CfP: for SI on Pursuitworthiness in Science
We are soliciting papers for a special issue in Studies of History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, on the topic “Pursuitworthiness in Scientific Inquiry”. The special issue will be co-edited by Dunja Šešelja (TU Eindhoven) and Jamie Shaw (University of Toronto).
Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2021.
The topic of pursuitworthiness in scientific inquiry received a lot of
attention throughout the last decades of the 20th century. While this
theme draws its roots from Peirce’s ‘economy of research’ and
discussions that followed Reichenbach’s distinction between
the context of discovery and the context of justification,
pursuitworthiness became an explicit topic of philosophical accounts in
the post-Kuhnian literature. Starting from Laudan’s (1977) ‘context of
pursuit’, to McMullin’s (1976) ‘heuristic appraisal’,
to Anne-Whitt’s (1992) ‘indices of theory-promise’ different accounts
aimed at explicating ways of evaluating the promising character of
scientific inquiry. The importance of distinguishing the ‘comparative
evaluation of problem-solving efficiency and promise’
and the ‘evaluation of completed research’ (Nickles 1980) remained
central to subsequent philosophical debates: from discussions on the
role of values in scientific research, to the literature on scientific
pluralism, to debates concerning particular controversies
in empirical sciences, to epistemological discussions on the norms
underlying the process of inquiry – to mention only some examples.
Even though the topic of pursuitworthiness continues to play a central
role in contemporary philosophical debates, its treatment remains
scattered across different problem-fields. Whether we are tackling the
pursuitworthiness of theoretical frameworks such
as string theory in physics, projects concerning the risks and safety
from a future artificial intelligence, exploratory models in biomedical
sciences, or highly idealized models in social sciences, several issues
remain constant across these debates. With
this volume, we aim to bring these discussions together and provide an
overview of the current outlooks on the pursuitworthiness in various
scientific inquiries. At the same time, we aim to reexamine the
actuality of the traditional philosophical accounts
in face of novel problems and challenges. Altogether, we welcome
submissions on:
- questions about the distinctive epistemic norms operative in the assessment of pursuitworthiness in various scientific disciplines
- formal approaches to the assessment of pursuitworthiness
- the pursuitworthiness of different epistemic units (such as
hypotheses, models, theories, research programs, epistemic objects,
etc.)
- the role of values in the context of pursuit
- the relevance of traditional accounts of pursuitworthiness in contemporary philosophical debates, etc.
Please submit your paper via the
Editorial Manager (VSI: Pursuitworthiness in Science), prepared
for anonymous review by May 1, 2021. The manuscript should not exceed
10,000 words. Please let one of us know if you have any questions.