Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta 2012. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta 2012. Mostrar todas las entradas

24/3/13


U. Mäki, ed., Philosophy of Economics [Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 13], Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2012, 903 pp. 

Uskali Mäki’s latest edited collection, Philosophy of Economics, appears as the 13th volume in the Handbook of Philosophy of Science, an Elsevier series presented by its editors as “the most comprehensive review ever provided of the philosophy of science”. Three of the seventeen volumes are devoted to social disciplines: apart from economics there is another one for linguistics, and a joint volume for sociology and anthropology. As Mäki points out in his general introduction, economic methodology is closer today to “frontline philosophy of science” (p. xv) than ever before in its very short life as an independent field. This volume marks its coming of age, and it should be celebrated as such.
Reviewing a nearly 1000 pages volume in about 1000 words seems not easy, so let me try to grasp its significance through a comparison with its obvious predecessor The Handbook of Economic Methodology, co-edited by Mäki, John Davis and Wade Hands for Edward Elgar in 1998. This latter was based on short entries, while the 2012 volume consists of regular size papers. Rather than discussing the content of every one of them –and for the suspicious reader, yes, I spent my Christmas break going through it from cover to cover–, I will try to see what this book as a whole reveals about the philosophy of economics as it is cultivated today.
We should notice first that 12 of the 29 authors in the 2012 volume featured already in the previous installment and 9 of them write on almost the same topics: Mäki on realism, R. Backhouse on Lakatos, M. Morgan on models, K. Hoover on causality, H. Kincaid on economic explanation, W. Hands on the positive-normative dichotomy, C. W. Granger on economic forecasting, A. Spanos on econometrics and V. Vanberg on rational choice and rule following. As the reader may guess, most of these pieces take stock of decades of reflections on each topic and sometimes provide real primers on the author’s views. For example, Spanos’ 70 pages paper on “the philosophy of econometrics” is, in fact, an excellent introduction to the error-statistical approach with a final section on the title. Philip Mirowski’s “The Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in Economics” is a reconsideration of most Mirowskian themes (physics’ envy, computers and markets, etc.) from a new angle (what sort of philosophical approach to mathematics would do justice to its uses in economics). Some of these veterans present instead research conducted after the publication of that first Handbook: for example, John Davis on individuals in economics or Marcel Boumans on measurement.
There are topics in the 2012 volume that have grown beyond anyone’s expectations fifteen years ago. Alan Nelson’s 1998 entry on “Experimental economics” called for further methodological reflections on internal and external validity, now accomplished in Francesco Guala’s piece for the 2012 volume, drawing on a decade of his own work. Herbert Simon claimed in 1998 that “behavioural economics is not so much a specific body of economic theory as a critique of neoclassical economic theory and methodology”. But Erik Angner and George Loewenstein present it in their 2012 paper as a “bona fide subdiscipline of economics”. I could not find in the 1998 index a mention of the ultimatum game, for which there is a paper in 2012 by Cristina Bicchieri and Jiji Zhang (about the incorporation of norms of justice into decision models). Dan Hausman writes about the experimental testing of game theory, another virtually absent topic in the 1998 handbook. Summing up, the papers explicitly addressing experiments claim 133 of the 903 pages of the 2012 volume, whereas they barely add to 10 of the 572 pages in the previous installment.
Other topics have not changed so dramatically. Apart from experiments, it seems as if nothing is radically different in the philosophy of game theory (T. Grüne-Yanoff and A. Letihnen) and rational choice theory (P. Anand). The methodological debate on disciplines such as evolutionary economics, feminist economics and public choice is mostly the same if we judge it from the content of the papers by, respectively, Jack Vromen, Kristina Rolin and Hartmut Kliemt. The piece on the economics of science was programmatic in 1998, whereas now Jesús Zamora Bonilla provides a survey of actual contributions. Most results in judgment aggregation date from this last decade so the short (and helpful) introduction written by Christian List is a real novelty in this volume. Geographical economics is also a new topic, but not because the discipline is new but rather thanks to a philosopher (Caterina Marchionni) who has decided to tackle its methodology.
