Jeroen Van Bouwel

In this paper, we show that the so-called "green cheese" and "red herring" problems, which have been raised in connection to Bas van Fraassen's pragmatic theory of scientific explanation, lead to two theoretical (or epistemological) tasks for philosophers of science and two practical (or methodological) tasks. After clarifying these tasks we argue that the theoretical tasks are extremely difficult. We are pessimistic about their accomplishment and motivate this. The practical/methodological tasks are easier to handle, and we make some substantial contributions with respect to these tasks. Finally, we compare our practical/methodological results to Kareem Khalifa's hands-on contextualism. © 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

The idea that political debate should be resolved through knowledge —by deferring to those with more knowledge— recurs persistently in discussions of governance. In these turbulent times, in which democracy faces increasing skepticism, it is worth critically examining the proposals that “epistemize” democracy. In this contribution, I discuss epistemological as well as philosophy of science arguments against epistocracy, defending that democracy remains superior even on purely epistemic terms. In doing so, I also highlight the surprising parallels between technocracy and so-called populism. On the basis of a good understanding of scientific pluralism and the role of values in the sciences, we can elaborate an alternative to epistocracy, technocracy and populism: one that calls for a deeper democratization of both science and policymaking. This approach revitalizes political, democratic debate as a space where competing interests, values, and visions for society are deliberated and weighed —rather than framing societal problems as mere knowledge deficits to be solved through more knowledge and expertise. In an attempt to make the best possible use of (scientific) knowledge in shaping policy, epistocrats overlook a fundamental feature of democratic politics: the clash of worldviews and the necessity of negotiating provisional compromises among divergent values and interests.

Is the ideal of value neutrality in science (a) achievable, (b) desirable, and, (c) not detrimental? Alex van den Berg and Tay Jeong (2022) passionately defend the ideal of value neutrality. In this reply, I would like to fine-tune some of their arguments as well as refute others. While there seems to be a broad consensus among philosophers of science that value neutrality is not achievable, one could still defend it as an ideal to aspire to for the sciences (including social sciences). However, I argue that the ideal of value neutrality advanced by van den Berg and Jeong is detrimental, therefore not desirable. We should rather adjust our view of science towards scientific pluralism and perspectivism in combination with strategies to productively deal with values in science. The latter approach is, pace van den Berg and Jeong, more conducive to democracy and egalitarianism than the ideal of value neutrality.

Analyzing the doctrine of methodological individualism and its opposition to methodological holism, I start by briefly reviewing three historical periods in which the discussion around it was very lively (i.e., the turn of the century around 1900, the 1950s, and the 1980s-90s) explicating the variety of characterizations of methodological individualism. To highlight the connection of these philosophical discussions to social scientific practice, intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary dynamics, I then look into the debates around microfoundations (in the 1980s) and so-called economics imperialism in the social sciences (and its impact within political science in the 1990s). While both the microfoundations project and economics imperialism are driven by methodological individualists, here too it seems important to pay attention to the variety of understandings of methodological individualism as well as the exact ambition of their undertakings (evaluated along different dimensions, i.e., ontological, epistemological, axiological, and institutional). Overall, I conclude that when looking into the history of the social sciences, the best philosophers can do when discussing methodological individualism and holism is to carefully distinguish the broad variety of positions that can be evaluated along multiple dimensions, to demonstrate the benefits of methodological pluralism as well as expose the downsides of methodological monocultures.

In this chapter, I review different ways of dealing with values in science that philosophers have developed. I also examine how these play out in practice in contemporary political science debates. In particular, I scrutinize transparency (analyzing the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) debate in political science), representativeness (using research on central banking as an example), and, citizen engagement (considered in International Political Economy) as three conditions to make the influence of values in science justifiable. Doing so, I defend strategies of dealing with values that go beyond the individual researcher, rather focusing on the role social-epistemic processes play in improving our collective epistemic practices and outputs. Hopefully, this chapter will engage political scientists to reflect on their strategies of dealing with value influences in science as well as help philosophers further developing these strategies – which would benefit from more social and political analysis.

Given that values influence the scientific process, including when doing economics, we should be asking under what conditions this influence is justifiable. In this paper, I argue that citizen engagement could be the best way to scrutinize and justify value influences in economics. To do so, I analyze a number of citizen engagement initiatives in economics and discuss how they contribute to value scrutiny. Next, I look at the rationales that have been formulated for such a citizen economics, like, e.g., increasing economic literacy, democratization, and, strengthening the legitimacy of economics, and I evaluate their benefits for the scrutiny of values. Overall, the paper concludes that citizen engagement is a promising way to address value judgments in economics and to make economics epistemically more robust even though there are still some challenges to be addressed for it to become part of a broadened economic methodology.

