Abstract
The epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as epistemic tolerance and authoritarianism, play important roles in the discourse about rivaling theories. Epistemic tolerance stands for the mental attitude of an epistemic agent, e.g., a scientist, who is open to opposing views, while epistemic authoritarianism represents the tendency to uncritically accept views of authorities. Another relevant epistemic factor when it comes to the epistemic decisions of scientists is the skepticism towards the scientific method. However, the question is whether these epistemic attitudes are influenced by their sociopolitical counterparts, such as the researcher’s degree of conservatism. To empirically investigate the interplay between epistemic and sociopolitical attitudes of scientists, we conducted a survey with researchers (N = 655) across different disciplines. We propose scales for measuring epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism, as well as a scale for detecting the participants' readiness to question the scientific method. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism on the one hand, and career stage and sociopolitical views on the other hand. Interestingly, our study found only small correlations between the participants' degree of conservatism and their epistemic attitudes. This suggests that political views, against common argumentation, actually do not play an important role in one’s scientific decisions. Moreover, social scientists scored higher on the epistemic tolerance and lower on the epistemic authoritarianism scale than natural scientists. Finally, the results indicate that natural scientists question the scientific method less than social scientists.
Highlights
Scientists, in addition to their methodological stances, hold a whole array of sociopolitical views
The principal aim of our research was to operationalize and empirically test epistemic attitudes, with epistemic tolerance construed as an epistemic virtue, epistemic authoritarianism as an epistemic vice, and skepticism towards the scientific method as a Janus-faced epistemic attitude, rather than virtuous at all times
The first step concerns the confirmation of the quality of the newly proposed scales and the interpretation of the descriptive statistics of all scales presented in the previous section
Summary
Scientists, in addition to their methodological stances, hold a whole array of sociopolitical views. Scientists develop epistemic attitudes that resemble political ones. They can be more or less epistemically tolerant towards opposing scientific theories or follow leading authorities in their disciplines with different levels of trust. The legitimate question arises whether non-epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as moral values, reflect on their epistemic attitudes and general beliefs about science. One could argue that non-epistemic values influence the scientists’ views on the relationship between a scientific hypothesis and the evidence, or their perception of the scientific method (cf Colombo et al 2016)
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