Category: Perspectives on Science seminar

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 29.3., Harold Kincaid (University of Cape Town) will give a presentation titled “Making Progress on Causal Inference in Economics”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm, Helsinki time (UTC+3).

Please notice that Finland will switch to summer time. The time zone is different from previous seminars.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Enormous progress has been made on causal inference and modeling in areas outside of economics. We now have a full semantics for causality in a number of empirically relevant situations. This semantics is provided by causal graphs and allows provable precise formulation of causal relations and testable deductions from them. The semantics also allows provable rules for sufficient and biasing covariate adjustment and algorithms for deducing causal structure from data. I outline these developments, show how they describe three basic kinds of causal inference situations that standard multiple regression practice in econometrics frequently gets wrong, and show how these errors can be remedied. I also show that instrumental variables, despite claims to the contrary, do not solve these potential errors and are subject to the same morals. I argue both from the logic of elemental causal situations and from simulated data with nice statistical properties and known causal models. I apply these general points to a reanalysis of the Sachs and Warner model and data on resource abundance and growth. I finish with open potentially fruitful questions.

Author bio:

Harold Kincaid is Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town. Early books were Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (Cambridge 1996) and Individualism and the Unity of Science (Rowman and Littlefield 1997). He is the coeditor of many books, including the OUP Handbooks of Philosophy of Economics, of Social Science and of Political Science (forthcoming) and of the forthcoming A Modern Guide to Philosophy of Economics (Elgar). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in the philosophy of science and social science. In addition to his philosophy of science work, Kincaid does work in experimental economics focusing primarily on risk and time attitude elicitation, currently in the context of covid.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 22.3., Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Modelling and functions: within and without”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

As a cognitive activity, modelling can serve a variety of external functions, such as explanation, prediction, exploration, education, design, persuasion, and so on; and each of these comes in numerous possible further variants. The components of modelling, including idealizing assumptions, serve numerous functions within the activity, such as isolating causal mechanisms and securing mathematical tractability. The challenge of decomposition and coordination is to identify these functions and align them with one another; meeting this challenge is the burden of model commentary. All this has consequences for issues such as model evaluation and the sensible locus of truth ascription in modelling. The talk will summarize, expand, and refine my own past work, and will respond to some recent contributions by other philosophers of modelling.

For background reading, see Mäki (2020).

Author bio:

Uskali Mäki is professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, directing TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science; and a visiting professor at Nankai University, China. Between 2006-2017 he was an Academy professor. In 1995-2006 he was professor of theoretical philosophy at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, directing EIPE [Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics]. He is a former editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology (1995-2005). His current research focuses mainly on the philosophy of economics and on models, scientific realism, interdisciplinarity, and social aspects of science.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 15.3., Judith Favereau (Université Lyon 2) will give a presentation titled “Trapped in paternalism: randomized experiments and poverty”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee within the J-PAL, promote the systematic use of randomized field experiments (RFEs) in order to fight poverty. Thus, RFEs tend to shape the policies that can be tested with such an experimental design. These policies are behaviorally oriented, therefore many of them are actually nudging devices. Furthermore, Duflo strengthens the J-PAL’s perspective from libertarian paternalism (e.g. nudges) to what she calls a “democratic paternalism”. My claim in this paper is that J-PAL’s RFEs in failing to access the mechanisms behind the poor behaviors, makes it difficult for J-PAL’s researchers to draw political recommendations, and as such Duflo is smoothly pushed to call for a stronger paternalism. The paper methodologically explains such a shift and highlights potential political and methodological alternatives to randomized field experiments.

Author bio:

Judith Favereau is currently an associate professor in philosophy of economics and history of economic thought at the pluridisciplinary laboratory TRIANGLE in the University Lyon 2. She is also affiliated to TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science. Her topics of interest are: development economics, experimental economics, philosophy of economics and evidence-based policy. Her research focuses on how development economics, experimental economics and evidence-based policy interact together in order to fight poverty, which implies studying the methodology of these sub-fields and their disciplinary transfers. More information about her at her website judithfavereau.wordpress.com.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Tuesday 9.3., Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam) will give a presentation titled “Just how unobjectionable is the Pareto principle?”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 3 to 5 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

