IntroductionIntroduction: Values and norms in modeling
Section snippets
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)
Valuation and acceptance of scientific hypotheses
Philosophy of Science
(1956)The scientist qua scientist makes value judgments
Philosophy of Science
(1953)
Cited by (2)
Contested futures of/with energy generation
2022, Energy Futures: Anthropocene Challenges, Emerging Technologies and Everyday LifeModelling the future
2022, An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies