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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Ethical judgments and contextual values necessarily enter the scientist's core activity of accepting and rejecting hypotheses, refuting the Value-Neutrality Thesis (VNT).

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Accepting or rejecting a hypothesis requires judging which consequences of error are more palatable.
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    • 2.One possible error is that some individuals die from side effects of a drug erroneously judged to be safe.
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    • 3.Another possible error is that individuals die from a condition because they lacked access to a treatment erroneously judged to be unsafe.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Heather Douglas (2000) demonstrates that values function as 'indirect' reasons in hypothesis acceptance by setting tolerable error thresholds.
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    • 2.The choice of significance threshold (e.g., p<0.05 vs p<0.01) is not determined by data alone but by judgments about which error type causes more harm.
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    • 3.Since significance thresholds are constitutive of hypothesis acceptance, and their selection requires value judgments, values are internal to core scientific inference.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Rudner (1953) established that the scientist qua scientist makes value judgments because accepting a hypothesis entails deciding its evidence is sufficiently strong.
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    • 2.What counts as 'sufficiently strong' evidence varies with the ethical weight of acting on a false hypothesis, as in drug safety versus particle physics contexts.
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    • 3.Therefore, the standard of proof itself is value-laden, making ethical commitments structurally inseparable from the act of hypothesis acceptance rather than merely peripheral to it.
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