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Assertion, Nonepistemic Values, and Scientific Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Paul L. Franco
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Abstract

This article motivates a shift in certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for nonepistemic values in scientific practice from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance toward an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis. I argue that speech act theory’s account of assertion as a type of doing makes salient legitimate roles nonepistemic values can play in scientific practice. The article also shows how speech act theory might provide a framework for fruitfully extending aspects of the social and pragmatic turns in the philosophy of science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 160 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Carole Lee, Colin Marshall, Jon Rosenberg, Conor Mayo-Wilson, and Alison Wylie for their encouraging and helpful comments on an earlier draft; to the audience at the University of Washington lunchtime works-in-progress series and Erin Kendig for fruitful discussions about ideas that led to the article; and to three anonymous reviewers for Philosophy of Science for their pointed and charitable suggestions for revising the article.

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