Uskali Mäki

In a series of insightful publications, Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson have argued for an explanatory ecumenism that is designed to justify a variety of types of social scientific explanation of different , including structural and rational choice explanations. Their arguments are put in terms of different kinds of explanatory information; the distinction between causal efficacy, causal relevance and explanatory relevance within their program model of explanation; and virtual reality and resilience explanation. The arguments are here assessed from the point of view of the illumination they are able to cast on the issue of economics imperialism, the project of privileging rational choice as a unifying basis for explanations. While the Jackson–Pettit arguments turn out to be helpful in specifying some of the ontological and pragmatic constraints on economics imperialism, they are also shown to conflate distinct dimensions in the purported explanantia (such as small grain and particular grain, and the macro and the existentially quantified) and thereby to miss an important class of individualist causal process explanations of social phenomena

Is economics a proper science at all? Or if it qualifies as a science, does it underperform, does it fail to fulfil its scientific duties? Does it perhaps just pretend to proceed as a science by applying principles and techniques that are not suitable for addressing its proper subject matter and for meeting the legitimate expectations? There is a long and live tradition of economics-bashing and economics apology in posing and answering such questions. One popular current in this tradition is to blame economics for being theory-driven or method-driven or driven by whatever else but the world or empirical evidence or observation. Economics thus does not care about the real world – indeed, being so deeply shaped by its favourite theories and methods disconnects economics from the world. The alternative to this gloomy scenario is for a discipline to be evidence-driven or world-oriented or to be guided by some such proper scientific ethos. Being theory-driven involves stressing scientific virtues such as simplicity, coherence, convenience, tractability, formal rigor, theoretical elegance, and so on. Being observation-driven or world-oriented means emphasizing the importance of truth, complexity, empirical testing, practical relevance, and so on. Sometimes the former is characterized as a deductive approach, in contrast to the latter inductive approach. Diagnosis of the failures of economics and advice for how to do better economics is often put in such dichotomous terms. This popular way of framing the issues and debates is all too simplistic and outright distortive....

The cultural and epistemic status of science is under attack. Social and cultural studies of science are widely perceived to offer evidence and arguments in support of an anti-science campaign. They portray science as a mundane social endeavour, akin to religion and politics, with no privileged access to truthful information about the real world. Science is under threat and needs defence. Old philosophical legitimations have lost their bite. Alarm bells ring, new troops have to be mobilised. Call economics, the good old friend of the status quo depicting it as a generally beneficial social order while accommodating a rather mundane picture of human behaviour. In contrast to constructivist and relativist sociology of scientific knowledge, economic accounts of science seek to provide a rigorous defence of the cultural and epistemic legitimacy of science by accommodating plausible elements in the sociological accounts and by embedding them in invisible-hand arguments about the functioning of some market-like structure within science. Viewed through economic spectacles, science re-emerges from the ashes as stronger and more beautiful than ever. A spectator raises an innocent question: is economics itself strong and beautiful enough to offer such alleviating services? In order to examine the emerging issue of disciplinary credibility, we need to look at economics itself more closely, and we need to address traditional issues in the philosophy of science as well as less traditional issues of reflexivity. We will see that the above caricature concerning the role of economics in the science wars calls for heavy qualifications if not wholesale rejection

Realism and Russia? Realism is a notion with multiple meanings, so options abound as to how the two might connect with one another. An old Russian proverb conveys a realist message about social properties: "An individual in Rssia was composed of three parts: a body, a soul, and a passport." (Ruben 1985, 83) Having a passport signals the possession of a complex set of social properties, and if these are taken to be real in some appropriate sense, one is inplying a realist view in social ontology. In another sense of the word, realism is a live issues in the study of international relations. Political realism considers the behaviour of states by emphasizing the importance of national interests and the drive for power on the one hand, and the suppression of moral concerns on the other (e.g. Donnelly 2000). Russian realists hold diverse views about the newly emerged unipolar global power structure and Russia's proper strategy for adjusting to this structure (e.g. Shakleyina and Bogaturov 2004). Realism is a family of viewpoints also in the arts (including painting, music and literature) and their study. Socialist realism is a version that used to be an official doctrine in Russia, gently requesting artists to optimistically represent society's march towards communism, glorifying the heroic role of the proletariat in driving the process. Socialist realism was also well known elsewhere. So much so that in the 1970s, a philosophy professor at the University of Helsinki announced to give a lecture course on "scientific realism" but on its way to the university catalogue through the university administration, the title of the course was transformed into "socialist realism". In the spirit of rectifying that old administrative mistake, the remards to follow deal with scientifit realism as a philosophy of science. The general issue to be addressed is how the social sciences relate to the social world, in both directions.

