Introduction
Introduction: Values and norms in modeling

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Background

During the first part of the twentieth century it was widely thought that science is, or should be, value-free. The main argument made by positivists and others was that science deals with facts, and since values are no facts, values have no role in science. However, in a widely discussed paper Richard Rudner (1953) criticized this argument from a novel perspective. Unlike others, Rudner did not question the fact-value distinction. His point was that whether a hypothesis should be accepted

The contemporary debate

One of the many things that have changed over the past fifty years is that philosophers nowadays take an active interest in models. They no longer consider theories to be the sole entity worthy of serious philosophical analysis. There is no uncontested way of explicating the difference between a model and a theory, and in some disciplines the word “model” seems to be synonymous with “theory”, but many models seem to serve practical purposes that many theories do not have.

For an example of such

Acknowledgements

Draft versions of the articles included in this special section were presented at the conference “Values and Norms in Modeling”, held at Eindhoven University of Technology in June 2012. The organizers would like to thank the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology and the Eindhoven Centre for Innovations Studies for generous financial support.

References (2)

  • R.C. Jeffrey

    Valuation and acceptance of scientific hypotheses

    Philosophy of Science

    (1956)
  • R. Rudner

    The scientist qua scientist makes value judgments

    Philosophy of Science

    (1953)

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