Abstract
Philosophers have recently argued, against a prevailing orthodoxy, that standards of knowledge partly depend on a subject's interests; the more is at stake for the subject, the less she is in a position to know. This view, which is dubbed "Pragmatic Encroachment" has historical and conceptual connections to arguments in philosophy of science against the received model of science as value free. I bring the two debates together. I argue that Pragmatic Encroachment and the model of value-laden science reinforce each other. Drawing on Douglas' argument about the indispensability of value judgments in science, and psychological evidence about people's inability to objectively reason about what they care about, I introduce a novel argument for Pragmatic Encroachment.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 253-270 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | European Journal for Philosophy of Science |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I thank Arnon Keren, Jacob Stegenga, Dan Hicks, Isaac Record, and Sandy Goldberg for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I thank Ruth Weintraub, David Enoch, Moti Mizrahi, and Levi Spectre for useful discussion. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper was presented at the Philosophy of Science (PSA) Meeting (San Diego, 2012), the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) Conference (Exeter, 2011), and the Israeli Society for History and Philosophy of Science Annual Meeting (Jerusalem, 2012). I thank the audience members for useful comments and discussion. This paper was partly written when I was an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa. I am grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for an award of an Azrieli Fellowship. I am also grateful to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, and the Dan David Foundation, Tel Aviv University, for postdoctoral fellowships.
Funding
I thank Arnon Keren, Jacob Stegenga, Dan Hicks, Isaac Record, and Sandy Goldberg for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I thank Ruth Weintraub, David Enoch, Moti Mizrahi, and Levi Spectre for useful discussion. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper was presented at the Philosophy of Science (PSA) Meeting (San Diego, 2012), the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) Conference (Exeter, 2011), and the Israeli Society for History and Philosophy of Science Annual Meeting (Jerusalem, 2012). I thank the audience members for useful comments and discussion. This paper was partly written when I was an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa. I am grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for an award of an Azrieli Fellowship. I am also grateful to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, and the Dan David Foundation, Tel Aviv University, for postdoctoral fellowships.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Azrieli Foundation |
Keywords
- Action
- Inductive risk
- Intellectualism
- Interest-relative invariantism
- Knowledge
- Science and values
- Subject-sensitive invariantism