. On the other hand, they also do much, and crucially in Kuhn's view, to promote and sustain a healthy diversity among the practitioners who share any specific disciplinary matrix. In particular, Kuhn claims that “individual variability in the application of shared values may serve functions essential to science.”. (shrink)