A remedy, a naturopath and a pharmacy

Imagine a scenario in which experiments suggest a medicine is ineffective, while a naturopath insists it heals. Now we’re forced to decide: should pharmacies be allowed to sell it? Is insurance cover justified? Should it maybe be banned altogether?

Hidden in that decision is a fundamental question: do we privilege experimental methods, or traditional expertise, or do we try to reconcile both in what we accept as a good reason?

We live in a world shaped by a multitude of beliefs and knowledge systems, and societies constantly face the challenge of judging which claims are legitimate. That task shapes our education system, our health policy and our courts. Left alone, we face an epistemic chaos of opinions, arguments, positions and methods. So how do we bring it to order? Here a philosophical core dilemma comes up: do we find common ground by holding on to one rigid, uniform standard of justification? Or does an ever-changing landscape demand a more fluid, pluralist approach that adapts to different contexts?

Joseph Rouse makes a comparison I find fitting: the way we decide what counts as knowledge mirrors the way political systems decide what is legal1. Just as laws create order in society, certain rules define valid knowledge and try to create unity among diverse opinions and methods. The basic challenge for our understanding of knowledge is, in my view, that it is chaotic by nature. We are bombarded with competing arguments, perspectives and claims to truth, and we lose ourselves in a sea of information without reliable tools for telling what is legitimate. That can lead to a paralysing relativism2, in which all knowledge seems equally valid, or equally invalid.

This piece is a popular version of a seminar paper I wrote in 2024 at the University of Vienna3. Its goal: to find a framework for navigating this chaos and, at best, a rulebook for which methods to prefer over others.

Judging the judges: virtue epistemology

There’s a catch. If I want to tell good rulebooks from bad ones, I’m judging too, and I need a justification myself. So I need a yardstick.

Mine is virtue epistemology4. It treats epistemology, the study of knowledge, as a fundamentally normative discipline, one about how we ought to think: it is about cultivating intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness, conscientiousness or intellectual curiosity, and about identifying and countering harmful traits like dogmatism or arrogance. Where ethics deals with moral values, virtue epistemology deals with intellectual ones.

Simply put, I understand it like this: virtuous habits of thought are the ones that, applied regularly, lead to true beliefs. And the production of knowledge isn’t a process independent of people; it is bound up with the qualities and habits of those searching for truth.

In this piece virtue serves as the measure for the rulebooks themselves. A particular monism or pluralism is good if it is itself epistemically virtuous, and bad if it isn’t. And so I argue, among other things, that settling for epistemic chaos is not virtuous, which is why we need to agree on a rulebook that avoids it5.

One sovereign: monism

Rouse, drawing on Foucault’s political theory, describes the theory of epistemic sovereignty: the traditional philosophical view that there is one highest authority that knows what is true and what is false, much like a kingdom under a monarch. Traditionally, the scientific method holds this throne. In these monist approaches, scientific method, or traditional scientific values, take the sovereign position that separates knowledge from non-knowledge and pseudo-knowledge.

“There are many monisms,” as the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it; “what they share is that they attribute oneness.”6 The monism I mean is a normative epistemic monism: there is exactly one correct way of judging. Hasok Chang describes the assumption behind it: there is only one world, so only one truth about it, and only one science that should seek it; every well-formed question has one right answer7.

This position is especially attractive in concrete cases about tangible things. Is the Earth round or flat? Was it created by a god a few thousand years ago, or did it form over a much longer time? We can easily imagine that at most one of the answers is correct. That may be why monist ideas are especially widespread among physicists, as Chang notes.

But this tradition has drawn a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. Just as political systems shouldn’t rest on an absolute sovereign ruler, Rouse thinks our understanding of scientific knowledge doesn’t need a single authority that decides “what counts”8. Stephen Healy picks this up9: such perspectives preserve their own authority and deny the legitimacy of other perspectives. Science played an important role in breaking free of old dogmas, but today it holds a similar authority that blocks flexible answers to complex challenges. A narrow idea of how we know things seeps into society and makes us rely too much on quick technological fixes, while other perspectives are silenced.

With virtue epistemology in mind, I agree: clinging to one ultimate method can be seen as dogmatism, and so as an epistemic vice. We should look for an alternative.

Many: what pluralists defend

Healy proposes epistemological pluralism as the counter-model: understanding comes from a multitude of methods and views, and perspectives outside a strictly “scientific” frame should be included. He doesn’t give a concrete definition, more a set of attitudes: a flexible landscape of knowledge that values diverse perspectives, the processes of producing knowledge, and an awareness of how power shapes what counts as “true”.

