Aniello De Santo's co-authored article "The Problem-Ladenness of Theory" published in Computational Brain & Behavior
Daniel Levenstein, Aniello De Santo, Saskia Heijnen, M. Narayan, Freek Oude Maatman, Jonathan Rawski, and Cory Wright. The Problem-Ladenness of Theory. Computational Brain & Behavior (2024).
Abstract.
The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories
or develop those that suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical
virtues have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We
advance a pragmatic account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to
estimate a theory’s contribution to a field’s body of knowledge and the degree to
which it increases that knowledge’s ability to solve problems in the field’s domain
or problem space. From this perspective, properties that are traditionally considered
epistemic virtues, such as a theory’s fit to data or internal coherence, can be couched
in terms of problem space coverage, and additional virtues come to light that reflect
a theory’s alignment with problem-having agents and the context in a societally embedded
scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the 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.