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24/2/24

 


Completing the landscape on models and scientific representation
 

Roman Frigg: Models and theories: a philosophical inquiry. London:Routledge, 2022, 495 pp, 

Open access at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781844654918

“What are theories? What are models? And how do models and theories relate to each other? These are the core questions that this book is concerned with” (1). These expansive questions predictably give rise to a monumental 500-page monograph that Roman Frigg presents as, at once, an introduction, a literature review, and a critical assessment (1). On all these tasks, the book works very well. Unlike standard textbooks, Frigg does not indulge in didactic simplification: he smoothly walks the reader from the elementary concepts to the upper echelons of the question under analysis.  Having been an active participant or direct witness of two decades of debates on the title topics, Frigg’s scholarship and insight are often extraordinary. And so is the organization of the material presented. In a time where books are often collected papers in disguise, here discussions are systematically developed through the book’s four parts until each of the running threads is exhausted. Yet, the number of cross-references and signposts makes it almost impossible for the reader to get lost.

Reviewing this book requires hard choices. I will mainly focus on the first two parts in which Frigg presents his original view of the old masters’ views in our discipline, from Carnap to Suppe, hoping it will be less known to the average reader than the content of parts three and four. In them, Frigg discusses the last forty years of work on models and scientific representation, completing the landscape that he had already presented in his previous volumes. 

The first part of the book introduces the Linguistic View of Theories: “a scientific theory is a description of its subject matter in a formal language” (5). Frigg’s first move is to separate the Linguistic from the traditional Received View (RV) to make his initial claim: the latter may have fallen, but the former lives on.  Both are based on three principles, and the first two are reasonably similar between the two views: 1) “The language in which the theory is formulated has a logical structure that allows scientists to derive propositions from other propositions and to formulate proofs of theorems,” and 2) “A theory contains general principles, or axioms, which are the theory’s laws” (18). The difference lies in the third principle: 3) whereas for the linguistic view, in the language of the theory there are pre-theoretical terms and technical terms that arise within the theory, in the Received View, the terms are either logical or extra-logical and the latter are further divided into theoretical and observational.

Frigg rehearses, in Chapter 1, some standard objections against the RV, showing that most of them are based “either on misattributions, misunderstandings, or on hasty conclusions” (25). The real problems for the linguistic view appear in the following three chapters, and they are addressed in an equally constructive way. In Chapter 2, Frigg presents the role of models in the RV as alternative interpretations of a theory’s formalism, i.e., as logical models without any representational role. A consequence of the denial that models play a representation role is that according to RV a theory is connected to the world only by the observation terms and correspondence rules. A persistent strand of argumentation is that the limiting results in first-order logic, notably Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem and the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, show such an analysis to be untenable. But, Frigg observes, these arguments are not conclusive, and they would only be a problem if the RV was inextricably tied to first-order logic, a claim for which he finds no evidence.

The challenge discussed in Chapter 3 is whether the distinction between theoretical and observation terms is tenable, to what extent observations are theory-laden, and how the relation between observation and data should be understood. Frigg concludes that the distinction between observation terms and theoretical terms should be given up and replaced by a dichotomy between antecedently understood and new terms, where the latter might be analysed in terms of Balzer, Moulines and Sneed’s notion of the T-theoreticity. This leaves the question of how data models fit into a linguistic view of theories. According to Frigg, the linguistic view is not reductive in this regard: scientific data should not be reduced to sentences to understand their epistemic input on a theory, data models can also do the job. 

Chapter 4 is about the semantics of theoretical terms, and how to define them. Although the review of the alternatives under discussion is significantly longer than in any other chapter—starting with verificationism ending with the causal theory of reference—Frigg takes no sides here. “This is still an active field of research” (140) is the chapter’s bottom line. Probably he does not need to take sides: of the three principles defining the RV, he just needs the first two, pertaining to the logical structure of theories and the presence of axioms, to assert the viability of the Linguistic View.  

The next step is to show the compatibility of the Linguistic View with the Model-Theoretical View (MTV), in which a scientific theory is mainly a family of models. Frigg had already warned his readers, in the first part of the book, that his “liberal” version of the RV is “in fact indistinguishable from a liberal” MTV: for both, the analysis of theories should be formal; in the liberal RV a theory would be “a language with a family of models”; in the liberal MTV a theory would be a family of models with a language. Here is another foundational claim of the book: “The consensus then is that any reasonable analysis of a theory must be a dual view” (167). 

The second part shows how far this consensus goes. Chapters 5 to 7 deal with the mainstream version of the MTV, in which models are mathematical structures.  Chapter 5 presents Suppe’s foundational ideas, lists the main developments of this view, and considers how the MTV solves the problems discussed in Part 1. New problems, of course, appear—-e.g., do models constitute or represent a theory? Crucially, Frigg presents here his case for having language as a key ingredient of the MTV. 

