In science — and economics — one could argue that there are basically three kinds of reasoning available: (1) Deduction Premise 1: All Chicago economists believe in the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH). Premise 2: Robert Lucas is a Chicago economist. Conclusion: Robert Lucas believes in REH. Here we have an example of a logically valid deductive […]
Theory of Science & Methodology
Yours truly has been offering a crash course on causality to fellow researchers at Malmö University over the past couple of years. If you’re curious, the course PowerPoint is available here: Causality – a crash course. Many research questions in the social sciences today are fundamentally about issues of causality. What is behind the rise […]
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory […]
What is 0.999 …, really? Is it 1? Or is it some number infinitesimally less than 1? The right answer is to unmask the question. What is 0.999 …, really? It appears to refer to a kind of sum: .9 + + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + … But what does that mean? That […]
If postmodernism evaporates in the face of conditions that no one seems to want to dispute, then why bother putting so much effort into critically examining it? Isn’t that a redundant exercise? No, it is not, because even though most historians in their daily work proceed as if it were possible to discover the real […]
Instrumentalists are right to point out that the meaning of statements involving unobservable entities (like “quark”) is in part related to the implications of such statements for direct observations. But only in part: though it is difficult to say exactly how we give meaning to scientific expressions, it seems plausible that we do it by […]