Do scientific methodological beliefs affect the topics that are investigated?
Do scientific methodological beliefs affect the topics that are investigated?

The obvious answer to that is, of course, yes. Scientists are people, too, and while we try our best to conduct the actual research as objective and unbiased as possible (and sometimes we fail at that as well), lots of very subjective and &quot;unscientific&quot; factors go into the selection of concrete hypotheses, problems, and methodologies to work on / use.
These include perceived chance of success (nobody wants to spend a lot of time and money on a study they assume will fail in uninteresting ways), perceived importance, personal taste (if you hated mathematics the question you raise in your introduction would likely not even cross your mind), chances of writing a high-level publication (people are much more likely to commit to a study that could get into their favorite A* venue than one that is unlikely to), and many other factors.

But if &quot;scientific methodological beliefs&quot; for example assume that &quot;empirical is hard&quot;, then could this motivate more studies on &quot;easy approximations&quot;, rather than &quot;phenomena themselves&quot;? Intuitively they need to agree somewhere, but I was more thinking along the lines of:
Is it possible to produce a lot of research by researching &quot;easy approximations&quot; than &quot;studying the real thing&quot;? Does scientific belief justify this by making people &quot;okay with easy approximations&quot;?

&quot;Perceived difficulty&quot;, especially in relation to expected impact and publication chances, are certainly one of these factors that make people choose which concrete problem to work on over others. However, I would argue that this is less about &quot;beliefs&quot; and more about fairly pragmatic cost/benefit estimations: if empirical works take a long time and are not valued highly, then fewer people will work on them. Again, researchers are people, too, and as a group researchers (just like anybody else) react to the incentives that are presented to them.