Chang’s picture is more concrete. He defends active normative epistemic pluralism: researchers should deliberately keep several ways of investigating the same field alive side by side. He calls them systems of practice: coherent sets of research activities, each pursued with its own goals in mind.

Different researchers clearly mean different things by pluralism. For my purpose that isn’t a big problem, because all the proposals can be read as rulebooks against epistemic chaos: sometimes methods are supposed to be decisive (Chang), sometimes values (Longino).

To pin down what exactly is at stake, Anjan Chakravartty helps10. He discusses epistemic stances, roughly a practical approach to deciding what to trust and how to find things out, and argues for a pluralism of them. His definition resonates strongly with my description of the core dilemma: an epistemic stance is an orientation, a cluster of attitudes, commitments and strategies relevant to producing allegedly factual beliefs. Stances determine how people go about generating claims about the world. Stances themselves are not believed; they are adopted, held, and expressed in people’s actions11.

With that, I can state the core problem more precisely. By default we are exposed to a chaos of epistemic stances, and we need a rule that decides which stances are legitimate and which aren’t. If only the strict scientific stance counts as legitimate, we’re talking about monism. If many stances are legitimate, we’re talking about pluralism. The monist and pluralist proposals of various scholars, Chang and Longino among them, can be read in this pattern and placed on this spectrum, even if with different motives and emphases.

Epistemic virtue guides an attitude about which stances are legitimate; that attitude grants legitimacy to several epistemic stances; each stance produces its own facts Epistemic virtue judges Attitude: which stances are legitimate? grants legitimacy Stance A Stance B Stance C produces "facts" "facts" "facts"
The politics of knowledge (after Figure 1 of my paper). Each stance is a closed system that produces its own supposed facts. This piece is about the level above: the attitude that decides which stances get legitimacy, judged by whether that attitude is itself virtuous.

Chang: spreading the risk

So what do pluralists actually stand for? As we saw, the original motive seems to be breaking the sovereign authority of one stance. Chang notes that only since the Enlightenment have we been able to see diversity of opinion as a positive good, a core value of liberal democracy12, and asks whether science could slowly learn to value pluralism too. Like a healthy democracy, diversity of thought and methods ultimately strengthens science as a practice. In my view that isn’t obviously true, but let’s leave it aside; there are more important criticisms.

His pluralism rests on the insight that different methods, theories and even values may be best suited to different areas of knowledge. By allowing competition between ideas and approaches, the scientific community avoids relying too much on a single perspective. A kind of spreading of risk becomes possible that minimises the effects of errors or biases within any single system. There might even be insights that a particular stance could never produce. In other words: science should at least let itself be enriched by other approaches. Pluralism also increases robustness, because results from different fields can be linked, which over time leads to mutual checking and higher reliability.

In short, Chang sees plurality not as fragmentation, but as the basis for a more resilient and dynamic pursuit of knowledge. He argues pragmatically: risk-spreading, division of labour, robustness through interweaving, and competition. And he doesn’t stop at a taxonomy of knowledge and non-knowledge. He calls for actively promoting methodological diversity in schools and universities, and argues for funding research in alternative stances13.

Stirring, understandable and appealing as it is, Chang’s proposal, more of a plea, is hard to pin down. On closer inspection, above all, the degree of pluralism is unclear. Sometimes he talks about teaching Christian creationism in schools, elsewhere about integrating acupuncture or traditional Chinese medicine into health care. If, say, 1% of the national research budget goes into such alternative research, the question remains open: should it flow into creationism, astrology, homeopathy, quantum consciousness, esotericism, or research on phlogiston, the “fire substance” chemistry abandoned in the 18th century? And how useful would that research be?

Chang actively avoids the question of the legitimacy of alternative knowledge. His answer to objections like “How do you keep the crazies [or weeds] out?” is that this problem exists whatever the plurality of our rulebook14. I disagree. Look at the set of all stances: our criteria of legitimacy, the conditions a stance has to meet to count as legitimate, determine the degree of our pluralism. Very strict criteria grant legitimacy to only one, sovereign stance; that’s a monist attitude. Weak criteria grant legitimacy to many; that’s a pluralist one15.

Since the degree of pluralism is, by this argument, inevitably tied to our criteria for legitimate stances, and can make the difference between strict monism and loose (even paralysing) pluralism, it is careless to dodge this question in a plea for methodological pluralism.

