Delineating the Legitimate Role of Values in Science

Abstract Previous philosophical discussions of values in science have mainly been devoted to showing that non-epistemic values can have a legitimate influence on the evidential requirements for accepting a scientific claim. There is a lack of credible explanations of how the influence of such values can be – and usually is – adequately restricted so that science still provides us with sufficiently reliable information. The importance of this problem has increased due to the current onslaught of science denial. We show how it can be solved with decision-theoretical tools, the most important of which is the distinction between lowering and raising evidential requirements. Lowering the evidential requirements for treating a claim as scientifically established is usually inadvisable since it increases the risk of adopting badly supported – and therefore often incorrect – full beliefs. In such cases, a distinction should instead be drawn between the criteria for accepting a claim and those for acting as if it is true. In contrast, value-based raising of the evidential requirements for accepting a claim does not involve any risk of making the set of factual full beliefs less reliable. This type of value influence seems to have a considerable role in areas of science that have extensive practical applications. The influence of values in science may therefore be larger than what has often been assumed.