Behavioral policies, such as nudges and boosts, are gaining prominence. Such policies are advertised as evidential public policies. Yet, they have significant evidential problems. I analyze an important example of behavioral policy, so-called Incentivized Smoking Cessation Policies. I focus on their evaluation with respect to health inequities. I demonstrate that the evaluations of Incentivized Smoking Cessation Policies can be characterized by a plurality of researchers making use of different kinds of evidence gathering methods. I argue that the evaluation of Incentivized Smoking Cessation Policies' impact on health inequities can best be accomplished by integrating different evidence gathering methods. More generally, pluralism of evidence gathering methods adds another consideration to the debate about evidential requirements of behavioral policy assessment.
I examine how Heather Douglas’ account of values in science applies to the assessment of actual cases of scientific practice. I focus on the case of applied toxicologists’ acceptance of molecular evidence-gathering methods and evidential sources. I demonstrate that a set of social and institutional processes plays a philosophically significant role in changing toxicologists’ inductive risk judgments about different kinds of evidence. I suggest that Douglas’ inductive risk framework can be integrated with a suitable account of evidence, such as Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism, to address the role of social context in the cases like the one examined here. I introduce such an integrated account and show how Longino’s contextual empiricism and inductive risk framework fruitfully complement each other in analyzing the novel aspects of the toxicology case.
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