April 22, 2024, marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest philosophers in the history of philosophy. Kant’s ideas of the Enlightenment are still relevant, despite the numerous criticisms that have been levelled against them. The Enlightenment was characterized by a spirit of exploration that led to new discoveries […]
Theory of Science & Methodology
Mainstream economics nowadays usually assumes that agents that have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty behave according to Bayesian rules, axiomatized by Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1954) — that is, they maximize expected utility for some subjective probability measure that is continually updated according to Bayes theorem. If not, they are supposed to be […]
You will already be familiar with the fact that broad swathes of social science research are given over to establishing, analysing, generalising, theorising about and using statistical associations that are manipulated with the assumptions of probability theory. This makes sense if probabilities can be attached to broad swathes of the phenomena that social science is […]
What properties do societies possess that might make them possible objects of knowledge for us? My strategy in developing an answer to this question will be effectively based on a pincer movement. But in deploying the pincer I shall concentrate first on the ontological question of the properties that societies possess, before shifting to the […]
Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson and David Schmeidler (2022) describe a practice that … is not uncommon among theorists: “[O]ne may suggest a model with a descriptive interpretation in mind, but, when facing an aggressive audience, one might take a step back and rather than promoting the model as an explanation of a real-life […]
The field of economics has long been hailed as a bastion of rationality and objectivity, offering insights into the workings of present-day complex economic systems. However, questions about the foundations of economics and its prevailing methodological approach have to be raised. My own critique challenges traditional assumptions and argues for a more pluralistic and realistic […]
When people hear the word “complexity,” they respond in different ways. Some think “complicated” or “messy,” not being able to see the forest for the trees. Others think of a clutter of matter going this way and that with no chance to get a purchase on its behavior, to take hold of the “blooming, buzzing […]
Isn’t it the mark of a successful theory of a range of phenomena that it unites and embraces the causally relevant parameters and state variables within a single theoretical perspective? This question suggests that if our theories are successful, then they should produce descriptions of systems according to which the systems are interactionally simple. I […]