Trade-offs. In the perspective of means-ends epistemology, inquiry involves an ongoing struggle with hard choices, rather than the execution of a universal “scientific method”. The inquirer has to balance conflicting values, and may consider various strategies such as accepting difficulties in the short run hoping to resolve them in the long run. For example in the conservation law problem, there can be conflicts between theoretical parsimony, i.e., positing fewer conservation laws, and ontological parsimony, i.e., introducing fewer hidden particles. For another example, a particle theorist may accept positing undetected particles in the hopes that they will eventually be observed as science progresses. The search for the Higgs boson illustrates this strategy. An important learning-theoretic project is to examine when such tradeoffs arise and what the options for resolving them are. Section 4 extends learning-theoretic analysis to consider goals in addition to long-run reliability.