Why Dead Ends May Remain Well-Trodden Paths: Epistemic Hopes and Obstacles in the History of the Delphi Technique

Quite in contrast to any conception of the scientific process as being determined by verification plus adoption versus falsification and dismissal, one interesting feature of ideas in the (social) sciences is the relative inertia that accompanies their identification as dead ends. Even if under relentless fire by a wide array of critics, proponents of a dead end idea can continue to believe in its quality and capacity and defend it against any kind of attack. This might, in some cases, be explained by reference to Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, and the historian of science can analyze the ways in which proponents attempted to reduce the dissonance extant between their claims and reality. However, especially in the social sciences and humanities, a clear-cut event that causes the dissonance is missing. The paper proposes to use the concept of epistemic hopes for such cases. As an analytic category, epistemic hopes are the expectations towards capacity, productivity, efficiency, and impact of a scientific idea that guide the author(s) of this idea in its creation and development. Moreover, epistemic hopes can also be used as an explanatory category. They can draw attention away from the flaws of one’s own idea and obstruct an objective assessment of its capacity, productivity, efficiency, and impact. In this, they are similar, but not identical to Gaston Bachelard’s epistemic obstacles. Referring to the history of the Delphi technique, the paper discusses the concept of epistemic hopes and its relation to Bachelard’s epistemic obstacles.