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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 775-801 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Review of Philosophy and Psychology |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
We would like to thank Kaja Damnjanović, Dušica Filipović Đurđević, and Jovan Ivanović for reading and commenting upon the methodological aspects of our research, and Jan Sprenger for his suggestions that lead to a significant improvement of the theoretical parts of our paper. We would also like to thank Monika Milosavljević and other participants in the discussion after our research was presented at the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology, Belgrade, Serbia, as well as the participants in the discussion after the presentation at Science & More Seminar in Turin, Italy. We also appreciate the suggestions and constructive criticism of the anonymous reviewers. Finally, we are grateful to the researchers who found the time to participate in our survey and, thus, made this empirical study possible.