Kathleen Okruhlik (The University of Western Ontario), Values and Epistemic Voluntarism

 

 

Commentator: Boaz Miller, Tel Aviv University

 

Chair: Yossef Schwartz

 

Monday, May 12th, 18:00PM

Gilman Building, Hall 449

 

Bas van Fraassen’s view that belief is a matter of the will was first articulated in a 1984  Journal of Philosophy article called “Belief and the Will”.  His epistemic voluntarism is intimately tied to the claim that rationality is only “bridled irrationality”.  This is an element of van Fraassen’s epistemology, but it is also directly relevant to his anti-realist philosophy of science, which claims that the only belief required with respect to our scientific theories is the belief that those theories are empirically adequate.   The second important source is Thomas Uebel’s argument that Otto Neurath, a key figure in the early history of logical empiricism, is best understood as an epistemic voluntarist whose pursuit of economic theories that would empower the working classes was the result of a legitimate epistemic choice made in the presence of empirical underdetermination.

In this paper I shall explore various relationships that may obtain between varieties of epistemic voluntarism (on the one hand) and the role of so-called “non-epistemic” values in science (on the other).  The role of such values, which has been a central preoccupation of feminist analyses of science for close to 35 years, has recently moved into the philosophy of science mainstream.  There has, however, been little or no effort to examine the ways that varieties of voluntarism interact with views about the status of values in science.  This paper takes some first steps in that direction.