. Yours truly is fond of science philosophers like Nancy Cartwright. With razor-sharp intellects, they immediately go for the essentials. They have no time for bullshit. And neither should we. These Pufendorf lectures are a must-watch for everyone with an interest in the methodology of science.
Theory of Science & Methodology
That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting — indeed, it is under obligation to do so — from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form. But for […]
La philosophie n’est pas une science, ni ne peut l’être. Prétendre le contraire, c’est la vouer immanquablement à l’échec, comme elle l’est en effet, mais aussi à l’illusion ou à la mauvaise foi … Il n’y a pas de démonstration philosophique, et s’il y en avait ce serait la fin de la philosophie – puisqu’elle […]
. Using formal mathematical modelling, mainstream economists sure can guarantee that the conclusions hold given the assumptions. However, the validity we get in abstract model worlds does not warrant transfer to real-world economies. Validity may be good, but it is not enough. Mainstream economists are proud of having an ever-growing smorgasbord of models to cherry-pick […]
A major, and notorious, problem with this approach, at least in the domain of science, concerns how to ascribe objective prior probabilities to hypotheses. What seems to be necessary is that we list all the possible hypotheses in some domain and distribute probabilities among them, perhaps ascribing the same probability to each employing the principal […]
If we do not fully explain by adding more variables, how do we explain? Mechanisms explain because they embody an invariant property. The first mechanism, linking the gas pedal to the rotating drivetrain, is combustion: The second mechanism, linking the rotating drivetrain to acceleration, is the relationship of torque to force. Combustion is a high […]
There are good reasons to think that moderating causes have an important role general in explaining development and growth. Why? The growth process is apparently strongly affected by what economists call complementarities. Complementarities exist when the action of an agent or the existence of practice affects the marginal benefit to another agent taking an action […]
Psychology professor Susan Fiske doesn’t like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She’s implicitly following what I’ve sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth. I’ve written elsewhere on my problems with this attitude — […]
Methods for warranting causal claims fall into two broad categories. There are those that clinch the conclusion but are narrow in their range of application; and those that merely vouch for the conclusion but are broad in their range of application. Derivation from theory falls into the first category, as do randomized clinical trials (RCTs), […]
Mainstream economics is at its core in the story-telling business whereby economic theorists create make-believe analogue models of the target system – usually conceived as the real economic system. This modelling activity is considered useful and essential. Since fully-fledged experiments on a societal scale as a rule are prohibitively expensive, ethically indefensible or unmanageable, economic […]