It is increasingly accepted by philosophers of science that values influence the scientific process. The next question is then: under what conditions is the influence of values justifiable? Elliott (2017) highlights three conditions, namely value influences should be (1) made transparent, (2) representative of our major social and ethical priorities, (3) scrutinized through engagement between different stakeholders. Here, I analyze Elliott’s conditions (1) and (2). The first condition, transparency, brings benefits, but also has its drawbacks, in particular in relation to fostering scientific pluralism, as I argue, analyzing transparency initiatives in political science. Elliott’s second condition, representativeness, might help us in answering which/whose values scientists should (justifiably) use. This condition might be understood as values used in science should be representative/democratically legitimate. Alternatively, one could consider some values just being incorrect, while others conform to our principles. Elliott’s account of representativeness seems to sway between those two views. Starting from this ambiguity and considering the discipline of economics, I develop an alternative account of representativeness acknowledging that science consists of a variety of approaches adequately addressing particular types of questions and different groups of stakeholders might be interested in answering different questions. Would modifying Elliott’s conditions along those lines not lead to a too isolationist scientific pluralism? Clarifying the social-epistemic dynamics science and democracy share, I emphasize the importance of agonistic channels to deal with isolationist risks. Throughout this chapter, it is evident how close questions about scientific plurality and value influences are to questions about democracy.

Contrary to economics or history, for example, there does not exist an organized field dedicated to the philosophy of political science. Given that the philosophical issues raised by political science research are just as pressing and vibrant as those raised in these more organized fields, fostering a field that labels itself Philosophy of Political Science (PoPS) is important. PoPS is advanced here as a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and practicing political scientists contribute and discuss—with philosophical discussions that are close to and informed by actual developments in political science, making philosophy of science continuous with the sciences in line with contemporary naturalist philosophy of science. The topics scrutinized in the different chapters of the Handbook will figure prominently in PoPS, as we lay out in this chapter.

Is epistocracy epistemically superior to democracy? In this paper, I scrutinize some of the arguments for and against the epistemic superiority of epistocracy. Using empirical results from the literature on the epistemic benefits of diversity as well as the epistemic contributions of citizen science, I strengthen the case against epistocracy and for democracy. Disenfranchising, or otherwise discouraging anyone to participate in political life, on the basis of them not possessing a certain body of (social scientific) knowledge, is untenable also from an epistemic point of view. Rather than focussing on individual competence, we should pay attention to the social constellation through which we produce knowledge to make sure we decrease epistemic loss (by ensuring diversity and inclusion) and increase epistemic productivity (by fostering a multiplicity of perspectives interacting fruitfully). Achieving those epistemic benefits requires a more democratic approach that differs significantly from epistocracy.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science contains twenty-seven freshly written chapters to give the reader a panoramic introduction to philosophical issues in the practice of political science. Simultaneously, it advances the field of Philosophy of Political Science by creating a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and practicing political scientists contribute and discuss. These philosophical discussions are close to and informed by actual developments in political science, making philosophy of science continuous with the sciences, another aspiration that motivates this volume. The chapters fall under four headings: evaluating theoretical frameworks in political science; methodological challenges and reconciliations; the purposes and uses of political science; and, the interactions between political science and society. Specific topics discussed include the biology of political attitudes, intra-agent mechanisms, rational choice explanations, theories of collective action, explaining institutional change, conceptualizing and measuring democracy, process tracing, qualitative comparative analysis, interpretivism and positivism, mixed methods, within-cause causal inference, evidential pluralism, lab and field experiments, external validity, contextualization, prediction, expertise, clientelism, feminism, values, and progress in political science.

Recently, we notice an increasing support for mechanism-based social explanations. Earlier pleas for social mechanisms were often closely linked to defenses of methodological individualism. However, more recent contributions by, e.g., Daniel Little and Petri Ylikoski, seem to be loosening that link and develop a more sophisticated account. In this paper, we review the impact of the social mechanisms approach on methodological individualism and draw conclusions regarding the individualism/holism debate, severing the link between the social mechanisms approach and individualism. Four steps will be taken: there are more than two levels of social explanation; levels of explanation are perspectival, neither absolute, nor unique; seeking microfoundations has value, but so has seeking macrofoundations; there are no general preference rules with respect to the level of social explanations. In conclusion, the answer to the title question is that the social mechanisms approach does not strengthen the case for methodological individualism.

This paper investigates the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation: Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher, and Wesley Salmon. We argue that they do three things: construct an explication in the sense of Carnap, which then is used as a tool to make descriptive and normative claims about the explanatory practice of scientists. We also show that they did well with respect to, but that they failed to give arguments for their descriptive and normative claims. We think it is the responsibility of current philosophers of explanation to go on where Hempel, Kitcher, and Salmon failed. However, we should go on in a clever way. We call this clever way the “pragmatic approach to scientific explanation.‘ We clarify what this approach consists in and defend it.