At this point, the reader might be wondering what has been left behind in economic methodology. The most significant loss is the history of economic thought: organized in short dictionary-like entries, in the 1998 volume there were many about particular economists; but in 2012 only Mirowski adopts a full-fledged historical approach. Is this is a sign of how the profession is evolving? Whereas many of the senior contributors had a separate career as historians (Backhouse, Hands, Hoover, Morgan, etc.), this is less common among their junior peers (Angner is probably the most significant exception). However, there is an increasing (but still far from consensual) advocacy for an integration of History and Philosophy of science among practitioners of this latest discipline (e.g., Hasok Chang). Given how prominent this integration has been during decades in the case of economics, I think a more explicit reflection on the virtues (or flaws) of doing philosophy in such close connection with history could have been useful.
The second, but minor, loss is Marxism. In the 1998 Index it was explicitly mentioned in about 30 pages. In 2012 it is just mentioned five times, all in the same paper. In it we find, I think, the more original contribution to this volume, as compared to its predecessor. Don Ross’ “Economic Theory, Anti-economics and Political Ideology”, classifies five principled objections against economics as a purely positive endeavor and proceeds to refute them. Ross argues that economists defending the efficiency of markets are not promoting partisan views, if their arguments are read literally or, if they do, they are not representative of the profession. “The economic attitude –he claims– is consistent with policies drawn from anywhere on the left-right spectrum that acknowledges scarcity as fundamental to political and social organization” (p. 280). Ross’ strategy is to subvert the popular understanding of economic theories drawing on a combination of conceptual analysis and historical acumen (an integrated HPS, after all?). The reader will find another take on the same approach in his other paper in this compilation, “The economic agent: Not Human, But Important”, where he defends his well-known thesis that economic agency reliably captures bug-like decision making, but still is useful to understand ours. In other words, economics is a perfectly positive science, provided you have the proper concept of what economics and science are. I was unable to find anyone so bold about it in the 1998 volume.
It is significant that both Don Ross and Harold Kincaid have two papers each in this volume (unlike every other contributor), totaling 130 pages. In a decade of joint work, they have renewed our understanding of the philosophy of the social sciences putting forward a variety of naturalism that combines their own versions of contextualism (Kincaid) and structural realism (Ross). Following the path of Uskali Mäki, Alex Rosenberg or Dan Hausman in the 1990s, they have addressed economics in connection with broader problems in philosophy of science –in this respect, I guess it would have been fair to include a chapter by/about Nancy Cartwright’s views, the other great contender in this league. This is probably the take home lesson of this volume for newcomers in the discipline: stay close to actual practice (e.g, experiments) and make your philosophical position as general as possible (as Kincaid and Ross have done).
But speaking of newcomers, I should say something about the audience of this volume. Namely, that I do not see very clearly who their readers are. Its size and price (165 EUR) make it clearly a reference work for libraries, but not every paper is suitable for just the curious reader or first year student: all of them are very good, but some are very long, some are narrow in their approach (or very personal) and few suggest the reader where to go next. In addition, I think that, as an intellectual community, we are about to exhaust the Handbook genre for pure lack of diversity (and I plead myself guilty since I have contributed to three similar volumes in the last five years). Ross and Kincaid have their fair share of Mäki’s compilation, but they have edited themselves two other Handbooks for Oxford, where they extensively present their views (and so do Mäki, Vromen, Guala and a few other authors of this volume). I also read Ross, Guala and Knuuttila in another Handbook co-edited by Zamora Bonilla for Sage. This is probably the Matthew effect, but I wonder if our university libraries will really benefit from acquiring all these collections every ten years. Perhaps we should invest more in new editorial formats (like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that perform more or less the same function in a more updated and accessible way. de
{December  2012}
{Journal of Economic Methodology, 21.1 (2014)  96-98 }

