Lars P. Syll

Game theory — a severe case of ‘as if’ Model Platonism The critic may respond that the game theorist’s victory in the debate is at best Pyrrhic, since it is bought at the cost of reducing the propositions of game theory to the status of ‘mere’ tautologies. But such an accusation disturbs the game theorist not in the least. There is nothing a game theorist would like better than for his propositions to be entitled to the status of tautologies, just like...

Yours truly was interviewed last week for a radio program re the legacy and impact of Margaret Thatcher on society. The picture below conveys, in not so many words, my feelings and views on the subject … The rising inequality that has been going on in our societies since the Reagan-Thatcher era is outrageous. Income and wealth have​ increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a very small and privileged elite. And a society where we allow the inequality of incomes and...

The poverty of deductivism The idea that inductive support is a three-place relation among hypothesis H, evidence e, and background factors Ki rather than a two-place relation between H and e has some drastic philosophical implications, which partly explains why philosophers of science have been so reluctant to endorse it. The inductivist program … aimed at doing for inductive inferences what logicians had done for deductive ones … Once the Ki enter the...

The status quo of Economics ten or fifteen years ago was that paying $8 to see a revenge fantasy of a fictitious protagonist taking fictitious revenge on a fictitious bad guy who has fictitiously wronged him falls tightly under economists de-gustibus-non-est-disputandum sensibility, whereas a subject spending $8 to take real revenge on a real-life bad guy who has wronged the subject himself needed explaining. Looked at by an outsider not wedded to the assumption of 100%...

Tooze: Viele Menschen, die Trump gewählt haben, sind der Überzeugung: Die Regierungen der vergangenen Jahrzehnte haben sich nicht um mich gekümmert. Damit haben sie sogar Recht. Jetzt ist da aber plötzlich jemand, der nimmt uns ernst. ZEIT ONLINE: Aber stimmt das wirklich? Nimmt Trump diese Menschen ernst? Tooze: Natürlich ist Trump in Wahrheit kein Interessensvertreter für die Stahlarbeiter im Rustbelt. Das zu glauben, wäre sehr naiv. Er mag eine Sympathie für diese Menschen...

Scientific realism and inference​ to the best explanation In a time when scientific relativism is expanding, it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level. We have to maintain the Enlightenment tradition of thinking of reality as principally independent of our views of it and of the main task of science as studying the structure of this reality. Perhaps the most important contribution a researcher can make is to...

Top 20 heterodox economics books Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867) Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (1911) Nikolai Kondratiev, The Major Economic Cycles (1925) Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1930) John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (1936) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Paul Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development...

Universitet och högskolor släpper igenom sämre studenter Krisen i den svenska skolan har nått högskolan. I dagens Kaliber berättar universitetslärare om studenter med låga förkunskaper, om krav som sänks och om ett ersättningssystem som ger mer pengar ju fler studenter som godkänns … Lars Pålsson Syll är professor i samhällskunskap och undervisar bland annat blivande lärare i statistik. Sedan han började undervisa för 30 år sedan har antalet...

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Abduction — the induction that constitutes the essence​ of scientific reasoning In science we standardly use a logically non-valid inference — the fallacy of affirming the consequent — of the following form: (1) p => q (2) q ————- p or, in instantiated form (1) ∀x (Gx => Px) (2) Pa ———— Ga Although logically invalid, it is nonetheless a kind of inference — abduction — that may be factually strongly warranted and truth-producing. Following the general...