Let’s grant that the problem exists either way; after all, I argue myself that the epistemic default state is chaos. But it’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve! “Who is crazy and who isn’t?” or “Can we learn something from the crazies too?” are the questions we’re trying to answer. We can’t just push them aside.

Longino: many values

Besides the pluralism of methods, there’s the pluralism of values. Helen Longino deals at heart with the problem of underdetermination16: the same data often fit several theories. The highest good of science is empirical adequacy, fitting the data, but it isn’t enough to choose between all the theories that fit the same available data.

Philosophical tradition tries to solve this with epistemic values, extra qualities we prefer in a theory: Thomas Kuhn’s famous list is accuracy, consistency, scope (how much it explains), simplicity and fruitfulness (how much new research it opens up)17.

Longino criticises these traditional values, sets alternative values against them, and stresses that the ideal epistemological state is the acceptance and application of many differing sets of epistemic values.

Her call: instead of striving for one scientific community with the “perfect”, sovereign virtues, we should foster different communities with different strengths that tolerate and respect each other’s approaches, and promote cooperation between groups that may not agree. If we read those communities as followers of different legitimate stances, Longino and Chang effectively argue for a very similar pluralism, in which many stances are granted legitimacy.

Longino argues that the traditional values of consistency and simplicity carry no more epistemic weight than novelty and complexity:

  1. That a theory conforms particularly well to prevailing theories doesn’t mean it’s more likely to be true.
  2. Simplicity has no epistemic weight, because it limits how a theory understands and explains the world.

She gives illustrative examples: whether medications work for women when they were only tested on men, or an understanding of how all gorillas behave that takes the male gorilla as typical of the whole species18.

First, I’ll say that I find both arguments appealing at first glance. But:

On (1): conformity with other theories clearly doesn’t speak directly for truth. It does mean, though, that with higher certainty they are all true or all false together. If a theory can be tied closely to another theory whose truth we’re very sure of, then conformity carries at least indirect epistemic weight19.

On (2): I don’t read this as a critique of the value of simplicity specifically, but rather of relying on values in general, or of relying on one-sided values. If simplicity means that we shouldn’t be too creative in interpreting data, but rely on elegant, modest, simpler explanations, then I think it does carry epistemic weight: P is true in more cases than P and Z.

Say P is “this drug lowers blood pressure” and Z is “and it does so through mechanism X”. Whenever “P and Z” is true, P is true too, but not the other way round; every extra assumption is one more chance to be wrong. So there is a kind of simplicity that makes her examples straw men, because they are simply epistemic failures20.

Nonetheless, they are failures that happened, possibly even because people held dogmatically, or at least too tightly, to one particular value: simplicity. Values aren’t unambiguous signposts. They allow such slips because they’re tied to decisions of the people interpreting: “If one imposes uniformity on the data by rejecting anomalies or differences, then one is making a choice for a certain kind of account.”

This critique converges with Healy’s and Rouse’s. If our thinking about what good science is gets stuck, we limit which explanations of the world we can even consider. Take an approach that regularly produces over-simplified theories, say because the simplification leaves out a large part of a population. Such theories don’t reflect our reality well, can’t claim much truth, and allow epistemic injustice: the people left out end up with worse knowledge about themselves, like the women whose drug doses nobody had studied. Then we have to speak of an epistemic vice. Simplicity in the sense of elegance and modesty can be a virtue; in the sense of generalisation, a vice.

Still, the sheer persuasive force of the traditional values can’t be dismissed entirely. Longino agrees on the importance of empirical adequacy, and her examples can be at least partly defused as data manipulation, and so as epistemic failure. Longino really only argues that we shouldn’t rely exclusively on the traditional canon of values, since sometimes traditional values help, and sometimes alternative ones21.

The best of all worlds

What can we take from the different positions?

I suspect many researchers share a desire to find the truth. Objectivity here means two things: science truthfully representing the objects and processes of nature, and researchers agreeing with each other for good reasons22.

What draws me to the monist position is exactly this pursuit of objectivity, together with the appealing one-world-one-truth argument. It’s easy to understand. If we find the optimal method and the optimal canon of values, why should we dilute it with less effective approaches? Why should we risk engaging with less watertight approaches? Even pluralists accept that paralysing relativism has to be prevented, and that some ideas are just nonsense. “Not every crackpot idea needs to be accorded the same seriousness,” writes Longino; “neither monism nor pluralism delivers us from the responsibility of judgment,” writes Chang.

On the other side, the criticism of monism and the advantages of pluralist approaches are just as understandable and should be part of our attitude.