11/4/12

Catherine Will & Tiago Moreira, eds, Medical Proofs, Social Experiments. Clinical Trials in Shifting Contexts, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.

More than half a century ago now, physicians began to struggle with how to assess the efficacy of treatments. As the late Harry Marks documented at length, around the 1950s the two alternatives considered for making these assessments were the case-based judgment of individual experts and the results of randomized clinical trials (RCTs). However, after only a few decades, the RCT reached the apex of the hierarchy of clinical evidence, where it remains despite the objections of a number of dissenting doctors, philosophers and sociologists. The compilation edited by Catherine Will and Tiago Moreira brings us a selection of the most recent sociological literature on medical experiments. It is interesting to note that, as the editors themselves present it, this book constitutes a vindication of case-based reasoning against the purported generality of RCTs. In these latter, we assume that we are dealing with a representative sample of patients and a standardized treatment protocol, allowing us to generalize our conclusions beyond the trial. The case studies compiled in this book question the possibility of such generalization: as the editors conclude, information about how clinical trials are organized and carried out goes beyond reporting of methods and is crucial for critical interpretation of evidence. This information should be compiled precisely through case studies, bridging the gap between the agents defined in the research protocol and the communities and contexts where these protocols are implemented.

Unlike other edited collections of case studies, this one aims at constructing a systematic argument. In this respect, Will and Moreira have done a wonderful editorial job, making explicit the threads between the different chapters in their introduction and conclusion and in short prefaces to each of the three parts into which they divide their compilation. In part I, “The Practices of Research,” three case studies, by Stefan Timmermans, Ben Heaven and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, analyze how researchers struggle with trial protocols, either adapting them to their own goals, resisting them if they conflict with these latter or supplementing the protocols with their own ad hoc methods in order to assure that trials are completed. The editors present their own papers in part II, “Framing Collective Interpretation”. Both deal with the appraisal of trial results by third parties: the medical profession through their specialized journals and the State (the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence). In part III, “Testing the Limits for Policy,” three more papers discuss the use of trials for policy-making purposes. Again, the analyses focus on the role of contexts in policy-oriented trials: the adverse consequences of bracketing contextual information (briefly discussed by Trudy Dehue regarding depression) or the virtues of making the most of it in the trial (Ann Kelly and Alex Faulkner).

This quick summary is obviously guilty of saying very little about the actual the content of the papers. If we list them according to the interventions examined, we find a trial on the use of antidepressants (bupropion) against methamphetamine dependency (Timmermans), a comparison of two lifestyle interventions with medication against a common, chronic condition (Heaven), the controversy on the rosuvastatin trials (Will), the NICE cost-utility analysis of dementia drugs (Moreira), two hybrid trials of an arthritis screening program and of mesh screens against malaria (Kelly), and a recent British prostate cancer detection program (Faulkner).

The general point the editors are trying to make is that the conduct of clinical trials and the interpretation of their results depend not only on their research protocol, but on the intentions of the many agents who, one way or another, are involved in the process. Generalizing the results of a trial beyond their “context of discovery” is something that we can only decide on case by case basis. Indeed, from what they hint in the conclusion (e.g., p. 158), the editors would rather advocate redesigning regulatory trials so that their different stakeholders could have their say.

Emphasizing the ultimate context dependence of RCTs is a point worth making against those philosophers (or perhaps statisticians) who allow no epistemic role for such contextual dependencies of RCTs. But do the contextual dependencies discussed in this volume actually interfere with our ability to identify treatments that are efficacious for the general population? Do we have less reliable trials as a result of these out-of-the protocol interventions, and should the medical community consider alternatives to the RCT ?

Unfortunately, none of the papers in this collection addresses this crucial problem. The one that comes closest is Helgesson’s analysis the practices of out-of-protocol data cleaning in large Swedish RCTs. Helgesson tracks the ways in which data are informally recorded and corrected without leaving a trace in the trial’s logbook, from post-it notes to guesses about the misspelling of an entry. In his view, the trial participants who make such corrections do them in good faith in order to increase the credibility of their results. However, Helgesson explicitly refuses to discuss what sort of errors may be thus introduced in the data, as if “any idiosyncratic shaping of data should be understood as producing biased data and biased results” (p. 52) and we therefore cannot draw any conclusions about the impact of such errors on the interpretation of the study. But psychologists have documented at length how the credibility these practitioners seek is directly connected with confirmation biases, despite Helgesson’s contention: we all tend to accept more easily information that confirms our prior beliefs than disconfirming data. Confirmation biases have been documented in scientific laboratories, for instance, by Kevin Dunbar and his team at Toronto, who have shown as well that experimenters rely on bias-correction procedures from which the reliability of the data stems.

