Uygun Tunc, Duygu and Tunc, Mehmet Necip (2025) Inductive Risks and Evidential Thresholds: A Reliabilist Case for Value-Freedom in Science. [Preprint]
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Abstract
The argument from inductive risk is often taken to show that social values must inform evidential thresholds for accepting scientific claims, because purely epistemic criteria cannot determine such thresholds non-arbitrarily. We reconstruct this arbitrariness charge as a version of the threshold problem for fallibilism and show, first, that it does not uniquely challenge the value-free ideal, and second, that using social values in setting thresholds inherits the same difficulties while adding epistemic costs. Within a reliabilist framework, where justification depends on the reliability of inferential procedures rather than evidential certainty in singular cases, concerns about arbitrariness reduce to familiar issues of vagueness and underdetermination that purely epistemic considerations often sufficiently manage. On this view, value-freedom is best conceived as a regulative ideal of long-run, socially distributed error-control and remains both viable and normatively preferable for managing inductive risks.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Values In Science |
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| Depositing User: | Duygu Uygun Tunc | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 11 Jan 2026 01:39 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 11 Jan 2026 01:39 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 27848 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Values In Science |
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| Date: | 2025 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/27848 |
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