The ambiguous nature of values, introduced as an answer to underdetermination, can be seen as a danger to scientific objectivity. But a pluralism of values can address this hurdle; it may not be a vice at all, but an epistemic virtue. Paradoxically, to reduce the influence of single values on science, divergent values should be introduced as counterweights. Through mutual criticism and control, value pluralism is in our epistemic interest, because it can contribute to the reliability of scientific results. Martin Carrier argues along the same lines.

So how can we combine the best of both worlds? The goal is to preserve the objectivity of science and to hold a virtuous attitude. That’s why the pluralist critique should shape our attitude too. My proposal: commit in principle to a pluralism of epistemic stances. But we can’t dodge the question of which stances we commit to. So we need a filter from the set of all stances to the set of legitimate ones.

A filter that’s too cheap

Chakravartty attempts exactly this. He sets two concrete conditions a stance has to meet to count as legitimate, evidently trying to be minimally invasive:

  • C1 Rationality: stances must be coherent.
  • C2 Empirical adequacy: stances must be consistent with the empirical findings of science.

With this, though, we quickly run into trouble, because both criteria can be met by the stance itself. One of my premises is that the attitude we’re looking for must preserve scientific integrity. So I take it as clear that approaches like astrology, Scientology, homeopathy, quantum mysticism and the like, pseudo-scientific stances, should not count as legitimate. (I assume that’s what’s meant by “crackpot ideas” and “crazies”.) With C1 and C2 we can’t exclude them yet.

As conspiracy theories in particular show, even very unreasonable approaches can be defended coherently, as long as you’re willing to adjust your beliefs around one particular belief you want to keep. As for C2: charlatanry often creates an aura of reliability and scientificity through pseudo-scientific language and rhetoric23. Supposed facts are produced inside the stance to satisfy C2; see Scientology or creationism24.

In other words, coherence is easy to achieve, a relatively cheap criterion, and some supposed evidence can always be found to claim what you want to claim, especially when the stance being judged itself decides what counts as a fact. In a similar spirit, Martin Kusch argues, about van Fraassen’s empirical stances, that this kind of stance pluralism amounts to a relativism: there’s no perspective from which stances can be neutrally ranked25. So Chakravartty’s pluralism slips away from us into an unrestricted, paralysing relativism26.

Grading instead of sorting

Ragnar van der Merwe suggests not throwing out Chakravartty’s position but refining it2: instead of a strict binary split into legitimate and illegitimate stances, take a graded approach. He presents revised criteria for the degree of legitimacy, and for the degree of scientificity, how scientific a discipline is:

  • C1′: a stance is legitimate to the degree that it agrees with what is empirically detectable with our best scientific instruments.
  • C2′: a discipline aspiring to be scientific is scientific to the degree that it meets a defining list of criteria, gained empirically from current usage in institutional science, a list in which empirical detectability comes first.

So we define science by features of its institutional use: what can be detected and reproduced comes first, then things like coherence, fit with established knowledge and honest methods, and even prizes, citations and funding.

With this revision we hope to bring in stance-independent criteria that allow a graded rating of legitimacy and scientificity. In my view, the biggest advantage of this approach is that it unites attractive features of monism with attractive features of pluralism.

You could argue that van der Merwe’s sorting of stances is monism. After all, detectability with modern scientific instruments is clearly decisive for legitimacy. We grant legitimacy to different stances, but only if they fit our picture of science. That in itself could be taken as monist. In the same way, van der Merwe gives the scientific institution and its practice a special status: the criteria of scientificity are supposed to come from them. Healy criticised monism because the sovereign, the scientific institution, preserves its own authority and denies legitimacy to other perspectives. That danger isn’t fully defused here.

On the other hand, you could argue it’s a pluralist approach. Effectively, a variety of stances is granted legitimacy and scientificity. On top of that, the defining list of criteria isn’t set in stone; it’s meant to adapt to practice27. So a mixed canon of values, as Carrier and Longino argue for, is definitely possible28. The approach is also in the spirit of Chang: “If you want to be a pluralist, do whatever you would do in choosing the winner in a monist scheme, and just pick two winners at the end, or put in a second prize—that would be a fine start. Pick three winners, if you can afford to have a third prize, too.”

So, is there only one right way to know things?

I let myself be drawn into the pluralist arguments, and convinced by them. Pluralism can offer epistemic advantages, so building it into one’s own attitude is virtuous. Still, the pluralist ways of classifying stances aren’t satisfying. In my view the most promising approach is Chakravartty’s, especially in van der Merwe’s revised version.

