“Theory choice” or “theory selection” is pervasively treated as a fundamental task of science, if not the primary task of any theoretical inquiry. As commonly understood, scientists, or at least scientists working on fundamental theories in a given field, should engage in systematic comparative evaluations of competing frameworks available at a given stage of scientific development, so to recognize the right one or at least the best one at this stage, and then to select it as the basis of future theorizing, while ceasing to take seriously and explore further its competitors.

Such a conception has been, and still is to a considerable extent, a pivotal, largely unquestioned commitment about science. Accordingly, the so-called “problem of theory choice”, or latter the broader “problem of paradigm selection”, acquired the status of a central issue in the philosophy of science.

Regarding these problems, innumerable writings have been produced by meta-studies about science, and myriads of disparate purported solutions have been elaborated, about how to choose.

The conference, however, aims to explore a more fundamental, logically prior question: The question of whether or not, and why, we should choose one unique scientific theoretical framework to the detriment of all its rivals. In other words, the aim is to consider the issue, not of the methodology and historical reasons of theory choice, but of the very rationale of the categorical imperative “select the best theory and abandon the exploration of its competitors”. Put differently, the aim is to characterize the features, and to critically discuss the impacts, of what can be called the “monist regime of our science”.