Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge argues forcefully that there are inherent limitations to the predictability of human action, due to a circumstance he calls “ideational heterogeneity.” However, our resources for predicting human action somewhat reliably in the light of ideational heterogeneity have not been exhausted yet, and there are no in-principle barriers to progress in tackling the problem. There are, however, other strong reasons to think that disagreement among epistocrats is bound to persist, such that it will be difficult to (...) decide who has “the right answer” to a given technocratic problem. These reasons have to do with competing visions of the good society, fact/value entanglement, and the fragility of the facts of the social sciences. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether the individual attributes of locus of control, gender, major in college and years of job experience affect the acceptability of certain workplace behaviors. A total of 198 college students of a mid-sized southeastern university formed the sample for this study. Locus of control, gender and years of job experience were found to have some affect on whether an individual considered a certain behavior acceptable or unacceptable.

In this book, Reiss argues in favor of a tight fit between evidence, concept and purpose in our causal investigations in the sciences. There is no doubt that the sciences employ a vast array of techniques to address causal questions such as controlled experiments, randomized trials, statistical and econometric tools, causal modeling and thought experiments. But how do these different methods relate to each other and to the causal inquiry at hand? Reiss argues that there is no "gold (...) standard" in settling causal issues against which other methods can be measured. Rather, the various methods of inference tend to be good only relative to certain interpretations of the word "cause", and each interpretation, in turn, helps to address some salient purpose but not others. The main objective of this book is to explore the metaphysical and methodological consequences of this view in the context of numerous cases studies from the natural and social sciences. (shrink)

An Aims-based Curriculum spells out a ground-breaking alternative to the familiar school curriculum constructed around a number of largely academic subjects. Its starting point is not subjects, but what schools should be for. It argues that aims are not to be seen as high-sounding principles that can be easily ignored: they are the lifeblood of everything a school does. -/- The book begins with general aims to do with equipping each learner to lead a personally fulfilling life, and to help (...) others to do so too. From these, they derive more specific aims covering the personal qualities, skills and understanding needed for a life of personal, civic and vocational well-being. -/- The second half of the book, on political realities of implementation, takes this process of aims-derivation further. Some of its detailed aims, but by no means all, overlap with conventional curriculum objectives. It also looks at the role of the state in curriculum decisions, as well as the implications of the book’s central argument for student choice, school ethos, assessment, inspection and teacher education . (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking some controversial claims philosopher Jason Brennan makes in his book Against Democracy as a starting point, this paper argues in favour of two theses: There is No Such Thing as Superior Political Judgement; There Is No Such Thing as Uncontroversial Social Scientific Knowledge. I conclude that social science experts need to be kept in check, not given more power.

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

What is the correct concept behind measures of inflation? Does money cause business activity or is it the other way around? Shall we stimulate growth by raising aggregate demand or rather by lowering taxes and thereby providing incentives to produce? Policy-relevant questions such as these are of immediate and obvious importance to the welfare of societies. The standard approach in dealing with them is to build a model, based on economic theory, answer the question for the model world and then (...) apply the results to economic phenomena outside. Data come in, if at all, only in testing a limited number of the model's consequences. Despite some critical voices, economic methodology too has by and large subscribed to a "theory first" approach to applied economics. Error in Economics systematically develops an alternative to the theory-based orthodoxy. It places the methodical study of evidence at the centre of the scientific enterprise and thus provides a foundation for a methodology of evidence-based economics. But the book does not stop at the truism that claims should be based on the best available evidence. Rather, detailed studies in the areas of measurement, causal inference and policy analysis show what it means for a claim to be evidence-based in the context of a concrete case. The examples discussed concern topics as diverse as consumer price indices, radio spectrum auctions, the transmission mechanism, natural experiments on minimum wages and the evaluation of counterfactuals for policy. Error in Economics is essential reading for economic methodologists, philosophers of science and anyone interested in how claims about socio-economic matters are validated. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce the instrumental variables technique to the discussion about causal inference in econometrics. I show that it may lead to causally incorrect conclusions unless some fairly strong causal background assumptions are made, assumptions which are usually left implicit by econometricians. These assumptions are very similar to, albeit not identical with, James Woodward's definition of an ‘intervention’. I discuss similarities and differences of the two points of view and argue that—understood as a practical method (...) of causal inference—the set presented here is superior. (shrink)