Ronald Coase has been a vigorous critic of mainstream economic theory, arguing that it is unrealistic and that a good theory is realistic. The attributes "realistic" and "unrealistic" appear in three senses at least in Coase: one related to narrow ness and breadth; another related to abstracting from particularities (and the issue of "blackboard economics"); and the third related to correspondence with the legal. This does not yet make Coase an advocate of realism. It is therefore separately argued that each of the three kinds of "realisticness" as a property of theories is consistent with realism as a theory of theories

Science is often said to aim at truth. And much of science is heavily dependent on the construction and use of theoretical models. But the notion of model has an uneasy relationship with that of truth. Not so long ago, many philosophers held the view that theoretical models are different from theories in that they are not accompanied by any ontological commitments or presumptions of truth, whereas theories are (e.g. Achinstein 1964). More recently, some have thought that models are not truth-valued at all, but truth-valued claims can be made about similarity relations between models and real systems (e.g. Giere 1988). Others suggest that models are instruments that can be used for attaining truths, for example that models are false means for true theories (e.g. Wimsatt 2007). At the same time, philosophers and others keep talking about models being ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘accurate’ and ‘inaccurate’ or getting facts ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Among practicing scientists, one can find both the notion of a ‘true model’ and the idea that ‘it is in the nature of models that they are false’. There seems to be enough variety of views and confusion around them to invite a little bit of further investigation (see also Mäki 1992, 1994, 2004, 2009a,b,c).

In everyday usage, ‘realism’ is often used as a name for a practically or epistemically low-ambition attitude, while ‘idealism’ is often taken to denote a highambition—if not utopian—attitude. In philosophcal usage, mostly, it is the other way around: those who are called realists tend to claim more than their opponents—they are the philosophical optimists. Within philosophy itself, ‘realism’ adopts a variety of interrelated and contested meanings. It is used as the name for doctrines about issues such as perceptual access to reality, the existence of universals, the goals and achievements of science, the nature of truth, the objectivity of morality, and many other things. Given this variety, no single shorthand definition of the term ‘realism’ can be provided. One manifestation of this variety is that the opponents of realism about these issues are not called uniformly by a single label (other than the rather uninformative ‘antirealism’): the labels used include idealism, phenomenalism, instrumentalism, conventionalism, fictionalism, noncognitivism, constructivism, relativism, irrealism, and others. Sometimes such labels vary from one dispute or domain to another even when similar ideas are being expressed. Sometimes they are used to make claims that are specific to the domain at hand and distinct from other antirealist theses. In what follows a brief tour will be taken along some of the representative philosophical highways and lanes, from ontology through semantics to epistemology. Along the way, realism will be confronted with some of its various opponents and internal conflicts. The philosophical landscape in the neighborhood of realism is nowadays much broader than it used to be: in a typical older encyclopedia, ‘realism’ was taken to name doctrines about universals or about perception, or both, to the exclusion of much of its present coverage, and many of the current opponents were missing from view altogether.

Contemporary philosophers of science argue that models are a major vehicle of scientific knowledge. This applies to highly theoretical inquiry as well as to experimental or otherwise observational research, in both the natural and the social sciences. Making this claim is not yet very illuminating, given that there is a large variety of different kinds of model, and a number of ways in which they function in the service of science. The ambiguity of the term ‘model’ and the multiplicity of kinds of model are illustrated by Pierre Duhem’s famous comparison of the mind of a continental physicist to that of an Englishman: the former strives for ‘theories’ that are formulated in ‘the clear and precise language of geometry and algebra’ and consist of abstract and idealized notions and formulae, while the latter insists on having mechanical ‘models’ that satisfy ‘his need to imagine concrete, material, visible, and tangible things’ that are familiar to ordinary experience. While the French or German physicist deals with a formalized theory in his account of electrostasis, the English account is in terms of ‘strings which move around pulleys, which roll around drums, which go through pearl beads, which carry weights; and tubes which pump water while others swell and contract; toothed wheels which are geared to one another and engage hooks. We thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason, but we find ourselves in a factory’ (Duhem 1954, pp. 70–1). Models in this sense—iconic models —employ analogies to visualize the mechanisms depicted, while formalized theories supposedly lack this property. On the other hand, it is nowadays customary to use the term ‘model’ also for such formal systems of equations, conspicuously so in the social sciences—and, much of the time, such formal systems are used for representing causal mechanisms. In relation to such a formal system, ‘model’ is also used for its various interpretations, or just for the interpretation that makes it true. The model muddle needs to be sorted out.

