Hasnes Beninson, Zvi (2024) Epistemic Commitments Have No “Off” Button: On the Embodiment of Commitments by Way of Model Formulation. [Preprint]

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Abstract

The current paper examines how a commitment to a principle, adhered to by an individual agent, becomes an accepted standard of an epistemic community. Addressing this question requires three steps: first, to define the terms used throughout the paper, and especially the characteristics of commitments to a principle. The second step is to find a mechanism through which such epistemic commitments are introduced to an epistemic community and in certain cases are adopted as the standard by the community. While there could be several such mechanisms, the current paper focuses on the practice of model formulation. The third step is to demonstrate the analytical framework developed in the first two steps in a case study. The case study chosen for this paper is the unique approach to feedback analysis adopted by the ecologist and population geneticist Richard Levins. In what follows I will show that part of the features that made Levins’ approach unique was his Marxist commitments, and his attempt to embody those commitments in feedback analysis by formally representing them as modeling assumptions.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Hasnes Beninson, Zvi habezvi87@gmail.com 0000-0001-6219-9543
Keywords:	Epistemic commitments; thick concepts; Richard Levins; loop analysis; model formulation
Subjects:	General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Zvi Hasnes Beninson
Date Deposited:	11 Oct 2024 14:47
Last Modified:	11 Oct 2024 14:47
Item ID:	24041
Subjects:	General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	October 2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24041

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