When empirical underdetermination makes testing undecidable among alternative theories, different scientists may have personal reasons for preferring one alternative as an explanation. In such circumstances selection may be an investment decision for the career scientist rather than an investigative decision. The choice may be influenced by such circumstances as the cynical realpolitik of peer-reviewed journals. Knowing what editors and their favorite referees currently want in submissions greatly helps an author getting his paper published. Publication is an academic status symbol with the more prestigious journals yielding more brownie points for accumulating academic tenure, status and salary.
In the January 1978 issue of the Journal of the American Society of Information Science (JASIS) the editor wrote that referees sometimes use the peer review process as a means to attack a point of view and to suppress the content of a submitted paper, i.e., they attempt censorship. Furthermore editors are not typically entrepreneurial; they are the risk-avoiding rearguard rather than the risk-taking avant-garde. They select the established “authorities” with reputation-based vested interests in the prevailing traditional views, and these “authorities” suborn the peer-review process by using their preferred views as criteria for criticism and thus acceptance for publication.
External sociocultural factors have also influenced theory choice. In his Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) Kuhn wrote that the astronomer in the time of Copernicus could not upset the two-sphere universe without overturning physics and religion as well. Fundamental concepts in the pre-Copernican astronomy had become strands for a much larger fabric of thought, and the nonastronomical strands in turn bound the thinking of the astronomers. The Copernican revolution occurred because Copernicus was a dedicated specialist, who valued mathematical and celestial detail more than the values reinforced by the nonastronomical views that were dependent on the prevailing two-sphere theory. This purely technical focus of Copernicus enabled him to ignore the nonastronomical consequences of his innovation, consequences that would lead his contemporaries of less restricted vision to reject his innovation as absurd.
Later in discussing modern science in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn does not make the consequences to the nonspecialist an aspect of his general theory of scientific revolutions. Instead he maintains, as part of his thesis of “normal” science, that a scientist may willfully choose to ignore a falsifying outcome of a decisive test execution. This choice is not due to the scientist’s specific criticism of either the test design or the test execution, but rather is due to the expectation that the falsified theory will later be improved and corrected. However any such “correcting” alteration made to a falsified theory amounts to theory elaboration, which produces a new and different theory.
Similarly sociology and politics operate as criteria today in the social sciences, where defenders and attackers of different economic views are in fact defending and attacking certain social/political philosophies, ideologies, interests and policies. For example in the United States Republican politicians attack Keynesian economics, while Democrat politicians defend it. But pragmatism has prevailed over ideology, when expediency dictates, as during the 2007-2009 Great Recession crisis. Thus in his After the Music Stopped (2013) Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University economist and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, reports that ultraconservative Republican President Bush “let pragmatism trump ideology” (P. 213), when he signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, a distinctively Keynesian fiscal policy, which added $150 billions to the U.S. Federal debt.
In contrast Democrat President Obama without reluctance and with a Democrat-controlled Congress signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in 2009, a stimulus package that added $787 billions to the Federal debt. Blinder reports that simulations with the Moody Analytics large macroeconometric model showed that the effect of the stimulus in contrast to a no-stimulus simulation scenario was a GDP that was 6 per cent higher with the stimulus than without it, an unemployment rate 3 percentage points lower, and 4.8 million additional Americans employed (P. 209). In an article published in Foreign Policy in 2000 recent Federal Reserve Board Chairman from 2006 to 2014, Ben Bernanke wrote that the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash resulted less from the severity of the crash than from the response of policyholders. In his memoir The Courage to Act (2015), he wrote that the 2008 stimulus was small in comparison with its objective of helping to arrest the deepest recession in seventy years in a $15 trillion national economy (P. 388). Thus Bernanke, a conservative Republican, did not reject Keynesianism, but concluded that the recovery was needlessly slow and protracted, because the stimulus program was too small.
Citing Kuhn some sociologists of knowledge including those advocating the “strong program” maintain that the social and political forces that influence society at large also influence scientific beliefs. This is truer in the social sciences, but sociologists who believe that this means that empiricism does not control acceptance of scientific beliefs in the long term are mistaken, because it is pragmatic empiricism that enables wartime victories, peacetime prosperity – and in all times business profits, as reactionary policies, delusional ideologies and utopian fantasies cannot.
4.23 The “Best Explanation” Criteria
As noted above, Thagard’s cognitive-psychology system ECHO developed specifically for theory selection has identified three nonempirical criteria to maximize the coherence aim. His simulations of past episodes in the history of science indicate that the most important criterion is breadth of explanation, followed by simplicity of explanation, and finally analogy with previously accepted theories. Thagard considers these nonempirical selection criteria as productive of a “best explanation”.
The breadth-of-explanation criterion also suggests Popper’s aim of maximizing information content. In any case there have been successful theories in the history of science, such as Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and uncertainty relations, for which none of these three characteristics were operative in the acceptance as explanations. And as Feyerabend noted in Against Method in criticizing Popper’s view, Aristotelian dynamics is a general theory of change comprising locomotion, qualitative change, generation and corruption, while Galileo and his successors’ dynamics pertains exclusively to locomotion. Aristotle’s explanations therefore may be said to have greater breadth, but his physics is now known to be less empirically adequate.
Contemporary pragmatists acknowledge only the empirical criterion, the criterion of superior empirical adequacy. They exclude all nonempirical criteria from the aim of science, because while relevant to persuasion to make theories appear “convincing”, they are irrelevant to evidence. Nonempirical criteria are like the psychological criteria that trial lawyers use to select and persuade juries in order to win lawsuits in a court of law, but which are irrelevant to courtroom evidence rules for determining the facts of a case. Such prosecutorial lawyers are like the editors and referees of the peer-reviewed academic literature (sometimes called the “court of science”) who ignore the empirical evidence described in a paper submitted for publication.
But nonempirical criteria are routinely operative in the selection of problems to be addressed and explained. For example the American Economic Association’s Index of Economic Journals indicates that in the years of the Great Depression the number of journal articles concerning the trade cycle fluctuated in close correlation with the national average unemployment rate with a lag of approximately two years.
4.24 Nonempirical Linguistic Constraints
The empirical constraint is the institutionalized value that regulates theory acceptance or rejection.
The constraint imposed upon theorizing by empirical test outcomes is the empirical constraint, the criterion of superior empirical adequacy. It is a regulating institutionalized cultural value definitive of modern empirical science that is not viewed as an obstacle to be overcome, but rather as a condition to be respected for the advancement of science toward its aim.
There