Topical Collection in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Guest Editors: Enno Fischer (Institute of Philosophy, TU Dresden) & Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda (Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, KU Leuven)
Open for submissions: 1 November 2024 – 30 April 2025
Originally going back to Larry Laudan’s (1977) distinction between the ‘context of acceptance’ and the ‘context of pursuit,’ the concept of pursuitworthiness has garnered considerable attention in the philosophy of science in recent years. For instance, philosophers have explored the different stances on pursuitworthiness adopted by towering figures in the field such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (e.g., Šešelja & Straßer, 2013; Shaw, 2022), and have advanced and debated manifold epistemic criteria on what makes a scientific idea or proposal worthy of being undertaken (e.g., Achinstein, 1993; Šešelja et al., 2012; Šešelja & Straßer, 2014; Shan, 2020; DiMarco & Khalifa, 2019, Fleisher, 2022). The significance of this enlarging body of scholarship notwithstanding, philosophical reflections on the pursuitworthiness of scientific research have almost exclusively focused on theories, (and to a lesser extent on) models and research programmes in toto (e.g., Lichtenstein, 2021; Cabrera, 2021; Haueis & Kästner, 2022; Han, 2023; Fischer, 2024a; Wolf & Duerr, 2024), whereas systematic and comprehensive reflection on the pursuitworthiness of experiments is hitherto lacking (but see Laymon & Franklin, 2022; DiMarco & Khalifa, 2022; Fischer, 2024b). This is an important and somewhat surprising lacuna because it is often the experiments, out of the many elements that make up scientific practice, that require large amounts of funding, deliberations, and long-term planning.
For the philosophy of science, delving into the pursuitworthiness of experiments is also particularly pressing given that since the years of Laudan’s initial proposal, the philosophy of experiment has re-established itself as a central element in the canon of the discipline (see, e.g., Hacking, 1983, 1988; Gooding et al., 1989; Steinle, 2002; Radder, 2003; Weber, 2009; Feest & Steinle, 2016; Bokulich & Bocchi, 2024). Philosophers of experiment have foregrounded many important considerations (e.g., material cultures of experimentation and the role of instruments, the importance of tacit knowledge in experimental manipulations, and how experiments affect concept, model and theory formation), but they have not inquired in detail about the context of pursuit of experiments in different scientific settings. In this sense, the topic of the pursuitworthiness of experiments lies at the interface between two salient, overarching problem spaces in the philosophy of science.
The aim of this topical collection is to put discussions of the pursuitworthiness of experiments on the agenda of general philosophy of science and the philosophies of the special sciences. It will bring together contributions addressing experiments across the sciences, from the physical and chemical sciences to the life, biomedical, and cognitive sciences, as well as the social sciences. For more details on possible topics and questions, references and instructions for submission see the full call for papers:
https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/phil/iphil/phisci/ressourcen/dateien/CfP_EJPS.pdf