In Chapter 6, he hammers this point in a thorough discussion of the representational role of models in the MTV, in which Frigg draws on his previous work on scientific representation to map the territory with several adequacy conditions and reference problems. Two contending approaches are considered: the Data Matching Account and the Morphism Account. In the former, “a model M is a scientific representation of target T iff a measurement performed on T yields data model D and D is isomorphic to M’s empirical substructure” (212).  Siding with Bogen and Woodward, Frigg quickly discards it, arguing that the theories represent phenomena, not data models. In the Morphism account, “M is a scientific representation of T iff M is isomorphic to T” (201). The first problem here is in specifying in what sense the objects in the target system are a structure isomorphic to a set-theoretic M. And then Frigg proceeds to show in detail how morphism accounts are ill-equipped to deal with some desiderata that any view of scientific representation should meet. 

Chapter 7 explores the links between models belonging to the same theory in the light of the Munich structuralist school, Balzer, Moulines, and Sneed. The distinctions introduced in this account to deal with the different models within a theory successfully illuminate problems like theory-ladeness. But the Munich school does not have a solution for the problems so far detected in other structuralist accounts.
Chapter 8 completes this second part examining Giere’s and Suppe’s non-structuralist accounts of the MTV. Although the key ingredients are now models conceived as abstract entities representing the world through similarities, these accounts equally fail to meet Frigg’s desiderata for scientific representation, for the same underlying reason: language also plays an essential, but unexamined role in these alternative versions of the MTV.  

We are now halfway through the book. The lesson that emerges clearly from the discussion is that “purist” versions of either the linguistic or the model theoretical view are untenable. As Frigg puts it in the Envoi: “Any tenable account will have to see theories as consisting of both linguistic and non-linguistic elements” (490). This means that a defensible analysis of theories must be a dual view. Frigg’s discussion at this point remains programmatic. He sketches the main outlines of a dual view, but he leaves the task of working out the details of such a view to future research.  

In the third and the fourth part, we are treated to an in-depth exploration of twenty-five more years of controversies on scientific representation. Unlike the previous two parts, there will be no unifying threads like the RV or the MTV: the focus is now on models in scientific practice, without any overarching program of rational reconstruction. 

Each chapter in Part 3 deals with open questions about how models represent. In Chapter 9, we find several contenders for the very notion of scientific representation: namely, direct representation, inferentialism, and representation-as approaches. The next three chapters present critical discussions of specific kinds of representation via models: analogy in Chapter 10, abstraction and approximation in Chapter 11, and idealisation in Chapter 12. Whereas Chapter 9 closes with an overview of Frigg’s own DEKI account (where the acronym stands for denotation, exemplification, keying up, and imputation), on which he has extensively published elsewhere, the other chapters in this third part are critical assessments of the state of the art in the respective subject areas.

In Part 4, the author really struggles not to be carried away by casuistry and find philosophical threads connecting an immense and disperse literature. The opening thirteenth chapter engages in a mostly case-based debate on the autonomy of models from theories. Frigg provides a reasonably representative sample of how this autonomy has been analysed in the models in scientific practice literature. We also find a very nice overview of the debate between some leading authors in this approach and their counterparts in the MTV on whether the latter’s account of models captures the diversity of scientific practice—Frigg doubts it. The three final chapters are also opinionated. In Chapter 14, discussing the ontology of models, Frigg sets some desiderata and defends his own Waltonian fictional account, in line with DEKI. Chapter 15 deals with some philosophical dilemmas arising from the proliferation of models, exploring, for example, how robustness analysis exploits it for good or how perspectivism makes sense of the variety. These are ongoing debates, and the challenges Frigg proposes for the latter view are, in my view, worth considering. The last chapter, Chapter 16, contains an original classification of model types that I will just quote, for the sake of brevity: “1) Model types pertaining to model-target relations; 2) Model types pertaining to carriers; 3) Model types pertaining to the process of model construction and to models’ relation to theory; 4) Model types pertaining to the uses and functions of models in the scientific process” (467–468).  

What is the moral that the reader should draw from this second half of the book? In the final “Envoi”, Frigg is at once short and ambitious: “The next step in a discussion of representation will be to get to a better understanding of particular representation relations and the styles to which they belong, as well as to integrate an account of how models represent into a broader understanding of the structure of theories” (490). In other words, merge the main threads of this book into a unified view. Frigg has masterfully laid out the foundations of this project for any newcomer in the discipline, like Suppe did with his own volume in the 1970s. We can only hope it will orient future debates with similar success.

{January, 2024} {Metascience}


2/6/21



Adolfo García de la Sienra.  A Structuralist Theory of Economics. London/New York: Routledge (INEM Advances in Economic Methodology), 2019. XII+222 pp.  

