Why do funding agencies favor hypothesis testing?

•Discusses an important and deeply neglected topic in the philosophy of science.•Presents large-scale data on how grant proposal refereeing actually works.•Develops a conservative model for explaining refereeing practices.•Proposes how to model funding strategies using computer simulations.

Exploratory inquiry has difficulty attracting research funding because funding agencies have little sense of how to detect good science in exploratory contexts. After documenting and explaining the focus on hypothesis testing among a variety of institutions responsible for distinguishing between good and bad science, I analyze the NIH grant review process. I argue that a good explanation for the focus on hypothesis testing—at least at the level of science funding agencies—is the fact that hypothesis-driven research is relatively easy to appraise. I then explore one method by which we might gauge the epistemic merits of different styles of inquiry.