Venerdì 23 febbraio 2024 ore 11:00
Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia
via della Pergola 60 - Firenze
Sala Altana
Casey McCoy (Yonsei University)
Pursuitworthiness and Epistemic Justification of Scientific Theories
Abstract: Much of modern philosophy of science with an epistemological orientation has focused on questions of justification, following on from the classic distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Lately, Laudan's idea of a context of pursuit has been revived as a means of deflating certain justificatory accounts centered on justification, such as inference to the best explanation and meta-empirical confirmation. In this paper, we criticize such efforts to decouple assessments of pursuitworthiness from epistemic assessments, and argue for two main points: that assessing the viability of a theory is essential to assessing its pursuitworthiness, and that pursuitworthiness assessments are worthwhile only to the extent that pursuitworthy theories tend to be epistemically successful.