Adolfo García de la Sienra is one of the most prominent philosophers of economics in the Spanish-speaking world. He has held a meeting of the International Network for Economic Method in Xalapa and actively participates in the Sociedad Iberoamericana de Metodología Económica. Thanks to García de la Sienra, the structuralist approach to economics is now mature, with a full-fledged analysis of some of the most significant varieties of economic theorizing in the 20th century. This analysis is now thoroughly presented in A Structuralist Theory of Economics, where we also find García de la Sienra’s own take on the structuralist programme, connecting it with its Suppesian roots.
 
The first half of the book is an introduction to the pillars of the structuralist approach. In Chapter 1 we find the Suppes informal structural view, articulated on set-theoretical predicates and data structures, in which the key epistemic notion is the observational adequation between the two. Chapter 2 presents the concept of structure, drawing on the seminal work of Sneed and his school, on the one hand, and Da Costa and Chuaqui, on the other. Structures are informally defined as “a list of sets together with relations built over such sets” (p. 30). García de la Sienra then formalizes this intuition using types, to classify power sets, and a modified version of the Ackermann-Müller theory of classes. He is then ready to define set-theoretical predicates rich enough to capture the complexity of actual scientific theories. This is illustrated, in Chapter 3, with an analysis of classical particle mechanics, followed by a short but effective introduction to the key elements in the Sneedian structuralist view of theories (theory core, theory element, and theory nets).
 
García de la Sienra closes the first half of the book with two additional chapters on idealization and concretization (ch. 4) and measurement (ch. 5). In the former, García de la Sienra answers some regular objections against the ability of the structuralist view to grasp empirical phenomena. For García de la Sienra, scientific theories reach this grasp through the interplay of four items: there are, on the one hand, set-theoretical structures (intended applications, models of data) representing reality, but there are also, on the other hand, model systems (conjunctions of predicates expressing idealizations, in the sense of Mäki and Portides) and the real concrete systems that the former represent. This same dialectic between set-theoretical structures and its empirical targets reappears in chapter 5 with the distinction between metrization and measurement. For García de la Sienra, metrization occurs when an empirical property is proven mensurable, according to a given unit of measurement. The representational theory of measurement establishes the set-theoretical conditions under which such property is metrizable, independently of how it is actually measured.
 
This fifth chapter starts the transition from general philosophy of science to the philosophy of economics. In order to illustrate how metrization is achieved independently of the representational theory of measurement, García de la Sienra briefly discusses two classical 20th century controversies: the measurement of demand functions and the measurement theory debate. Chapter 6 establishes the target of any economic theory, the general concept of an economy, a structure covering four basic activities: production, distribution, exchange and consumption.
 
Chapter 7 covers preferences and utility where we find one of the author’s main conceptual achievements. For a structuralist, a preference relation may be idealized, but it is nonetheless empirical, and its content should be represented by a (theoretical) utility function. The problem is that in standard microeconomic theory, utility functions are continuously differentiable, a pre-requirement for the topological analysis of economic equilibrium. But what would be the empirical counterpart of differentiability in a preference relation? García de la Sienra suggests that differentiability captures a way in which the agent’s tastes are stable in the vicinity of any consumption menu. Capturing this apparently simple intuition requires a long mathematical digression showing the correspondence between algebraic and geometric difference structures, and then between the latter and preference structures. Against instrumentalist or positivist interpretations of utility theory, where its mathematical apparatus would not require any empirical justification provided it delivered empirically successful predictions, García de la Sienra vindicates a realist account in which every empirically meaningful element of a preference relation would be represented by the corresponding utility function.
 
No less original is the analysis of game theory in chapter 8. Focusing on dynamic games, García de la Sienra provides an axiomatic formulation from which the theory-element of neoclassical economics will emerge as a specialization. Its empirical content is captured as follows. On the one hand, García de la Sienra shows that behavioural strategies “determine a probability measure over the space of all possible histories of the game”, making some trajectories more probable than others -those that maximize the expected utility of the agent.  The empirical behaviour of economic agents generates a histogram over the same space. According to the author, the fundamental law of game theory states that such empirical distribution must approximate the probability measure -i.e., agents behave strategically and the empirical distribution approximates an equilibrium of the game.
 
In chapter 9 García de la Sienra solves the main conceptual problems that have ravaged the labor theory of value. He provides a general definition of abstract labor and a representational measurement of the same. He then shows that a uniform profit induces abstract labor, and finally he proves that a given determination of abstract labor induces a system of prices which is unique up to similarity transformations. In chapter 10, the author recasts classical economics fusing the labor theory of value with “neoclassical” economics, proving the existence of an equilibrium in which the prices are induced by labor value, they clear the markets, and all the agents maximize utility.
 
