difficult...Iwouldn’t hold a candidate in political science re-
sponsible for what seemed to me to be having overly instrumental
or diagrammatic ways of understanding what they’re going to do,
because they have to have those. They have to have a certain sci-
entism.The premium put on “cognitive contextualization” acts as a coun-
terweight to idiosyncratic tastes and pushes panelists to assess pro-
posals through the lenses that are distinctive to the applicant’s field.
A political scientist makes this clear as he explains how other panel
members misunderstood his evaluative criteria:
I was basically being accused of being a positivist. No one ever
said that, because obviously that’s like calling somebody commu-
nist. But there was a sense in which I was imposing my disciplin-
ary bias inappropriately on another discipline. That’s what I was
picking up. And my response was “No, I actually am holding [the
applicant] to her own standards and I’m not trying to be hege-
monic on this.”“Cognitive contextualization” presumes a certain methodologi-
cal pluralism, that is, the ability to understand that different methods
serve different purposes. Panelists act on this understanding, even
if it may not seem to be in their interest. For instance, a herme-
neutically inclined historian says that he “even liked” the political
scientist on his panel and argues that “committee[s] always need one
fairly tough-minded, empiricist, scientistic, social scientist who can
hold up that banner and articulate why his standards...are[what]
they are.” Methodological pluralism produces universalism, thus bol-
stering the legitimacy of collective evaluations.^29 But significantly,
such methodological pluralism does not favor the use of consistent
criteria across disciplines; instead, different proposals prime eval-
Pragmatic Fairness / 133