Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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Is scientific theory-commitment doxastic or practical?

Ward E. Jones

pp. 325-344

Abstract

Associated with Bayesianism is the claim that insofar as thereis anything like scientific theory-commitment, it is not a doxastic commitment to the truth of the theory or any proposition involving the theory, but is rather an essentiallypractical commitment to behaving in accordance with a theory. While there are a number of a priori reasons to think that this should be true, there is stronga posteriori reason to think that it is not in fact true of current scientific practice.After outlining a feature that distinguishes doxastic from practical commitment, I presentempirical evidence that suggests that, like perhaps all other theoretical commitment,scientific theory-commitment is doxastic.

Publication details

Published in:

(2003) Synthese 137 (3).

Pages: 325-344

DOI: 10.1023/B:SYNT.0000004901.93310.03

Full citation:

Jones Ward E. (2003) „Is scientific theory-commitment doxastic or practical?“. Synthese 137 (3), 325–344.