Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

In Social Science and Medicine (December 2017), Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright argue that RCTs do not have any warranted special status. They are, simply, far from being the ‘gold standard’ they are usually portrayed as: Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that the lay public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in RCTs over other methods of in- vestigation. Contrary to frequent...

What kind of evidence do RCTs provide? Perhaps it is supposed that the assumptions for an RCT are generally more often met (or meetable) than those for other methods. What justifies that? Especially given that the easiest assumption to feel secure about for RCTs—that the assignment is done “randomly”—is far from enough to support orthogonality, which is itself only one among the assumptions that need support. I sometimes hear, “Only the RCT can control for...

Sex and the problem with interventionist definitions of causation We suggest that “causation” is not univocal. There is a counterfactual/interventionist notion of causation—of use when one is designing a public policy to intervene and solve a problem—and an historical, or more exactly, etiological notion—often of use when one is identifying a problem to solve … Consider sex: Susan did not get the job she applied for because the prejudiced employer took her...

Hunting for causes (wonkish) There are three fundamental differences between statistical and causal assumptions. First, statistical assumptions, even untested, are testable in principle, given sufficiently large sample and sufficiently fine measurements. Causal assumptions, in contrast, cannot be verified even in principle, unless one resorts to experimental control. This difference is especially accentuated in Bayesian analysis. Though the priors that...

John von Neumann on mathematics

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Bayesianism — a wrong-headed pseudoscience The occurrence of unknown prior probabilities, that must be stipulated arbitrarily, does not worry the Bayesian anymore than God’s inscrutable designs worry the theologian. Thus Lindley (1976), one of the leaders of the Bayesian school, holds that this difficulty has been ‘grossly exaggerated’. And he adds: ‘I am often asked if the [Bayesian] method gives the right answer: or, more particularly, how do you know if...

On the poverty of deductivism In mainstream macroeconomics, there has for long been an insistence on formalistic (mathematical) modelling, and to some economic methodologists (e.g. Lawson 2015, Syll 2016) this has forced economists to give up on realism and substitute axiomatics for real world relevance. According to the critique, the deductivist orientation has been the main reason behind the difficulty that mainstream economics has had in terms of...

Realism and antirealism in social science The situation started to change in the 1960s, when antirealism wenton the rampage in the social studies community as well as in Anglo-American philosophy. This movement seems to have had two sources, one philosophical, the other political. The former was a reaction against positivism, which was (mistakenly but conveniently) presented as objectivist simply because it shunned mental states. I submit that the...

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