Rationally warranted promise: the virtue-economic account of pursuit-worthiness

Abstract

Pursuing a scientific idea is often justified by the promise associated with it. Philosophers of science have proposed a variety of approaches to such promise, including more specific indicators. Economic models in particular emphasise the trade-off between an idea's benefits and its costs. Taking up this Peirce-inspired idea, we spell out the metaphor of such a cost-benefit analysis of scientific ideas. We show that it fruitfully urges a set of salient meta-methodological questions that accounts of scientific pursuit-worthiness ought to address. In line with such a meta-methodological framework, we articulate and explore an appealing and auspicious concretisation -- what we shall dub "the virtue-economic account of pursuit-worthiness": cognitive benefits and costs of an idea, we suggest, should be characterised in terms of an idea's theoretical virtues, such as empirical adequacy, explanatory power, or coherence. Assessments of pursuit-worthiness are deliberative judgements in which scientifically competent evaluators weigh and compare the prospects of such virtues, subject to certain rationality constraints that ensure historical and contemporary scientific circumspection, coherence and systematicity. The virtue-economic account, we show, sheds new light on the normativity of scientific pursuit, methodological pluralism in science, and the rationality of historical science.