The Pareto principle (roughly, the principle that social state B is to be preferred to A if some are better off in B than in A and no one is worse off in B than in A) seems to be generally and routinely accepted by economists without further justification. Economists grant that the principle is weak, in the sense that it applies to only a small subset of comparisons of social states, but almost never seem to call its acceptability in question. Indeed, some economists even state that they cannot see how anyone could possibly object to the Pareto principle. In the paper I argue that reasonable objections, related for example to distributional concerns, can be made to the principle. I first note that that the principle is treacherously simple: it can (and has actually been) interpreted, used and applied in various ways. I then point out that if we confine our attention to how welfare economists standardly interpret and use the principle, the principle can do justice to distributional concerns. Yet I also argue that there are limits to this. Strictly speaking, the Pareto principle implies that no external (“extra-welfarist”) concern can possibly override social welfare changes (as defined by the principle), no matter how weighty the external concern and how small the welfare changes. In principle, such extreme implications can be avoided by generalizing the Pareto principle. But the price to be paid for such a generalization is that the principle becomes even weaker in the sense that it applies to an even smaller set of comparisons of social states.

Author bio:

Jack Vromen is professor of philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and Director of the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE, both at Erasmus University Rotterdam). He co-edits with N. Emrah Aydinonat the Journal of Economic Methodology. His research is at the intersection of economics and philosophy, with special attention to foundations of evolutionary economics, new institutional economics and neuroeconomics. More recently his research focuses on social preferences, on what they are, how they could have evolved, what might motivate them and whether their satisfaction should be included in welfare evaluations.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 1.3., Kristina Rolin (Tampere University) will give a presentation titled “Trust in Science: The Moral Dimension”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Trust in alleged experts is thought to be rational when the experts are trustworthy, and one has good reasons to believe that they are trustworthy, and one trusts the experts because of these reasons. Trustworthiness is thought to have two dimensions: the epistemic and the moral. Whereas the epistemic dimension involves expertise (to a reasonable degree in a relevant domain), the moral dimension involves honesty and good will towards those who are epistemically dependent on the expert. Trustworthiness is rarely transparent to others, and hence, the assessment of trustworthiness is dependent on the social indicators of trustworthiness (e.g., indicators of expertise, honesty, good will, and capability to make sound moral judgments). While there is a fair amount of discussion about the social indicators of expertise (Anderson 2011; Goldman 2006), there is surprisingly little discussion about the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness. In my presentation, I focus on the moral dimension of trustworthiness and its social indicators. In the first part of my presentation, I explain why Baier’s (1986) moral conception of trust (rather than mere reliance) is appropriate in an analysis of trust in science. In the second part of my presentation, I argue that to understand the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness, we need to distinguish between two types of cases, the ones in which honesty and good will can be assumed by default and the ones in which they cannot be assumed by default. Finally, I analyze the social indicators of the moral dimension in the latter case.

Author bio:

Kristina Rolin is University Lecturer in Research Ethics at Tampere University. She is the PI of the research project “Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science: An Epistemic Assessment” (2018-2022). Her areas of research are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. She is interested in diversity in science, the role of trust and values in science, collective knowledge, epistemic responsibility, and objectivity.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 22.2., Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “How Not to Make Trade-Offs Between Health and Other Goods”. The seminar is organised as a joint seminar with the Moral & Political Philosophy Research Seminar series. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

In the context of a global pandemic, there is good health-based reason for governments to impose various social distancing measures. However, in addition to health benefits, such measures also cause economic and other harms. In this paper, I look at proposals to make use of existing QALY (quality-adjusted life year) valuations and WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life-years) as the currency for making trade-offs between health and other goods. I argue that both methods are problematic. First, whether the costs and benefits are translated into money or well-being, the result is that morally irrelevant utilities are weighed against morally relevant ones. Second, neither of these approaches can capture the fundamental moral asymmetry between doing and allowing harm, since they construe trade-offs in terms of outcomes while ignoring information about the role of various agents in the causal chains that bring them about. I conclude that deliberation about trade-offs should remain a messy and communal process that can’t be replaced with well-intentioned calculation.

Author bio:

Antti Kauppinen is a Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and PI of the Academy of Finland Research Project Responsible Beliefs: Why Ethics and Epistemology Need Each Other ​(2019-2023).  He works mostly on ethics and metaethics, on topics like normativity, meaning in life, well-being, and moral sentiments. He also like to teach political philosophy. More information about him can be found here.