Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

What is meant by ‘rigour’ in evidence-based educational policy? The bad news is, first, that there is no reason in general to suppose that an ATE [Average Treatment Effect] observed in one population will hold in others. That is what the slogan widespread now in education and elsewhere registers: “Context matters”.  The issue in this paper is not though about when we can expect a study result to hold elsewhere but rather when we can have EBPP-style...

Sander Greenland on cognitive biases in science .[embedded content]

Nancy Cartwright’s Pufendorf lectures .[embedded content] 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.

The difference between logic and science 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 reason to enter on the sure path of science is, of course, much more difficult, since it has to...

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 ne se nourrit que de désaccords et d’incertitudes. Qu’est-ce que philosopher? C’est penser sans preuves, c’est penser plus loin qu’on ne sait, tout en se soumettant...

Properties of arguments — validity and soundness .[embedded content] 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 from (as long as, of...

What is this thing called Bayesianism? 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 of indifference. But where is such a list to come from? It might...

Explanation — not a question of simply adding nodes to a causal model 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 energy-initiated, exothermic...

The limits of DAG formalism 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 or to the marginal benefit of another practice. Education is...

When science goes wrong 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 — in short, (a) many published papers are clearly in error, which can often be...