Philosophy of Economics: A Contemporary Introduction is the first systematic textbook in the philosophy of economics. It introduces the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical problems that arise in economics, and presents detailed discussions of the solutions that have been offered. Throughout, philosophical issues are illustrated by and analysed in the context of concrete cases drawn from contemporary economics, the history of economic ideas, and actual economic events. This demonstrates the relevance of philosophy of economics both for the science of economics and (...) for the economy. This text will provide an excellent introduction to the philosophy of economics for students and interested general readers alike. (shrink)

In this paper we make a proposal for reforming biomedical research that is aimed to align re-search more closely with the so-called fair-share principle according to which the proportions of global resources as-signed to different diseases should agree with the ratios of human suffering associated with those diseases.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, but (...) completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

All univocal analyses of causation face counterexamples. An attractive response to this situation is to become a pluralist about causal relationships. "Causal pluralism" is itself, however, a pluralistic notion. In this article, I argue in favor of pluralism about concepts of cause in the social sciences. The article will show that evidence for, inference from, and the purpose of causal claims are very closely linked. Key Words: causation • pluralism • evidence • methodology.

Francesco Guala once wrote that ‘The problem of extrapolation is a minor scandal in the philosophy of science’. This paper agrees with the statement, but for reasons different from Guala’s. The scandal is not, or not any longer, that the problem has been ignored in the philosophy of science. The scandal is that framing the problem as one of external validity encourages poor evidential reasoning. The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative—an alternative which constitutes much better evidential (...) reasoning about target systems of interest, and which makes do without consideration of external validity. (shrink)

L’auteur part de la distinction générale entre les droits de l’homme, les droits fondamentaux et les droits civiques. Etant donné que cette séparation terminologique n’est pas appliquée dans les traités européens, il note qu’une différenciation stricte entre les droits de l’homme, les droits fondamentaux et les droits civiques n’est pas indispensable, ni cohérente. C’est pourquoi il se tourne vers les valeurs communes en analysant et en évaluant la normalisation législative des droits de l’homme dans l’Union européenne : le Traité sur (...) l’Union européenne, la Charte des droits fondamentaux, ainsi que d’autres prescriptions et pratiques des institutions européennes. La paix, qui est le principal objectif de l’unification européenne, peut se maintenir surtout grâce à la liberté et le respect des droits fondamentaux et des droits de l’homme. Le pilier le plus important de la construction d’une identité européenne commune est la prise de conscience des valeurs européennes communes, des droits fondamentaux et des droits de l’homme qui marquent l’espace culturel européen de manière spécifique et qui constituent l’âme de l’Europe. (shrink)

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture. It explores their history from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean, in the process giving close readings of a wide range of authors.

Introduction In Rene Wellek wrote that the "political attack on literature is a foolish generalization." He was dismissing those who would deprecate ...

Two approaches to evidential reasoning compete in the biomedical and social sciences: the experimental and the pragmatist. Whereas experimentalism has received considerable philosophical analysis and support since the times of Bacon and Mill, pragmatism about evidence has been neither articulated nor defended. The overall aim is to fill this gap and develop a theory that articulates the latter. The main ideas of the theory will be illustrated and supported by a case study on the smoking/lung cancer controversy in the 1950s.

