---
title: Philosophical Bias in Science
type: concept
tags: [philosophy-of-science, bias, methodology, ontology, epistemology, metascience]
sources: ["[[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science]]", "[[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-01-metascience]]"]
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# Philosophical Bias in Science

Term coined by **Andersen, Anjum & Rocca 2019** ("*Philosophical bias is the one bias that science cannot avoid*", *eLife*): basic **implicit assumptions** in science of an **ontological**, **epistemological**, or **normative** nature, which skew hypothesis formation, experiment design, evidence evaluation and interpretation of results.

Unlike confirmation bias or cognitive bias, philosophical bias cannot be eliminated — only made explicit and critically examined. "*Philosophy-free science is simply not an option*" ([[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-01-metascience]]).

## Types
- **Ontological** — implicit commitments about what exists (e.g. Descartes' mind–body dualism still structuring the division between psychology and medicine).
- **Epistemological** — implicit commitments about what counts as knowledge (e.g. data must be observable; methods define evidence).
- **Normative** — implicit commitments about how science *should* be done (e.g. "more data is better", "RCTs trump mechanisms").

## Philosophical biases embedded in scientific methods (the PHI403 tour)

Scientific methods carry implicit commitments about causation, probability, and complexity:

| Method | Implicit theory of causation |
|---|---|
| Statistical correlation | [[concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation|Regularity theory]] (Hume) |
| Comparative studies | Difference-making (Lewis) |
| Experimental methods | [[concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation|Interventionism]] (Woodward) |
| RCT-based EBM | [[concepts/evidence-hierarchy|Evidence hierarchy]] privileging Humean regularity |
| Bayesian reasoning | Credence, ratio analysis ([[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-17-conditional-probability]]) |
| Mechanistic reasoning | Productive-mechanism theory ([[concepts/mechanisms-in-science]]) |
| Case studies / N=1 | Singularist [[concepts/dispositionalism]] |

## Detecting philosophical bias
- Notice causal vocabulary ("increase", "prevent", "affect") smuggled into correlational conclusions ([[sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-12-explanatory-power-of-mechanisms]]).
- Ask what the method *assumes* about causation, and whether that matches the target phenomenon.
- Thomas Kuhn: paradigmatic crisis = scientists starting to do philosophy about their own norms.

## Relevance to this wiki
Any choice of BPM / PPM / APM *method* carries philosophical biases — for instance, benchmarking on aggregate metrics smuggles in a frequentist / Humean ontology. See [[concepts/rct-limitations]], [[concepts/probabilistic-causation]], [[concepts/causal-process-discovery]].

## Related
[[concepts/causation]] · [[concepts/evidence-hierarchy]] · [[concepts/methodological-pluralism]] · [[concepts/rct-limitations]]