Theory of Science & Methodology
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 […]
. Last week, yours truly was invited by the Department of Criminology at Malmö University to deliver a lecture to fellow researchers on recent theoretical developments in causality modelling. Following the presentation, one key question emerged: How can the potential outcomes approach be effectively evaluated within the social sciences? Framing all causal questions as questions […]
Andrew Ross has drawn an analogy between the hierarchical taste cultures (high, middlebrow and popular) familiar to cultural critics, and the demarcation between science and pseudoscience. At a sociological level this is an incisive observation; but at an ontological and epistemological level it is simply mad … Such epistemological agnosticism simply won’t suffice, at least […]
There are other sleights of hand that cause economists problems. In their quest for statistical “identification” of a causal effect, economists often have to resort to techniques that answer either a narrower or a somewhat different version of the question that motivated the research. Results from randomized social experiments carried out in particular regions of, […]