Scientific Explanation and Trade-Offs Between Explanatory Virtues

Rosales, Alirio; Morton, Adam

doi:10.1007/s10699-019-09645-0

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Theoretical virtues include properties such as accuracy, internal consistency, and simplicity (Keas 2018, Schindler 2018, and are sometimes construed as properties that provide epistemic justification, or support for belief, in a theory (Douglas 2014, Schindler 2018. While philosophers of science have debated how to balance competing virtues (Matthewson & Weisberg, 2009;McMullin 2009) and assess their relative importance (Mackonis 2013, Rosales & Morton 2021, Elliott & McKaughan 2014, this discourse has not yet had a large influence in the cognitive sciences (Roeckelein 1997, Mizrahi 2021.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem-ladenness of theory

Levenstein,

De Santo,

Heijnen

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories, or develop those that best suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical virtues, focused on their epistemic justification, have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We advance a problem-centric, or pragmatic, account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to estimate the degree to which a theory increases the problem-solving efficacy of a field's body of knowledge. From this perspective, what are traditionally considered epistemic virtues can be couched in terms of their coverage of problems in a field's domain, or problem-space, and additional virtues come to light that reflect a theory’s ability to facilitate its use by problem-having agents and its context in a societally-embedded scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the different needs of different fields result in different kinds of theories, and allows us to formulate the challenges facing cognitive science in terms that we hope will facilitate their resolution through further theoretical development.

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