It is argued that rather than a well defined F-Twist, Milton Friedman’s “Methodology of positive economics” offers an F-Mix: a pool of ambiguous and inconsistent ingredients that can be used for putting together a number of different methodological positions. This concerns issues such as the very concept of being unrealistic, the goal of predictive tests, the as-if formulation of theories, explanatory unification, social construction, and more. Both friends and foes of Friedman’s essay have ignored its open-ended unclarities. Their removal may help create new common ground for more focused debate in economics. Here I show how F53 can be reread/rewritten as a socially constructivist fallibilist, and realist statement – in contrast to the received instrumentalist interpretation.

Explanatory unification—the urge to “explain much by little”—serves as an ideal of theorizing not only in natural sciences but also in the social sciences, most notably in economics. The ideal is occasionally challenged by appealing to the complexity and diversity of social systems and processes in space and time. This article proposes to accommodate such doubts by making a distinction between two kinds of unification and suggesting that while such doubts may be justified in regard to mere derivational unification (which serves as a formal constraint on theories), it is less justified in the case of ontological unification (which is a result of factual discovery of the actual degree of underlying unity in the world)

Economics is a controversial scientific discipline. One of the traditional issues that has kept economists and their critics busy is about whether economic theories and models are about anything real at all. The critics have argued that economic models are based on assumptions that are so utterly unrealistic that those models become purely fictional and have nothing informative to say about the real world. Many also claim that an antirealist instrumentalism (allegedly outlined by Milton Friedman in 1953) justifying such unrealistic models has become established as the semi-official practitioners' philosophy of conventional economics. Others argue that what is the case in the economy and the way economics relates to it are socially constructed such that there is no economics-independent way the world worls or truths about it. On both of these pictures, realism would seem to have little do with economics. These pictures are too simplistic. There is more realism in and about economics than first would appear. To see this requires not just looking mere closely, but also adjusting one's conception of scientific realism. It also requires taking a critical stance on much of what economicsts themselves and other commentators have claimed. Yet, historically, there is much wisdom available in the philosophical self-image of the discipline.

Milton Friedman's 1953 essay 'The methodology of positive economics' remains the most cited, influential, and controversial piece of methodological writing in twentieth-century economics. Since its appearance, the essay has shaped the image of economics as a scientific discipline, both within and outside of the academy. At the same time, there has been an ongoing controversy over the proper interpretation and normative evaluation of the essay. Perceptions have been sharply divided, with some viewing economics as a scientific success thanks to its adherence to Friedman's principles, others taking it as a failure for the same reason. In this book, a team of world-renowned experts in the methodology of economics cast new light on Friedman's methodological arguments and practices from a variety of perspectives. It provides the 21st century reader with an invaluable assessment of the impact and contemporary significance of Friedman's seminal work.

No realist project in and about economics is close to completion. There are many open issues that remain to be addressed and resolved. Simon Deichsel (2011) has written a healthy challenge that should offer some useful inspiration to anyone interested in assessing and perhaps contributing to the realist projects. He argues against realism and in support of some sort of anti-realism. My response first deals with some conceptual issues regarding the very ideas of realism and anti-realism. I will then discuss the role of pragmatics in relation to truth. Finally, I will address the issue of justifying realism — Deichsel’s title, after all, suggests his challenge is directed against what he calls the pragmatic justification of realism. My remarks are both brief and selective.

One prominent aspect of recent developments in science studies has been the increasing employment of economic concepts and models in the depiction of science, including the notion of a free market for scientific ideas. This gives rise to the issue of the adequacy of the conceptual resources of economics for this purpose. This paper suggests an adequacy test by putting a version of free market economics to a self-referential scrutiny. The outcome is that either free market economics is self-defeating, or else there must be two different concepts of free market, one for the ordinary economy, the other for science. Both conclusions will impose limits on the applicability of the ordinary economic concept of the market to the study of science

Economists customarily talk about the ‘realism’ of economic models and of their assumptions and make descriptive and prescriptive judgements about them: this model has more realism in it than that, the realism of assumptions does not matter, and so on. This is not the way philosophers mostly use the term ‘realism’ thus there is a major terminological discontinuity between the two disciplines. The following remarks organise and critically elaborate some of the philosophical usages of the term and show some of the ways in which they relate to economists’ concerns. In the philosophy of science, scientific realism is the mainstream position – or rather a heterogeneous collection of positions - that includes ideas about the nature of scientific theories and how they are related to the real world and about the goals and achievements of scientific inquiry. However, most of what philosophers have contributed around these ideas is not designed to deal with the peculiarities of economics, thus some important adjustments are needed to make scientific realism an interesting position for economists.

