The problem-ladenness of theory

Abstract

The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories, or develop those that best suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical virtues, focused on their epistemic justification, have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We advance a problem-centric, or pragmatic, account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to estimate the degree to which a theory increases the problem-solving efficacy of a field's body of knowledge. From this perspective, what are traditionally considered epistemic virtues can be couched in terms of their coverage of problems in a field's domain, or problem-space, and additional virtues come to light that reflect a theory’s ability to facilitate its use by problem-having agents and its context in a societally-embedded scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the different needs of different fields result in different kinds of theories, and allows us to formulate the challenges facing cognitive science in terms that we hope will facilitate their resolution through further theoretical development.

From empirical problem-solving to theoretical problem-finding perspectives on the cognitive sciences

“…The ongoing discussion should suggest that phenomena in need of explanation are actively carved out by cognitive scientists when they observe cognitive behavior, or isolate secondary empirical regularities, through the lens of existing explanations and theoretical constraints. Much in the same way that theories and theoretical problems can be 'empirical problem'-laden (Levenstein, De Santo, et al, 2023), in the sense that they arise from and depend on efforts to explain particular observations, empirical problem-finding is theoryladen. In particular, this lack of automaticity or autonomy of empirical problem-finding highlights the active role of researchers in bringing to bear theoretical problems to carve out phenomena as scientific problems.…”