Joyce Havstad: Methodological Choice, Value-Criteria, and Fruitfulness

The literature on scientific choice is vast, much of it dedicated to how scientists choose amongst competing theories.  Coverage of methodological choice in science is less extensive, though by no means non-existent.  Here I discuss competing-method choice.  According to Kuhn, the traditional set of five major value-criteria for evaluating scientific theories in moments of competing-theory choice are accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness.  Competing-method choice, as I see it, uses a somewhat different set.  When evaluating available methods in moments of competing-method choice, scientists assess competing methods according to the criteria of fruitfulness, salience, useability, potency, and reliability.  After characterizing competing-method choice using these five value-criteria, I discuss what happens when one of the five values—in our current context, fruitfulness—comes to dominate methodological choice in science.  This analysis suggests an intriguing answer to the question, “what’s wrong, for science, with publish or perish?”

At the time of the lecture Joyce Havstad will be a Fellow at the University of Hannover's Centre for Advanced Studies project, Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information (SOCRATES). She is a philosopher of science and values, with a background in scientific practice. She has worked in a soil ecology lab on Bodega Marine Reserve, in a gene expression lab at the Salk Institute and as the philosopher-in-residence at the Field Museum of Natural History.  Her appointments at the University of Utah are in the Department of Philosophy, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance.  Her interdisciplinarity, her hands-on practice-facing philosophy, her certification as a Multiparty Conflict Mediator and her work on science and values, as well as her day-to-day work at Utah dealing with research integrity makes her a paradigm of humanities engaging science and society – which is what CHESS is all about.