Theoretical Virtues in Scientific Practice: An Empirical Study

Abstract

It is a common view among philosophers of science that theoretical virtues (also known as epistemic or cognitive values), such as simplicity and consistency, play an important role in scientific practice. In this paper, I set out to study the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice empirically. I apply the methods of data science, such as text mining and corpus analysis, to study large corpora of scientific texts in order to uncover patterns of usage. These patterns of usage, in turn, might shed some light on the role that theoretical virtues play in scientific practice. Overall, the results of this empirical study suggest that scientists invoke theoretical virtues explicitly, albeit rather infrequently, when they talk about models (less than 30%), theories (less than 20%), and hypotheses (less than 15%) in their published works. To the extent that they are mentioned in scientific publications, the results of this study suggest that accuracy, consistency, and simplicity are the theoretical virtues that scientists invoke more frequently than the other theoretical virtues tested in this study. Interestingly, however, depending on whether they talk about hypotheses, theories, or models, scientists may invoke one of those theoretical virtues more than the others. Introduction 2. Methods 3. Results Discussion Appendix

Epistemic Markers in the Scientific Discourse

“…The concept is virtually absent from all of biology. This situation should encourage us to reconsider the importance given to the philosophical accounts of theory in biology, 5 Mizrahi measured the percentage of articles in which an epistemic virtue such as simplicity would be found at least once together with theory, model, or hypothesis within a 10 10 word window, and for nine disciplinary subjects provided by the JSTOR Data for Research interface (Mizrahi 2022). In the present work, we measured the correlation between semantic field cooccurrence frequencies at the paragraph level.…”

“…Similarly, McPhetres and colleagues recently investigated the usage of theory in psychological research specifically ( N = 2,225, journal Psychological Science ) and found the term present in 53.6% of articles and referring to over 350 different named theories (McPhetres et al 2021). 1 Research has also been done on the use of epistemic virtues (through the Journal Storage [JSTOR] Data for Research interface), highlighting the predominance of simplicity , accuracy , and consistency over other virtues such as fruitfulness or testability , but with differences depending on their application to theories , hypotheses , or models (Mizrahi 2022).…”

Cognitive Artifacts and Their Virtues in Scientific Practice

“…Keas 2018). Only recently, pioneering empirical studies of how researchers appeal to virtues have been performed (Mizrahi 2021). Mizrahi, by performing a plain text search over JSTOR articles in multiple scientific disciplines, found that depending on the kind of scientific representation, different virtues are ascribed: models are treated differently from theories or hypotheses.…”

Theoretical Virtues: Do Scientists Think What Philosophers Think They Ought to Think?

“…Experimental methods have been employed in several subfields of philosophy since the early 2000s (Knobe and Nichols 2017). Although there were early attempts to use experimental methods in the philosophy of science (Stotz and Griffiths 2004; Stotz 2009), experimental methods have been embraced more widely only in more recent years (Schupbach 2011; Waskan et al 2014; Douven and Schupbach 2015; Steel et al 2017; Chall et al 2021; Mättig and Stöltzner 2019; Robinson et al 2019; Beebe and Dellsén 2020; Wilkenfeld and Lombrozo 2020; Mizrahi, forthcoming). This paper is a contribution to this recent wave in experimental philosophy of science.…”

“…1Mizrahi (forthcoming) is a recent exception. Mizrahi used data mining techniques and corpus analysis to investigate the frequency of the use of terms related to theoretical virtues.…”