Are these informal practices of data recording and correction threatening the goals of trials as safety and efficacy tests? We know that RCTs do not provide full information about the effects of a drug, as the statistics on adverse effects reported to the FDA show. But, at the same time, regulatory clinical trials have so far been reasonably good at screening off the pharmaceutical markets from toxic and ineffective compounds. If trials were conducted to learn as much as we could about new treatments, perhaps the sort of contextual information provided in these case studies would help. In her chapter, Ann Kelly shows, for instance, how the self-selection of participants in a trial may turn out to be a good thing if the information gathered about this particular group of patients shows how to best implement a medical intervention. However, most RCTs are conducted just to prove certain effects to a skeptical audience (the regulatory agencies). Given RCTs track record of efficacy for regulatory purposes, how would an ethnography of the trial, or any reform of the type we saw Will and Moreira advocate, help the regulator in making his decision? Will it improve our current standards of safety and efficacy? Would it just make the trials more credible to the public?

At any rate, if case studies are to play a role in this re-shaped regulatory process, we ought to require from them the same warrants of impartiality we require from RCTs. A number of well-documented biases interfere in the conduct of trials and we try, at least, to prevent them with devices such as blinding and randomization. If a case study on the conduct of a trial should be taken into account by the regulator, by way of background information, how does this latter know that the report is not biased? Sociologists and anthropologists are presumably as vulnerable to biases as any other researcher involved in a trial, and the case-study should incorporate methodological caveats preventing partiality. Will and Moreira do not mention any such safeguards in their conclusions, but if their proposal ever succeeds, I am sure this is a problem they will have to address.

{December 2011}
{Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33.5 (2012)}

10/7/11

Ángel Díaz de Rada, Cultura, antropología y otras tonterías, Trotta, Madrid

Durante años la divulgación científica más exitosa fue cosa de científicos naturales (principalmente físicos, a los que gradualmente se sumaron biólogos). Sólo en la última década los científicos sociales comenzaron a competir en popularidad como divulgadores gracias, sobre todo, a economistas y psicólogos (pensemos en Freakonomics o Stumbling on Happiness). Cabe sospechar que buena parte de su éxito se debe a cómo confirman o contradicen con sus datos algunas de nuestras intuiciones (o prejuicios) más arraigadas: por ejemplo, la de que somos capaces de anticipar nuestra felicidad futura (nos equivocamos sistemáticamente, según Gilbert). Sea explotando bases de datos con técnicas estadísticas o mediante experimentos (en el laboratorio o fuera de él), la evidencia que los científicos sociales están reuniendo sobre los fenómenos más diversos es digna de interés. Menos interesantes resultan las teorías de las que se sirven para explicarlos: la evidencia disponible ilustra más bien regularidades de carácter principalmente local, pero las ciencias sociales siguen sin leyes de aplicación general comparables a las de la física o la biología.

Ángel Díaz de Rada inaugura, creo, el género de la divulgación antropológica en nuestro país rebelándose contra estas convenciones literarias: Cultura, antropología y otras tonterías no pretende excitar nuestra curiosidad con la evidencia acumulada en trabajos de campo, sino aclarar la confusión reinante sobre el concepto de cultura. El libro se articula sobre una revisión de las principales teorías antropológicas sobre la cultura, a las que el autor opone su propia concepción, ilustrada de un modo decididamente coloquial. Díaz de Rada habla en primera persona y tutea al lector, recurriendo a ejemplos extraídos de la vida cotidiana con propósitos puramente didácticos. Díaz de Rada pretende convencerle de que su concepto de cultura es intelectualmente plausible y no se presta a usos políticos indeseables. Nuestro autor es un decidido adversario de las concepciones espiritualistas y esencialistas de la cultura, tanto en sus versiones académicas (entre antropólogos) como mundanas (entre nacionalistas, por ejemplo). El libro es abiertamente polémico: Díaz de Rada expone su propio concepto comparándolo críticamente con los de antropólogos clásicos y contemporáneos y aborda sus implicaciones prácticas (multiculturalismo o relativismo) sin temor a la controversia.

En su acepción más básica, la cultura sería, para Díaz de Rada, “el conjunto de reglas con cuyo uso las personas dan forma a su acción social”. Estas reglas no son primariamente enunciados verbales abstractos (“Hay que hacer...”), sino que se manifiestan corporalmente en la regularidad de nuestras acciones. Al describir tales reglas de un modo abstracto se pone en evidencia, en cambio, su carácter indeterminado: deben ser interpretadas contextualmente y, por tanto, no se prestan a un análisis causal de la acción. De ese juego de interpretaciones, que es parte de la propia interacción cultural, emerge la antropología como análisis sistemático de la conexión entre reglas. El principio que preside este análisis es el holismo: no es posible separar categorialmente unas reglas de otras, ya que el juego de interpretaciones puede conectar, potencialmente, cualquiera de ellas.