In chapter 11, he reconstructs, in the same vein, with Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. And to close the book, and his sweeping survey of economics, García de la Sienra tackles econometrics building up on Aris Spanos’ analysis of the connection between probability theory and data generation processes via model specification. And then the book ends up abruptly, without a conclusions chapter.  
 
As the reader may have already guessed, this is quite an impressive monograph for many different reasons. First, breadth and scope: A structuralist theory of economics is both a primer in some central themes in philosophy of science plus a broad introduction to economic theories, covering on equal grounds neoclassical and Marxist approaches. Although this is an exercise in formal philosophy of science, García de la Sienra makes the philosophical message clear at every step and, as conveyed -I hope- in the summary above, there are plenty of insightful intuitions. There are also some perplexities, let me just comment on a salient one.
 
Like many others, I have the impression that structuralist approach is perhaps too powerful, since it can reconstruct formally almost every articulated doctrine with a minimal amount of empirical content. Treating neoclassical and Marxist approaches on equal grounds shows, in my view, this sheer excess of power. Most practitioners and methodologists of economics would see these two approaches in open contradiction: García de la Sienra shows, with his reconstruction, that this is clearly not the case. Except that his reconstruction becomes something more than meta-theory: García del Sienra is actively picking up those threads in economics that will fit better with the structuralist template. This may be a legitimate strategy. After all, Suppes and his school tried to capture the distinguishing traits of the most successful scientific theories. If economics wants to achieve the same success, we should better focus on the structures it shares with other scientific disciplines.
 
Here comes the second perplexity: García de la Sienra’s analysis stops every time at the same point: the identification of the empirical claim of the theories reconstructed. He says very little about the truth of these empirical claims, despite decades of debate on whether economics succeeds at grasping the truth about the phenomena under analysis. But the reason for this, as he told me personally, is that whether a theory is successful in some applications is an entirely empirical matter. I hope the discussion of this empirical matter will provide a good enough reason for García de la Sienra to keep writing on economics.

{April, 2020}


27/8/16

Gustavo Bueno (1924-2016), el gran clasificador

“Crítica es clasificación”, decía Gustavo Bueno, el gran clasificador. Abra cualquiera de sus obras y lo más probable es que se encuentre una “teoría de teorías”, en la que sus propias ideas se oponen sistemáticamente a cualquier alternativa. Sólo un genio de la clasificación puede permitirse desafiar así las intuiciones de sus lectores. Bueno era materialista, pero, a diferencia de los materialistas vulgares, defendía la realidad de las ideas (un “género de materialidad”). El de Bueno era un ateísmo católico, en el que la tradición escolástica contaba tanto como la filosofía moderna (y bastante más que la contemporánea). A Bueno algunos le conocieron como falangista (en los 1940) y otros como marxista (en los 1970). De cualquier proyecto político a él le interesaba su implantación efectiva, y la universalidad de su alcance. Lo mejor: un Imperio. “De no ser por la Iglesia católica, el cristianismo habría sido una secta judía más”, decía. Caídas la Alemania nazi y la URSS, Bueno se las ingenió para argumentar que, en el siglo XXI, España es lo más parecido a un proyecto imperial que les quedaba a los filósofos sistemáticos-materialistas-ateos-católicos.

Nuestro gran clasificador era, por supuesto, inclasificable. Nadie se atrevió a mezclar tantas ideas como Bueno a propósito de tantos temas como tocó en su extensísima obra. Él se presentaba como un “compositor” en un medio académico de “intérpretes y arreglistas”, como el español. Suya fue la reivindicación de la Symploké ontológica (“No todo está relacionado con todo”), el cierre categorial (la verdad de la ciencia no es la correspondencia entre teoría y mundo: es una forma de organización del propio mundo a través de las operaciones del científico), el animal divino (el terror prehistórico ante el animal sin domesticar es el origen del sentimiento religioso), y un largo etc. Aunque Bueno no fue nunca demasiado cuidadoso al citar sus fuentes, muchos lectores adivinaban de dónde bebía. Pero eso no disminuye su mérito componiendo: ni en su generación ni en las siguientes encontramos semejante fusión de estructuralismo y escolástica, análisis lógico y fenomenología. Pretendiendo ser, todo el tiempo, más consistente que cualquiera de sus interlocutores, pues para eso –decía– sirve un sistema.

