Abstract
Associated with Bayesianism is the claim that insofar as thereis anything like scientific theory-commitment, it is not a doxastic commitment to the truth of the theory or any proposition involving the theory, but is rather an essentiallypractical commitment to behaving in accordance with a theory. While there are a number of a priori reasons to think that this should be true, there is stronga posteriori reason to think that it is not in fact true of current scientific practice.After outlining a feature that distinguishes doxastic from practical commitment, I presentempirical evidence that suggests that, like perhaps all other theoretical commitment,scientific theory-commitment is doxastic.
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Jones, W.E. Is Scientific Theory-Commitment Doxastic or Practical?. Synthese 137, 325–344 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SYNT.0000004901.93310.03
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SYNT.0000004901.93310.03