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108Doing Well in the CircumstancesJournal of Moral Philosophy 10 (3): 307-328. 2013.Judgments of well-being across different circumstances and spheres of life exhibit a staggering diversity. Depending on the situation, we use different standards of well-being and even treat it as being constituted by different things. This is true of scientific studies as well as of everyday life. How should we interpret this diversity? I consider three ways of doing so: first, denying the legitimacy of this diversity, second, treating well-being as semantically invariant but differentially rea…Read more
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173Well-Being as an Object of SciencePhilosophy of Science 79 (5): 678-689. 2012.The burgeoning science of well-being makes no secret of being value laden: improvement of well-being is its explicit goal. But in order to achieve this goal its concepts and claims need to be value adequate; that is, they need, among other things, to adequately capture well-being. In this article I consider two ways of securing this adequacy—first, by relying on philosophical theory of prudential value and, second, by the psychometric approach. I argue that neither is fully adequate and explore …Read more
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90Kristin Shrader-frechette Tainted: How philosophy of science can expose bad science (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 901-905. 2016.
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421Paternalism in economicsIn Christian Coons Michael Weber (ed.), Paternalism: Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press. pp. 157--177. 2013.
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6The Science of Well-BeingIn Guy Fletcher (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, Routledge. pp. 389-401. 2015.
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159First-person reports and the measurement of happinessPhilosophical Psychology 21 (5). 2008.First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.
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124When Analytic Narratives ExplainJournal of the Philosophy of History 3 (1): 1-24. 2009.Rational choice modeling originating in economics is sweeping across many areas of social science. This paper examines a popular methodological proposal for integrating formal models from game theory with more traditional narrative explanations of historical phenomena, known as “analytic narratives”. Under what conditions are we justified in thinking that an analytic narrative provides a good explanation? In this paper I criticize the existing criteria and provide a set of my own. Along the way,…Read more
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204Making models countPhilosophy of Science 75 (3): 383-404. 2008.What sort of claims do scientific models make and how do these claims then underwrite empirical successes such as explanations and reliable policy interventions? In this paper I propose answers to these questions for the class of models used throughout the social and biological sciences, namely idealized deductive ones with a causal interpretation. I argue that the two main existing accounts misrepresent how these models are actually used, and propose a new account. *Received July 2006; revised …Read more
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Well-Being |
Scientific Models |
Philosophy of Economics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Philosophy of Economics |