Chang argues that the worry that pluralism would put creationism into biology classes is unfounded: it simply wouldn’t be so terrible to teach alternative approaches too, while giving a frank assessment of how credible each one is. I agree. Maybe the categories “certainly true” and “certainly false” just aren’t enough. Instead, we should only be convinced of something as far as our evidence recommends.

That’s why I conclude that van der Merwe’s proposal is the most virtuous of the approaches considered here. With it, we can give crackpot ideas like Scientology low legitimacy and credibility, and yet, in the spirit of fallibility, not exclude them completely, insofar as they meet some of the criteria at least partially. We can satisfy monists, because we only admit approaches that meet certain scientific criteria and give the scientific institution a special status. And we can satisfy pluralists, because we endorse and promote a variety of values as well as methods, and different, possibly diverging stances are granted legitimacy and scientificity in this framework.

And the remedy from the beginning? My paper doesn’t settle it, but the attitude carries over. Our confidence in “it heals” should track the evidence: how far its effect shows up on our best instruments, whether it reproduces, whether it fits with the rest of what we know. That evidence can also speak clearly against it; grading doesn’t mean everything ends up somewhere in the middle. And the framework offers no ready-made scoring formula. Whether pharmacies sell it, insurance pays for it or a ban follows is still a political decision. But it’s one that can be made in proportion to the evidence, instead of between sovereignty and anarchy.

  1. Rouse, J. (1996). Beyond epistemic sovereignty. In P. Galison & D. J. Stump (Eds.), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (pp. 398–416). Stanford University Press. (My paper gave the title as “Beyond Epistemic and Political Sovereignty”.) ↩

  2. van der Merwe, R. (2024). Stance pluralism, Scientology, and the problem of relativism. Foundations of Science, 29(3), 625–644 (online 2022). doi:10.1007/s10699-022-09882-w. The criteria list is in section 5.2. ↩ ↩2

  3. Duty-Knez, M. (2024). Zwischen epistemischer Hoheit und Anarchie [Between epistemic sovereignty and anarchy]. Seminar paper, SE Eingangskolloquium, Epistemologies of Science and Technology, University of Vienna, February 2024. Unpublished; in German. PDF. The footnotes below correct a few of its citations and readings. ↩

  4. Turri, J., Alfano, M. & Greco, J. (2021). Virtue epistemology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 ed.). plato.stanford.edu ↩

  5. This is a premise of my inquiry, not something virtue epistemology proves on its own: order can coexist with systematic error, and disagreement with careful thinking. My claim is the practical one that a society that has to decide about pharmacies, schools and courts can’t virtuously leave the chaos unsorted. ↩

  6. Schaffer, J. (2018). Monism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 ed.). plato.stanford.edu ↩

  7. Chang, H. (2012). Pluralism in science: A call to action. In Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 293, pp. 253–301). Springer. Monism p. 259; the “crazies” objection pp. 261–263; “two winners” and “responsibility of judgment” p. 261. ↩

  8. I use Rouse’s image of sovereignty for monism. His own critique reaches further: sovereignty, he says, “need not be located in any actual sovereign knower”, and even forms of relativism stay inside the same way of thinking (section I). On his view, swapping one authority for several legitimate ones doesn’t automatically escape it. ↩

  9. Healy, S. (2003). Epistemological pluralism and the ‘politics of choice’. Futures, 35(7), 689–701. doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(03)00022-3 ↩

  10. Chakravartty, A. (2017). Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology. Oxford University Press, p. 47. ↩

  11. Chakravartty developed the idea for one specific question: what attitude to take towards the entities science describes (scientific ontology), e.g. as a realist or an empiricist (van der Merwe, sections 1–2). Applying it to ways of knowing in general, and modelling stances as closed systems that produce their own supposed facts (see the figure), is my extension. ↩

  12. Chang is quoting Hilary Putnam here (Chang, p. 258; Putnam, H. (1995). Pragmatism: An Open Question. Blackwell, p. 1). ↩

  13. The 1% figure is James Lovelock’s: Chang recalls Lovelock’s plea to give 1% of the national science budget to unorthodox schemes and calls it “not a crackpot suggestion” (p. 267). ↩

  14. In Chang’s words, the objection rests on a category mistake: pluralism is about how many places there should be at the table, not about the guest list, and monism doesn’t settle the guest list either (pp. 262–263). He does set one limit: “A system of practice that denies the rights of other systems to exist would have to be banned in a pluralist scientific regime” (p. 261), and he calls the guest-list question “unavoidable” (p. 262). My objection is that this isn’t discriminating enough to sort sensible from crazy, and that the two questions can’t be separated: the guest list is what fixes how many places get filled. ↩

