Fast and Frugal Heuristics at Research Frontiers

How should we model scientific decision-making at the frontiers of research? This chapter explores the applicability of Gerd Gigerenzer’s “fast and frugal” heuristics to frontier contexts, i.e., to so-called context of discovery. Such heuristics require only one or a very few steps to a decision and only a little information. While the approach is somewhat promising, given the limited resources in frontier contexts, trying to extend it to fairly “wild” frontiers raises challenging questions. This chapter attempts to frame the issues (rather than to provide resolutions to them), and thereby to cast light on frontier contexts, which have been misunderstood by philosophers, the general public, and funding agencies alike.

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