“Pensar es pensar contra alguien”, sostenía una y otra vez Bueno. Contra el propio Bueno, sin embargo, no ha pensado todavía nadie. Como sucede en cualquier escuela, los estudiosos de su materialismo filosófico suelen ser más arreglistas e intérpretes que compositores. Fuera de su escuela, nadie se ha tomado la molestia por ahora. Lo cual no dice mucho de sus méritos intelectuales. Así somos en España: ¿quién piensa hoy contra Zubiri, García Bacca, Amor Ruibal o García Calvo? Dice bastante, en cambio, de su implantación mundana. Como demuestran los obituarios publicados estos días, Bueno fue muy generoso con quienes se interesaban por su obra. Pero tenía también un talento enorme para excluirlos, si se distraían. Como a menudo le oí repetir a su hijo Gustavo, gestor de tantas de sus empresas académicas, al final “vale quien sirve”. Tan divertido como hiriente en el insulto, arbitrario en sus decisiones, atrabiliario en sus formas, muchos de sus colegas dejaron de tratar a Bueno (y de leerle) simplemente para evitarse disgustos. Yo entre ellos: duré dos números en el consejo editorial de su revista (El Basilisco), sin haber pedido ni entrar ni salir. “No se enfade usted, señor Bueno”, le rogaba el presentador en una de sus incendiarias intervenciones televisivas. “No me haga usted enfadar, que es muy distinto”, le respondía él, airado.

Gustavo Bueno podía enfadarse fácilmente y mucho. Lo cual, de nuevo, no prejuzga nada sobre el valor de sus ideas. El suyo no ha sido el único carácter difícil de la Historia de la filosofía y sus vaivenes políticos no son mayores que los de otras ilustres luminarias del XX. Bueno se quejaba de que él leía a todos sus colegas, pero ninguno le correspondía. Quizá les intimidase intelectualmente. Quizá temiesen su reacción si se atrevían a opinar. O quizá, simplemente, les aburriese. De lo que no se daba cuenta era de que no le pasaba sólo a él. Javier Muguerza, paradigma de la cortesía académica, decía a menudo eso de que “de los libros de los amigos no sólo hay que hablar bien; hay que leerlos”. Yo leí mucho a Bueno cuando era estudiante y sus tesis me parecieron siempre más interesantes que los de cualquier otro de sus coetáneos españoles, aunque sólo sea por menos aburridas/predecibles. Para una generación como la mía, que habla inglés y accede a Internet antes de salir de la Facultad, resultó fácil encontrar por ahí versiones mejores de casi cualquier argumento escrito en español en los últimos cincuenta años. Por una parte, porque somos muchos ya los filósofos de lengua española que usamos directamente el inglés para publicar. Por otro, porque al inglés se traduce más filosofía que a cualquier otra lengua. Entre todo lo que yo he leído, Bueno destacó siempre por la originalidad de sus argumentos.

Pero la originalidad no es todo lo que se debería buscar en un filósofo. Cualquier idea de las que interesaron a Bueno, y en particular todas las que se refieren a las ciencias, están discutidas con infinitamente más información y detalle en el mundo filosófico anglosajón. Tanta información y detalle que difícilmente darán lugar a un sistema tan ambicioso como el que pretendió construir Bueno. Aquí está el reto para su materialismo filosófico: ¿habrá entre sus discípulos algún otro compositor que acierte a ponerlo al día y obtener el eco académico que no obtuvo su fundador? ¿O como en tantos palacios de la antigüedad, los lectores de Bueno irán arrancando piezas de su sistema para levantar sus propios argumentos, ajenos ya a la composición original?

"El universo mudanza, la vida firmeza”, decía Bueno con los estoicos. Quizá algún día una biografía intelectual nos descubra cuánto cambió realmente Bueno en sus seis décadas de escritura académica. Hoy sólo podemos admirarnos de su fecundidad filosófica y recordar los buenos ratos que (a algunos) nos ha hecho pasar con sus diatribas. Si estáis contentos, aplaudid al actor.

{Contextos, agosto de 2016}

13/8/16



David Spiegelhalter, Sex by numbers, London, Profile books, 2015

For many, sex is more about quality than quantity, so David Spiegelhalter’s Sex by numbers may put off many potential readers.  Yet, in sex quantity seems to have a certain quality of its own –or so it claims Brooke Magnanti, invoking the intellectual authority of Stalin. This book has indeed a quality of its own: accuracy. Our folk understanding of sex is full of made up numbers to which we inadvertently stick without further reflection. Checking them out is more complicated that it seems: there are competing sources and we need a certain degree of statistical (and methodological) literacy to assess them properly. Hence, we can only be grateful to have Spiegelhalter, a world-leading statistician, spelling out for us what we really know about the numbers of sex in a clear and accessible manner.

Spiegelhalter is a Bayesian: for him, probabilities measure how strong our beliefs about random events are. This is a technicality that readers may safely ignore, but it explains why the book starts with a credibility ranking of the available figures about sex: numbers we can believe, numbers that are reasonably accurate, numbers that could be out by quite a long way, numbers that are unreliable, and numbers that have just been made up. Evidence in the two first categories will improve our statistical understanding of sex, whereas the remaining three scores will probably mislead us.