Nikolaus von Kues, der große Philosoph und Theologe des 15. Jahrhunderts, hat sich auch mathematischen Problemen gewidmet. Vor allem die Frage nach der Möglichkeit der Quadratur des Kreises beschäftigte ihn. In seinen Lösungsansätzen spielt die Lehre vom Zusammenfall der Gegensätze eine entscheidende Rolle. In den vergangenen Jahren wurde Cusanus’ Technikverständnis an der Kueser Akademie für Europäische Geistesgeschichte intensiv erforscht. Im Ergebnis stellt Ingo Reiss in diesem Buch den cusanischen Zugang zu Mathematik und Technik und zu deren Wechselverhältnis vor.

I present an alternative account of causation in the biomedical and social sciences according to which the meaning of causal claims is given by their inferential relations to other claims. Specifically, I will argue that causal claims are inferentially related to certain evidential claims as well as claims about explanation, prediction, intervention and responsibility. I explain in some detail what it means for a claim to be inferentially related to another and finally derive some implication of the proposed account for (...) the epistemology, semantics and metaphysics of causation. (shrink)

The first comprehensive, psychological theory in over a century--Reiss picks up where William James left off. This ground breaking work will change the way we understand religion. Religion is about the values motivated by the sixteen basic desires of human nature. It has mass appeal because it accommodates the values of people with opposite personality traits. This is the first comprehensive theory of the psychology of religion that can be scientifically verified.

This article argues that the Supreme Court should not require a religious exemption from vaccine mandates. For children, who cannot yet make autonomous religious decision, religious exemptions would allow parents to make a choice that puts the child at risk and makes the shared environment of the school unsafe — risking other people’s children. For adults, there are still good reasons not to require a religious exemption, since vaccines mandates are adopted for public health reasons, not to target religion, are (...) an area where free riding is a real risk, no religion actually prohibits vaccinating under a mandate, and policing religious exemptions is very difficult. (shrink)

I respond to some challenges raised by my critics. In particular, I argue in favour of six claims. First, against Alexandrova and Northcott, I point out that to deny the explanatoriness of economic models by assuming an ontic (specifically, causal) conception of explanation is to beg the question. Second, against defences of causal realism (by Hausman, Mäki, Rol and Grüne-Yanoff) I point out that they have provided no criterion to distinguish those claims a model makes that can be interpreted realistically (...) (the model's ?causal content? or claims it makes about causal powers or mechanisms) and those the realist can safely ignore. Third, I point out that Hausman's and Rol's claims about robustness plus the empirical observation that economic models are hardly ever robust to the right kinds of specification changes imply that these models do not explain (which is problematic as my original article argued). Fourth, I point out that Sugden's response still leaves an important question unanswered, viz. what makes economic models explanatory. Fifth, I sketch an alternative, instrumentalist account of explanation and argue that it would fit Sugden's bill. Sixth, I point out that under this account of explanation, economic models would come out as non-explanatory, which brings us back to Alexandrova and Northcott's account and its associated difficulties. The ?explanation paradox?, therefore, remains unscathed. (shrink)

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether creationism and intelligent design are controversial issues, drawing on Robert Dearden's epistemic criterion of the controversial and more recent responses to and defences of this. I then examine (...) whether the notion of ‘worldviews’ in the context of creationism is a useful one by considering the film March of the Penguins. I conclude that the ‘worldviews’ perspective on creationism is useful for two reasons: first it indicates the difficulty of using the criterion of reason to decide whether an issue is controversial or not; secondly, it suggests that standard ways of addressing the diversity of student views in a science classroom may be inadequate. I close by examining the implications of this view for teaching in science lessons and elsewhere, for example in religious education lessons and citizenship lessons and at primary level where subject divisions cannot be made in so clear-cut a manner. (shrink)

Diese Studie enthält eine Analyse der Grundprinzipien von Kants politischem Denken, dessen Ursprung als Ausdruck und Kritik seiner Zeit, besonders der Aufklärung, gesehen wird. Die Entwicklung von Kants politischem Denken aus seiner Erkenntnisphilosophie und seiner Ethik, wie auch in Verbindung mit seiner Geschichtsphilosophie, wird geschildert. Abschliessend grenzt der Verfasser Kants politische Philosophie ab, indem er sie mit den politischen Anschauungen bedeutender Vorgänger, wie Hobbes, Locke, Hume und Rousseau, vergleicht.

