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Inquiry Tickets: Values, Pursuit, and Underdetermination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Marina DiMarco  and
Kareem Khalifa
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Abstract

We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that nonepistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of nonepistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relevant to hypothesis choice: the relevance of nonepistemic values to a particular cognitive attitude with respect to h varies over time.

Type
Ethics, Values, and Social Epistemology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 1016 - 1028
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

We are grateful to Kevin Elliott for his careful and insightful attention to this argument and to audience members at PSA 2018 and members of the University of Pittsburgh HPS Works in Progress community for their feedback on earlier versions of the article.

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