Ranking evidence depends crucially on its sources and half of this book is about how social research on sexuality can be properly carried out. Spiegelhalter's paradigm for reliable data is the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3, 2010-2012). This is based on a random sample of face-to-face interviews funded by a private charity, the Wellcome trust -incidentally, the same trust commissioning this book. Spigelhalter spends time discussing the methodology and comparative reliability of his many sources (devoting an entire appendix to Natsal methods) and the crucial choices on which they all depend (e.g., what counts as a sexual partner). He also uses Natsal data in the first few chapters to introduce a number of handy statistical concepts: the mean and the median are important when we wonder about how much sex we are having.

With all these methodological caveats in sight, Spiegelhalter proceeds to inform you about everything you thought you knew about sex, despite not having a reliable source to check. Statistics about partners, heterosexual and homosexual activity, masturbation, reproduction etc. Most of it illustrated with graphics, about which I will make my only formal complaint about the book: in the epub version, sometimes they were not easy to read (despite trying the graphics on various readers). The text instead is delightful to read. Spigelhalter excels at both clarity and wit, both in the best British tradition, even if (or perhaps because) the topic is sex. 

Spigelhalter is cautious, but not shy, in appraising causality through data. Sometimes the evidence makes more likely some explanations of why sex happens the way it does. But often the data are far from conclusive regarding causation and, at best, they just describe what we do (and how often we do it).  Spiegelhalter adopts a good old positivist stance regarding the science of sex and admits at all points what we do not know, keeping it separate from any normative judgment. The most opinionated readers may be displeased by such a sober discourse on sex. The rest of us will be surely enlightened by the quality in the quantity.

{August, 2016}
{Metapsychology}

5/4/15

Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Chicago (Ill.), University of Chicago Press, 2013