A recent movement in the social sciences and philosophy of the social sciences focuses on mechanisms as a central analytical unit. Starting from a pluralist perspective on the aims of the social sciences, I argue that there are a number of important aims to which knowledge about mechanisms—whatever their virtues relative to other aims—contributes very little at best and that investigating mechanisms is therefore a methodological strategy with fairly limited applicability. Key Words: social science • mechanisms • explanation • critical (...) realism • methodology. (shrink)

This paper looks at an appeal to the authority of biomedical research that has recently been used by empirical economists to motivate and justify their methods. I argue that those who make this appeal mistake the nature of biomedical research. Randomised trials, which are said to have revolutionised biomedical research, are a central methodology, but according to only one paradigm. There is another paradigm at work in biomedical research, the inferentialist paradigm, in which randomised trials play no special role. I (...) outline the inferentialist alternative in broad strokes, apply it to a recent controversy in econometrics and draw some general conclusions concerning econometric methodology. (shrink)

In this paper we make a proposal for reforming biomedical research that is aimed to align re-search more closely with the so-called fair-share principle according to which the proportions of global resources as-signed to different diseases should agree with the ratios of human suffering associated with those diseases.

One of the major values of animal ethical theory can be found in the light it sheds on practical ethical problems involving animals. McCulloch and Reiss’ paper does precisely this regarding the culling of badgers in England to limit the spread of tuberculosis. Perspicaciously realizing that societal ethics represents a combination of utilitarian and rights-based theorizing, the authors apply both of these perspectives to the issue, noting that both theoretical approaches generate a rejection of culling in the presence of (...) other viable alternatives. In addition, the authors suggest and defend the use of an Animal Welfare Impact Assessment tool to assess the impact of various management approaches on the animals, and demonstrate its congruence with both the ethical theories considered, and with societal moral attitudes. In this way, they show that their conclusion is directly compatible with the societal ethic, in my view a major prerequisite for effecting social change. (shrink)

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out (...) a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems. (shrink)

The Uncertainty of Analysis pursues key issues raised in the author's earlier Discourse of Modernism, a ground-breaking work which focused attention on the nature of discourse and the ways in which one culturally dominant "discursive class" may be replaced by another. In this timely and provocative collection of his essays, Timothy J. Reiss shows how efforts to reconfirm the force and power of modernist, analytico-referential discourse in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have actually brought to the fore (...) internal contradictions, have made clear the problematic nature of the dominant discourse, and have precipitated the emergence of competing discourses. Reiss considers the explorations in foundational logic by Frege and Peirce; examinations of language and its relations to mind by Saussure, Greimas, and Chomsky; work in linguistic and scientific epistemology by Wittgenstein and Heisenberg; and the attempts to analyze the nature of society by Sartre and other Western Marxists. Reiss turns to some practitioners of literary criticism and theory who have sought to escape past constraints, and he points to what appear to be erroneous routes away from the dilemmas raised by these philosophers and critics. (shrink)

In this book, Reiss argues in favour of a tight fit between evidence, concept and purpose in our causal investigations in the sciences. There is no doubt that the sciences employ a vast array of techniques to address causal questions such as controlled experiments, randomized trials, statistical and econometric tools, causal modeling and thought experiments. But how do these different methods relate to each other and to the causal inquiry at hand? Reiss argues that there is no "gold (...) standard" in settling causal issues against which other methods can be measured. Rather, the various methods of inference tend to be good only relative to certain interpretations of the word "cause", and each interpretation, in turn, helps to address some salient purpose (prediction, explanation or policy analysis) but not others. The main objective of this book is to explore the metaphysical and methodological consequences of this view in the context of numerous cases studies from the natural and social sciences. (shrink)