Para Díaz de Rada, las reglas son convenciones que van siendo reformuladas a medida que los sujetos les dan uso. De ahí su nominalismo sobre la cultura: el antropólogo sólo puede referirse a interpretaciones puntuales de cada una de sus reglas, señalando su aquí y ahora. Reificarlas, pretendiendo que una interpretación particular constituye la cultura de un grupo, es, ante todo, un error metodológico. Se trata, de hecho, del primero de los muchos errores que el autor denuncia en la parte final del libro: no puede haber gente sin cultura; no hace falta la escuela para “tener” cultura; la diversidad cultural no se reduce a diversidad lingüística; la cultura es una propiedad de cualquier forma de acción social (y no de una clase particular de ellas); la cultura no es tampoco propiedad distintiva de un individuo ni de un grupo de ellos.

Los capítulos finales abordan sin ambigüedad alguna los aspectos más declaradamente políticos del concepto: el multiculturalismo o el relativismo ya citados, por ejemplo. Como el lector podrá ya imaginarse, Díaz de Rada es abiertamente crítico con los usos reificadores (por ejemplo, en “Ministerio de Cultura”) y responsabiliza de ellos principalmente a nuestros prejuicios, sean etnocéntricos o puramente narcisistas. Al fin y al cabo, buena parte de lo que se denuncia en este libro es que nos servimos del concepto de cultura de un modo parcial e interesado, normalmente el que nos resulta de mayor conveniencia. Y de ahí la originalidad de este libro como empresa divulgativa: si triunfase entre el público y adoptase su propuesta, podríamos empezar a hablar de la cultura en un sentido menos confuso y algo más neutral.

Aun simpatizando con todas las consecuencias prácticas que Díaz de Rada extrae de su concepto, este lector es más bien escéptico respecto a su propósito de persuadirnos de que es mejor no renunciar al concepto de cultura. No es, desde luego, porque su propia versión no resulte intelectualmente atractiva: a mí al menos me lo parece, digamos que por afinidad filosófica. Pero uno esperaría algo más de una ciencia social: los economistas, por ejemplo, ven mercados por todas partes, pero si aceptamos este concepto no es por lo precisa que resulte su definición, sino por el tipo de análisis que posibilita. Un viejo debate entre científicos sociales enfrenta a quienes defienden un uso instrumentalista de sus modelos y teorías en contra de quienes defienden que el realismo es necesario. Los primeros dirían que no importa tanto qué sea la cultura, sino qué podemos sacar de nuestro trabajo de campo con uno u otro concepto. Para los realistas, en cambio, es necesario que nuestros conceptos se refieran adecuadamente a las cosas como condición indispensable para su análisis. Pese a su nominalismo, Díaz de Rada parece alinearse con estos segundos pero, leyendo su libro, se diría que los antropólogos pueden realizar su trabajo incluso sin ponerse de acuerdo sobre la definición de cultura. Da la impresión de que uno no hará mejor o peor antropología según cuál sea su concepto de cultura. Posiblemente, Ángel Díaz de Rada no lo crea así, pero su libro no se detiene en argumentarlo.

Soy igualmente escéptico respecto a su propuesta de reformar nuestros usos cotidianos del concepto, por distintas razones. Por un lado, creo que se necesitaría una fuerza policial desproporcionada para lograrlo: los teólogos llevan siglos dictándoles a los católicos cómo debe rezarse el credo, pero se necesita toda una Iglesia para lograrlo. Cuando la disciplina es simplemente educativa, ni los físicos aciertan a reformar nuestro entendimiento: aunque un estudiante domine la teoría de la relatividad, los psicólogos han puestos de manifiesto cómo, en su vida diaria, ese mismo estudiante razonará sobre física igual que un griego de hace dos mil años. ¿Bastaría con formarnos adecuadamente en antropología para escapar a la confusión cultural?

No obstante, ya que inevitablemente estamos sumidos en ella, el lector ilustrado hará bien en leer este ensayo de Díaz de Rada para, si no escapar a la confusión, sí al menos no abandonarse completamente a ella. Como su autor bien nos advierte, las consecuencias cuando uno se deja llevar por algunos conceptos de cultura suelen ser indeseables.