Is rationality as clean and well-defined concept, such as a system of axioms, or rather a sticky syrup, like a “bowl of molasses”? Philosophers, at least within the analytic tradition, usually opt for axiomatic definitions and a paradigmatic illustration is, for instance, expected utility theory (EUT). Established by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1947, and expanded later by Savage in 1954, it quickly became the paradigm for the analysis of decisions between uncertain alternatives, until the accumulation of experimental anomalies forced economists to search for alternatives –although none has completely displaced it, as of today. The normative appeal of EUT (as a warrant of consistency in our decisions) still captivates philosophers, but all this anomalies have forced us to rethink whether there is some axiomatic unity in our rational choices or whether our decisions are like molasses and EUT is just one bowl containing some.
Herbert Simon made the remark about the bowl of molasses commenting on how “the irrational is the boundary of the rational” (115). As I read it, How reason almost lost its mind(CWR from now on) is a book about such boundaries: the concepts that came to define rationality among the social scientists around the 1950s and 1960s would not have hold together were it not for the context (the bowl) provided by the Cold War.
The ideal type of Cold War Rationality (3-4) would be a formal algorithm providing mechanically the best solution for a given problem. These algorithms would originate in the analytical decomposition of the actions of a person of “seasoned experience and proven judgment” (43), so that anyone could implement such sets of rules and obtain the same success. Human calculators, computing variables for astronomers in many 19th and 20th century observatories, provide a paradigm of the rationality that Cold War would generalize, thanks mostly to the success of algorithms in foundational research on the paradoxes of set theory. Ideas then flew from the more abstract regions of mathematics to the social sciences, in a process accelerated by the II World War and its posterity.
One major issue in the historiography of rational choice theory is to what extent it was shaped by such context: for instance, is it something more than a formal rendition of the neoliberal ideology that emerged after the war? In this case, we may wonder whether the rules defining rationality were somehow tainted by their military uses. The answer of CWR seems mostly negative. For a start, Cold War Rationality is something more than a simple combination of decision and game theory. Bounded rationality was just as much a Cold War product. The organization of the airlift that would provide basic supplies to Berlin during the Soviet blockade started a research agenda on military management that ultimately led Herbert Simon to defend the necessity of non-optimizing decision rules. The limitations of information and computing power that plagued such projects left no alternative.
Even further from rational choice standards, but equally part of Cold War rationality was Charles Osgood’s GRIT, the acronym for “graduated and reciprocated initiatives for tension reduction”. Osgood, a psychologist, studied strategies for de-escalating conflicts –paradigmatically, in the nuclear arms race. Osgood did not establish his decision rules on formal grounds and, as CWR point out, they were difficult to test experimentally. But nonetheless they had the algorithmic form distinctive of the era. And there is even more to Cold War rationality. Rules did not only emerge in theoretical contexts as a solution to a given problem, be it formal or not. There was also empirical research on how rules emerged, via the analysis of “situations”. These were small group interactions placed in a context that could be externally controlled and observed: e.g., a negotiation in a room with microphones and one-way mirrors, as the one used by Robert Bales at the Harvard Laboratory of Social Relations in the 1950s. Decomposing the interaction into its minimal elements and coding how often they featured would allow social scientists to engineer future exchanges so that they yielded the desired outcomes.
If Cold War rationality is so diverse (and showing it is a major contribution of this book), we may well grant that its content was not constrained by one single agenda. But then what brings all these different algorithms together under the umbrella of rationality? The bowl containing this molasses would have been the military demand for procedures that could handle the complexity of Cold War issues –from nuclear strategies to logistics and negotiation processes. Military budgets funded research according to their needs, independently of any disciplinary boundary. The RAND Corporation was probably the most successful hotbed of Cold War rationality, but we can find research programs tied to the military in University departments all over the United States.
According to CWR, the threat of a nuclear conflictwas powerful enough to break through the different paradigms then available for the study of decision making and bring them into a real debate. Had it not been for the Cold War, the topic might have been studied along more conventional disciplinary paths, with a different level of mutual engagement.Just as it happened after the end of the Cold War. When the bowl of military demand cracked, the molasses of rationality spilled in a plethora of experiments that showed a plurality of decision rules at work (namely, heuristics and biases), more or less deviant regarding formal standards of rational choice.
CWR shows, in sum, that Cold War rationality was more diverse than rational choice theory and that the one in the many, bringing together all such diversity, was the nuclear threat providing the context. Both points are carefully argued and I have learnt a great deal with this volume. But, of course, it is my task to challenge them –trying to live up, I hope, to the spirit of those foundational Cold War debates.
Starting with diversity, the authors define their ideal type in the most encompassing manner, but they often argue as if the canon within Cold War rationality was rational choice theory. I don’t think, at least, that any other of the approaches discussed in the book exhibits to the same degree the features of the type listed in p.5: formal methods modelling self-interested individuals in conflict, with a radical simplification of the circumstances and a step-by-step impersonal approach to a solution. As the authors acknowledge (p. 94), GRIT rulesfor conflict resolution are not as algorithmic as the identification of Nash equilibria. Even if the setting put individuals in conflict, situation rooms apparently neither sought nor yieldeddecision rules (p. 124). And certainly “the collapse of Cold War rationality” came with experimental tests of rational choice models. The other research agendas sparked by the nuclear threat apparently did not make it that far: whereas Cold War results in, e.g., game theory are still part of the standard curriculum in some social sciences, most other topics addressed in this book only belong in the history of their disciplines.
Why not telling the story of Cold War rationality, in all its diversity, giving its weight to its difference constituents? At this point it wouldn’t seem Whiggish, just an acknowledgment of the longer reach of rational choice theory among Cold War theories. My impression is that the authors do not seem very inclined to make such distinction, because they implicitly disagree with the sort of social science associated with rational choice theory (e.g., “the notoriously mean and lean Homo economicus”, p. 185), and they treat it as if its time was already past. This is how I make sense, at least, of the title of the book: “How Reason Almost Lost its Mind”. The reduction of rationality to formal decision models seems was often achieved “at the expense of reason” (p.2), where this latter is understood as the sort of Enlightened wisdom that an automaton can just poorly imitate. The “almost” in the title seems to suggest that the Cold War is over and there is a chance for reason to regain its grounds. Thereby, perhaps, the surprise at philosophers still spending so much time on rational choice theory as of today (p. 187). But what are the reasonable alternatives that we should be discussing instead?
I would have expected though that a historical analysis of Cold War rationality would have made explicit instances of such alternatives at the point where they were perhaps considered and discarded. Taking up again, by way of instance, EUT, it might have been more fruitfulto discuss how a reasonable decision rule from the Enlightement(Bernoullian utility functions) became the standard of Cold War decision making? After all, choosing between uncertain alternatives according to an average (expected utility maximization) is just an option among others (why not focusing on the variance). What made it so attractivecirca 1940?Can we explain its normative appeal on a priori considerations (such as Savage’s Dutch Book argument) or is it also ideological?After all, the alternatives to EUT now under construction among decision theorists (prospect theory, etc.) are closer to Cold War rationality standards than to any sort of mindful reason. And this was the case already in the 1950s: think of Allais’ arguments about the reasonability of EUT. So what is the reason beyond rationality in CWR?
Alternatively, we may wonder whether the Cold War is really over, as far as the idea of rationality in the social sciences is concerned. The contextual pressure of a nuclear threat may have propelled the deployment of rational choice theory in the social sciences. But probably something else is keeping it in place now, for the right or the wrong reasons.Reading CWR I cannot understand well why such algorithmic standards of rationality still prevail. The answer might not be epistemic at all: since the American military and the policy makers were mostly alone on the demand side for rationality during the Cold War, I can’t help wondering whether they were satisfied with the outcome they funded so generously. Perhaps the survival of Cold War Rationality is, after all, the survival of the intellectual institutions that won such War. Historians are certainly among the few who can answer that.

