Han, HyeJeong
(2025)
When to Recommend No Experiment? Drug Regulation and the Institutional Shaping of Pursuitworthiness.
[Preprint]
Abstract
In regulatory science, where there is high pressure to deliver results with limited time and resources, determining the point at which no experiment should be conducted is a crucial issue. The significance of such economic considerations makes regulatory science a particularly fruitful field for engaging with Peircean accounts of pursuitworthiness. In this paper, I examine how drug regulatory institutions tackle the problem of selecting experiments, drawing on a case study concerning the development of institutional guidelines for conducting bacterial mutagenicity assays and controlling mutagenic impurities. I argue that economic considerations regarding the cost of experiments have motivated regulatory institutions to shape the assessment of the pursuitworthiness of experiments into explicit and concrete forms of non-pursuitworthiness, specifically by standardising assessment methods, criteria, and their implications. In doing so, I present an economic approach to evidential standards, one that treats economic considerations about the cost of experiments as constitutive of the standards for deciding whether to continue gathering evidence while suspending judgement on hypothesis acceptance or rejection. This study of non-pursuitworthiness contributes to general discussions of the pursuitworthiness of experiments by placing social and material costs at the centre of epistemic discussions.
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