Inquiry Tickets: Values, Pursuit, and Underdetermination

Abstract

We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that nonepistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of nonepistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relevant to hypothesis choice: the relevance of nonepistemic values to a particular cognitive attitude with respect to h varies over time.