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Record W4410976626 · doi:10.5840/eps202562223

Meta-problems for the Values in Science Thesis

2025· article· en· W4410976626 on OpenAlexaff
Robert Hudson

Bibliographic record

VenueEpistemology & Philosophy of Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicInterdisciplinary Research and Collaboration
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEpistemologyPhilosophy of sciencePhilosophySociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There is in the science and values literature a core set of arguments that reject the value-free ideal at the inferential core of scientific investigation. They are usefully summarized in Kevin Elliott’s Values in Science (2022) under the following headings: 1) the gap argument; 2) the error argument; 3) the aims argument; and 4) the conceptual argument. I examine each of these arguments from a ‘meta’ perspective, wherein the arguments are turned on themselves. This is a possibility since each of these arguments is partially based various historical case studies that exemplify, for ‘values in science’ philosophers, scientific reasoning. This meta-investigation has a surprising result, that proponents of the value-ladenness of science are committed to a form of the value-free ideal in terms of the assumptions each of the above four arguments are required to make. A defense of the value-free ideal precipitates from this situation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.401
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.009
Science and technology studies0.0010.014
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0040.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.210
GPT teacher head0.444
Teacher spread0.233 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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