Bezhodnotová veda ako produkt sekvenčnej argumentácie

Can scientists invoke the value of good when seeking the truth? Richard Rudner claims they can because when they are setting the degree of the sufficient strength of scientific evidence, they take into consideration the social consequences of their eventual errors. However, as far as we conceive value-free science as a requirement for the privileged, not exclusive, status of epistemic values, then Rudner’s insight does not refute but rather confirms it. A reasoning sequence in which we scrutinize the tenability of a hypothesis or a theory based on epistemic criteria is different from a sequence in which we scrutinize the epistemic criteria themselves. For value-free science, scientists must not swing between these two sequences arbitrarily.