Miłkoś – Pursuitworthiness of breakthrough experiments

The next, this time online, meeting of the Philosophy of Cognitive Science seminar will be held on April 23th at 10:30 AM (Warsaw time, CET).

Our guest will be Szymon Miłkoś (IFiS, PAN), who will present and discuss a paper entitled Pursuitworthiness of breakthrough experiments: transforming emerging intuitions into established norms.

Meeting link: meet.google.com/vgp-ssdx-feu

Abstract: Pursuitworthiness accounts face a fundamental dilemma when confronting break- through experiments: investigations judged unworthy by current standards that, upon success, transform those very standards. I show how recent pursuitworthiness accounts exclude breakthroughs, undercutting scientific gain and stagnating our un- derstanding of pursuitworthiness. The alternative, abandoning standards entirely, increases scientific waste and embraces nihilism. I demonstrate that attempts to mitigate this dilemma fail, and that its harms in scientific practice are real, severe, and compounding. I distinguish three modes of pursuitworthiness at the forefront of science: emergent (opaque intuitions), established (justified norms), and trans- formative (explicating emergent into established forms). I argue that transformative pursuitworthiness standards allow us to escape from the escalating dilemma into complementary advancement. While we cannot evaluate breakthrough experiments using established standards, we can evaluate how researchers explicate their opaque intuitions into justified norms. I propose a foundational transformative norm: prefer pursuits that document their explication practice, providing the evidence to advance pursuitworthiness itself. Finally, I suggest that this norm offers an independent mechanism for funding breakthrough experiments.

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