Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

The logical fallacy that good science builds on In economics most models and theories build on a kind of argumentation pattern that looks like this: Premise 1: All Chicago economists believe in REH Premise 2: Robert Lucas is a Chicago economist —————————————————————– Conclusion: Robert Lucas believes in REH Among philosophers of science this is treated as an example of a logically valid deductive inference (and, following Quine, whenever logic is used in...

The best advice you will get this year Getting it right about the causal structure of a real system in front of us is often a matter of great importance. It is not appropriate to offer the authority of formalism over serious consideration of what are the best assumptions to make about the structure at hand … Where we don’t know, we don’t know. When we have to proceed with little information we should make the best evaluation we can for the case at hand —...

Observational studies vs. RCTs  [embedded content]

Probability calculus is no excuse for forgetfulness When we cannot accept that the observations, along the time-series available to us, are independent, or cannot by some device be divided into groups that can be treated as independent, we get into much deeper water. For we have then, in strict logic, no more than one observation, all of the separate items having to be taken together. For the analysis of that the probability calculus is useless; it does not...

The search for heavy balls in economics One of the limitations with economics is the restricted possibility to perform experiments, forcing it to mainly rely on observational studies for knowledge of real-world economies. But still — the idea of performing laboratory experiments holds a firm grip of our wish to discover (causal) relationships between economic ‘variables.’ If we only could isolate and manipulate variables in controlled environments, we would...

On analytical statistics and critical realism In this paper we began by describing the position of those critical realists who are sceptical about multi-variate statistics … Some underlying assumptions of this sceptical argument were shown to be false. Then a positive case in favour of using analytical statistics as part of a mixed-methods methodology was developed. An example of the interpretation of logistic regression was used to show that the...

Bayesianism — a dangerous superficiality The bias toward the superficial and the response to extraneous influences on research are both examples of real harm done in contemporary social science by a roughly Bayesian paradigm of statistical inference as the epitome of empirical argument. For instance the dominant attitude toward the sources of black-white differential in United States unemployment rates (routinely the rates are in a two to one ratio) is...

Postmodern mumbo jumbo soup The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the...

Friedman enters this scene arguing that all we need to do is predict successfully, that this can be done even without realistic theories, and that unrealistic theories are to be preferred to realistic ones, essentially because they can usually be more parsimonious. The first thing to note about this response is that Friedman is attempting to turn inevitable failure into a virtue. In the context of economic modelling, the need to produce formulations in terms of systems of...

Policy evaluation and the hazards to external validity As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog (e.g. here here here),  RCTs usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which many of its propagators portray it, cannot hide the fact that RCTs cannot be taken for granted to give generalizable results. That something works somewhere is no warranty for it to work for us or...