In this article, we inquire into two contemporary participatory formats that seek to democratically intervene in scientific practice: the consensus conference and participatory technology assessment. We explain how these formats delegitimize conflict and disagreement by making a strong appeal to consensus. Based on our direct involvement in these formats and informed both by political philosophy and science and technology studies, we outline conceptions that contrast with the consensus ideal, including dissensus, disclosure, conflictual consensus and agonistic democracy. Drawing on the notion of meta-consensus and a distinction between four models of democracy, we elaborate how a more positive valuation of conflict provides opportunities for mutual learning, the articulation of disagreement, and democratic modulation—three aspirations that are at the heart of most pTAs and consensus conferences. Disclosing the strengths and weaknesses of these different models is politically and epistemically useful, and should therefore be an integral part of the development of participation theory and process in science and technology.

Explanatory pluralism is the view that the best form and level of explanation depends on the kind of question one seeks to answer by the explanation, and that in order to answer all questions in the best way possible, we need more than one form and level of explanation. In the first part of this article, we argue that explanatory pluralism holds for the medical sciences, at least in theory. However, in the second part of the article we show that medical research and practice is actually not fully and truly explanatory pluralist yet. Although the literature demonstrates a slowly growing interest in non-reductive explanations in medicine, the dominant approach in medicine is still methodologically reductionist. This implies that non-reductive explanations often do not get the attention they deserve. We argue that the field of medicine could benefit greatly by reconsidering its reductive tendencies and becoming fully and truly explanatory pluralist. Nonetheless, trying to achieve the right balance in the search for and application of reductive and non-reductive explanations will in any case be a difficult exercise.

In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology.

Recent pleas for more heterodoxy in explaining economic action have been defending a pluralism for economics. In this article, I analyse these defences by scrutinizing the pluralistic qualities in the work of one of the major voices of heterodoxy, Tony Lawson. This scrutiny will focus on Lawson's alternatives concerning ontology and explanation to mainstream economics. Subsequently, I will raise some doubts about Lawson's pluralism, and identify questions that will have to be addressed by heterodox economists in order to maintain the claim of pluralism.

Commenting on recent articles by Keith Sawyer and Julie Zahle, the author questions the way in which the debate between methodological individualists and holists has been presented and contends that too much weight has been given to metaphysical and ontological debates at the expense of giving attention to methodological debates and analysis of good explanatory practice. Giving more attention to successful explanatory practice in the social sciences and the different underlying epistemic interests and motivations for providing explanations or reducing theories (which ask for different kinds of explanatory information to be found on the social or on the individual level) might lead to real progress in the debate on methodological individualism, and away from the unending battles of (metaphysical) intuitions. Key Words: methodological individualism • nonreductive materialism • pluralism • pragmatics of explanation.

Explanatory pluralism has been defended by several philosophers of history and social science, recently, for example, by Tor Egil Førland in this journal. In this article, we provide a better argument for explanatory pluralism, based on the pragmatist idea of epistemic interests. Second, we show that there are three quite different senses in which one can be an explanatory pluralist: one can be a pluralist about questions, a pluralist about answers to questions, and a pluralist about both. We defend the last position. Finally, our third aim is to argue that pluralism should not be equated with “anything goes”: we will argue for non-relativistic explanatory pluralism. This pluralism will be illustrated by examples from history and social science in which different forms of explanation (for example, structural, functional, and intentional explanations) are discussed, and the fruitfulness of our framework for understanding explanatory pluralism is shown.

In this paper, we inquire how the eternal tension between science and values has been tackled in philosophy of science by analysing three different strategies that have been used: focussing on different kinds of values and allowing some of these kinds to be present in science ; stipulating the role values are allowed to play ; and, specifying a social procedure in order to deal with values in science. Recently, the distinction between the direct and indirect role values could play in science and expertise was elaborated extensively by Heather Douglas, allowing values to play an indirect role. We scrutinize Douglas' account and claim that identifying the different roles of values in science faces similar problems as earlier philosophical accounts distinguishing kinds of values, cf. epistemic and non-epistemic values. The problems discussed concern interpreting, weighing, variety of, and distinguishing the kinds/roles of values in science. Furthermore, we investigate whether some of these problems, rather than by the kinds-of-values-approach or Douglas' roles-of-values-approach, could be addressed by stipulating a social procedure in order to deal with values in science and expertise, or, whether combining two or all three of the strategies would help us developing a satisfying account of values in science.

Some scholars claim that Critical Realism promises well for the unification of the social sciences, e.g., "Unifying social science: A critical realist approach" in this volume. I will first show briefly how Critical Realism might unify social science. Secondly, I focus on the relation between the ontology and methodology of Critical Realism, and unveil the politics of metaphysics. Subsequently, it is argued that the division of labour between social scientific disciplines should not be metaphysics-driven, but rather question-driven. In conclusion, I will therefore defend a question-driven pluralism as a guide for interdisciplinarity.