{September, 2014}

4/3/14

Raffaella Campaner, Philosophy of medicine. Causality, Evidence and Explanation, Bologna, Archetipo Libri, 2012

For more than a decade now, there has been a growing interest in the philosophy of medicine as a scientific discipline. Already in 2005, Raffaella Campaner published a monograph in Italian on causality and explanation in medicine (Spigazione e cause in medicina: un’indagine epistemologica) showing how philosophy of science could be successfully applied to biomedical research. Throughout this decade, Campaner published a series of papers in English on the same topics that are now compiled in the reviewed volume. Most of these papers were originally published in edited collections or journals where medicine was not the central topic, so re-publishing all together in a single volume makes sense for the interested reader. Moreover, the Italian publisher has produced a decently edited but inexpensive book, so all in all philosophers of medicine should welcome it.

Campaner has gathered here 9 papers plus an introduction. Their structure is somewhat similar: the author presents different philosophical positions (mostly on causality, but also on explanation) and proceeds to illuminate them with medical case studies, arguing on this basis for her own claims. The reader will find thus an introduction to the following accounts on causality: mechanistic (Salmon, Machamer-Darden-Craven, Glennan), interventionist (Woodward) and manipulative (Price and Menzies), with a brief digression on counterfactuals (Lewis). Despite featuring on equal rank in the book’s title, we do not find introductory accounts of philosophical theories of explanation and evidence. Campaner considers instead plenty of medical explanations and evidences and see how they may fit in the different philosophical accounts of causality presented. Among her case studies, two of the most detailed are on deep brain stimulation (a therapy for Parkinson’s disease) and anti-AIDS treatments. Campaner deals also in several papers with epidemiological and psychiatric causation.

The book puts forward a pluralistic perspective on causation, showing how in actual medical practice we may find all the above mentioned approaches complementing (rather than competing with) each other. The choice often depends on the methods implemented and the context of implementation. The author does not try to construct a principled argument for causal pluralism: as she acknowledges, “lots of work is still to be done before a plausible and coherent view will be settled on and shared” (p.60). The strength of her argument is empirical: there is no evidence that a “one size fits all” concept of causation can cope with the diversity of causal approaches at work in medical practice. However, Campaner also draws on a conceptual insight emerging from this diversity: diseases would be multilevel phenomena (ranging from cells, molecules, tissues upwards to the whole organism) and medicine (siding here with Schaffner, p. 11) would be a set of middle-range theories coping with them. Campaner adopts here a sort of meta-philosophical instrumentalism regarding such deeply entrenched methodological divides such as the one opposing reductionism and anti-reductionism: as she illustrates in chapter 7, both strategies have been fruitful in medicine and both might make sense contextually. In this respect, I think is worth noticing how difficult it is to sustain even moderately pluralist stances about medical causality such as the Russo-Williamson thesis –according to which we would need mechanistic and probabilistic evidence to properly ground causal discoveries. Yet, as Campaner argues in chapter 2, medicine has been quite capable of making progress without mechanisms and yet, when we have them, we often need manipulative evidence, in addition to statistics, to properly ground them.

Campaner constantly reminds us that her pluralism does not “amount to treat all available methodological options as equal in value” (e.g., p. 133), but the book focuses mostly on cases where there is more complementarity than straightforward competition between the alternatives considered and all of them are worth, at this point in time, of scientific consideration. Historically, though, medicine has not been as peaceful as it might seem today. In The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease (2003), for instance, K. Codell Carter has forcefully argued that scientific medicine began with the adoption of the etiological standpoint, the view that every disease has a single cause which is both necessary and sufficient for the disease, showing how this approach was crucial for progress in its treatment. Even today, I would say that medicine is not really pluralist when it comes to decision making about new therapies: we still rely on their success in randomized clinical trials as a rule. Of course, trials might be interpreted from different causal stances, but not all of them are equally captured in their design: mechanistic knowledge, for instance, does not currently qualify the value of a trial in most hierarchies of medical evidence.  In other words, as of today, philosophical pluralism about causation may faithfully reflects the way medicine is practiced, and methodological diversity may be in itself a fruitful research strategy. But I think Campaner’s claim would have been more balanced if it also considered cases in which there was open disagreement about causality between competing research agendas.

My major qualm with this volume is that the papers were not edited for the compilation. Reading it from cover to cover might be a bit reiterative sometimes since the same items are often revisited in different chapters. However, it makes it really suitable for use in undergraduate courses, in particular when teaching philosophy of science to medical students, since most concepts are explained in an accessible manner detail and illustrated with theories they will be certainly familiar with. The name index at the end is particularly helpful in tracing different approaches throughout the book and keeping the original abstracts at the beginning of each chapter is equally useful to guide the uninitiated reader. Campaner’s is thus not only a good philosophy of science in practice book, but also a very accessible book in itself.

{October 2013}
{International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27.4 (2013), 456-458}

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 }