  15. This needs one more assumption, I admit. Strict criteria could in principle be met by several stances, and weak criteria needn’t produce many serious candidates. My point is that, given the actual crowd of stances out there, the criteria decide how many get in, so a plea for pluralism owes us its criteria. ↩

  16. Longino, H. E. (2008). Values, heuristics, and the politics of knowledge. In M. Carrier, D. Howard & J. Kourany (Eds.), The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited (pp. 68–86). University of Pittsburgh Press. Consistency and simplicity pp. 72–75; the “uniformity” quote p. 73; “crackpot” p. 83. (My paper cited this text with the wrong publication details; the page numbers fit this edition.) ↩

  17. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). Objectivity, value judgment, and theory choice. In The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (pp. 320–339). University of Chicago Press. ↩

  18. Strictly, Longino’s example is about treating the male as “paradigmatic for the species”, as in “Gorillas are solitary animals; a typical individual travels only with a female and her/their young” (p. 71), not about a study that observed only males. My paper put it too strongly. ↩

  19. Longino herself grants this much: consistency “only has epistemic value if we suppose these other theories to be true” (pp. 72–73). Our disagreement is about how much that conditional support is worth. And it needs a real evidential link: a false theory can be perfectly consistent with a true one, so merely not contradicting a well-supported theory isn’t enough. ↩

  20. Two things Longino says that my reply should face. First, she already allows parsimony (“no more entities than are required to explain the phenomena”) as “a caution of prudence” and a useful heuristic; what she denies is that it indicates truth in general (p. 73). My P-and-Z point is narrower than a general preference for simpler theories: it covers adding an unsupported assumption to an otherwise unchanged claim. Second, she anticipates the “mere empirical failure” reply: the failures only show up as failures once the well-being of everyone in the population counts equally, since empirical adequacy doesn’t say which data you have to collect (p. 75). ↩

  21. Longino’s proposal also changes the role of these values: she treats both sets as heuristics that guide how theories and models get developed in a given context, “rather than assigning them probative status operative at the end of inquiry” (pp. 79–80). They don’t settle theory choice as indicators of truth. My disagreement about how much epistemic weight some of them carry still stands. ↩

  22. Carrier, M. (2013). Values and objectivity in science: Value-ladenness, pluralism and the epistemic attitude. Science & Education, 22(10), 2547–2568, here p. 2549. doi:10.1007/s11191-012-9481-5 · PDF (open access, CC BY) ↩

  23. Bigliardi, S. (2016). New religious movements, technology, and science: The conceptualization of the E-meter in Scientology teachings. Zygon, 51(3), 661–683. doi:10.1111/zygo.12281 ↩

  24. Van der Merwe’s own objection is subtler than “a stance produces its own facts”. Chakravartty’s C2 asks for consistency with “the empirical output of science”, but gives only minimal criteria for what counts as successful empirical inquiry. By those criteria, Scientology’s auditing makes some “successful predictions”, so C2 doesn’t clearly exclude it (van der Merwe, section 4.2). ↩

  25. Kusch, M. (2020). Stances, voluntarism, relativism. In D. Finkelde & P. M. Livingston (Eds.), Idealism, Relativism, and Realism: New Essays on Objectivity Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide (pp. 131–154). De Gruyter. Kusch himself thinks this relativism need not be debilitating, since people can still argue from what they share. ↩

  26. Not everyone agrees that this relativism must be paralysing. Sophie Veigl argues that scientific pluralism and epistemic relativism, both understood as stances, can be held at the same time without “anything goes” or giving up judgment. My worry is narrower: a filter that can’t keep the crazies out doesn’t help with the question we started from. Veigl, S. J. (2021). Notes on a complicated relationship: Scientific pluralism, epistemic relativism, and stances. Synthese, 199, 3485–3503. doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02943-2 · PDF (open access, CC BY 4.0) ↩

  27. With one exception: van der Merwe fixes the first criterion, empirical practice centred on detectability, as “not open to revision” (section 5.2). That is exactly the monist anchor discussed above. ↩

  28. Strictly, Longino doesn’t argue for mixing the two sets of values within one community: “what is called for is not integration of the virtues by one research community, but the tolerance of and interaction with research guided by different theoretical virtues” (p. 82). Reading her as support for a mixed canon is my extension. ↩