Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

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Inference to the best explanation One of the few statisticians that I have on my blogroll is Andrew Gelman.  Although not sharing his Bayesian leanings, yours truly finds  his open-minded, thought-provoking and non-dogmatic statistical thinking highly recommendable. The plaidoyer infra for  “reverse causal questioning” is typical Gelmanian: When statistical and econometrc methodologists write about causal inference, they generally focus on forward causal...

The value of uncertainty What is the evolutionary utility of the predictive strategy if it allows our models to remain so persistently disconnected from our external situation? To fully understand the self-reinforcing power of such habits, we need to look once more beyond the brain. We need to attend to how the process of acting to minimise surprise ensnares our environment into the overarching error-minimising process. At the simplest level, such actions...

Why economic models do not explain Analogue-economy models may picture Galilean thought experiments or they may describe credible worlds. In either case we have a problem in taking lessons from the model to the world. The problem is the venerable one of unrealistic assumptions, exacerbated in economics by the fact that the paucity of economic principles with serious empirical content makes it difficult to do without detailed structural assumptions. But the...

Hegel — wenn der Geist aufs Ganze geht [embedded content] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ist unbestritten einer der wichtigsten philosophischen Denker der Neuzeit. Aber — 250 Jahre nach der Geburt des deutschen Philosophen kann man sich fragen: Was bleibt von Hegel? Wer war er? Was wollte er? Und wie würde er unsere Gegenwart und Zukunft fassen?

Der Glaube an die Wissenschaft Betrachtet man den Verschwörungsirrsinn, der sich dieser Tage im Internet tummelt, kann man nur zu dem Schluss kommen: Der Irrationalismus ist auf dem Vormarsch. Aber dieser erschreckende Vormarsch lässt sich nicht stoppen, indem die Wissenschaft selbst in einen ideologischen Tunnel fährt. Ganz gleich, wie überzeugt man von seiner Sache ist: Als Aktivist muss man in einer Demokratie bereit sein, für seine Überzeugung auf dem...

The compulsive types there correspond to the paranoids here. The wistful opposition to factual research, the legitimate consciousness that scientism forgets what is best, exacerbates through its naïvété the split from which it suffers. Instead of comprehending the facts, behind which others are barricaded, it hurriedly throws together whatever it can grab from them, rushing off to play so uncritically with apochryphal cognitions, with a couple isolated and hypostatized...

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Social science — a plaidoyer One of the most important tasks of social sciences is to explain the events, processes, and structures that take place and act in society. But the researcher cannot stop at this. As a consequence of the relations and connections that the researcher finds, a will and demand arise for critical reflection on the findings. To show that unemployment depends on rigid social institutions or adaptations to European economic aspirations...

With a few notable exceptions, such as the planetary systems, our most beautiful and exact applications of the laws of physics are all within the entirely artificial and precisely constrained environment of the modern laboratory … Haavelmo remarks that physicists are very clever. They confine their predictions to the outcomes of their experiments. They do not try to predict the course of a rock in the mountains and trace the development of the avalanche. It is only the crazy...