The tone of this paper is largely critical. Therefore, I would like to begin by praising Donald McCloskey and Arjo Klamer for their exciting and provocative initiative in the metatheory of economics. They have done us a great favor by opening our eyes to some hidden aspects in the intellectual practices of economists. They have shown that economics is rhetoric; it is persuasion, discourse, conversation, and negotiation, to use their favorite phrases. They have provided plausible arguments and illuminating examples to convince us of the literary character of economic reasoning, notwithstanding the formal languages used by economists and the positivist pretensions typical of the self-image of the discipline. However, McCloskey and Klamer have been less successful in trying to convince us of what economics is not. In particular, it concerns me that they have opened up a gap between rhetoric and realism. They seem to think that because economics has a rhetorical character, it cannot be understood in realist terms. I will argue that this view is mistaken: rhetoric and realism do not exclude each other, but rather they are capable of being combined in a coherent methodology of economics. It is a valuable contribution to import the insights of the newly rehabilitated rhetoric to the metatheory of economics; but it is unnecessary to marry them with enthusiasm about the fashionable anti-realism of Richard Rorty and others. While this is my overall thesis, it is clear that only initial steps towards its substantiation can be taken in this paper. I intend to proceed as follows. I will first make an attempt to locate the problem at hand in the history of the metatheory of economics. Then I will point out those elements in rhetorical metatheory as practiced and defended by Klamer and McCloskey that apparently have anti-realist or non-realist assumptions or implications, either directly or via considerations of scientific rationality. Next I will formulate a few concepts of realism, the differences between which have been ignored in the methodology of economics to this day. Then I will make preliminary attempts to inquire into the mutual compatibility of the rhetorical insights provided by McCloskey and Klamer and realism in this context. I will show that, in principle, there should be no insurmountable obstacles to combining the two; in some of its senses, realism will even turn out to be presupposed by the rhetorical approach. I do not primarily intend to argue for realism as such in this paper. Instead, I will argue for the compatibility of realism and rhetoric. The argument is based on Klamer's and McCloskey's own commitments; in this sense, the argument is immanent to their rhetorical approach. As a final point, I will argue that one should not be indifferent about realism: it does make a difference in economics and in the methodology of economics whether rhetoric is accepted with or without realism.

Mark Blaug’s normative methodology of economics is an attempt to articulate certain intuitions about how economic science could be improved by making it more “realistic”. I discuss two such articulations, one in terms of falsificationist principles, the other in terms of an alleged trade-off between relevance and mathematical rigour. My conclusion is that Blaug’s methodology is itself unrealistic, both descriptively and normatively. His (well intended) methodological prescriptions for the improvement of economics are not based on a systematic, consistent, descriptively adequate, and normatively viable account. I suggest that Blaug’s intuitions can be developed into a more realistic account by incorporating the analysis of two further topics: economic modelling and the institutions of academic research

USKALI MÄKI (Helsinki, 1951) is a philosopher of science and a social scientist, and one of the forerunners of the strong wave of research on the philosophy and methodology of economics that has been expanding during the last three decades. His research interests and academic contributions cover many topics in the philosophy of economics, such as realism and realisticness, idealisation, scientific modelling, causation, explanation, rhetoric, the sociology and economics of economics, and the foundations of new institutional and Austrian economics. He is a coeditor of The handbook of economic methodology (1998); Economics and methodology: crossing boundaries (1998); Rationality, institutions and economic methodology (1993). And the editor of two compilations of essays that have become highly influential to the shaping of the field: The economic world view: studies in the ontology of economics (2001), and Fact and fiction in economics: realism, models, and social construction (2002).

Economics is a culturally and politically powerful and contested discipline, and it has been that way as long as it has existed. For some commentators, economics is the "queen of the social sciences", while others view it as a "dismal science" (and both of these epithets allow for diverse interpretations; see Mäki 2002). Economics is also a discipline that deals with a dynamically complex subject matter and has a tradition of reducing this complexity by using systematic procedures of simplification. Nowadays, these procedures involve for the most part building and using mathematical models (for an overview of the philosophical issues, see Morgan and Knuuttila 2011). In the dominant circles of the discipline, one is not regarded as a serious economist having a professional expert view on any given economic or social issue without having a model about it. Much of the power of the discipline and its characteristic contestations therefore involve models and modelling: the successes and failures of the dismal queen are those of modeling. The issues involved in conomic modeling have been made particularly acute once again by the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and its aftermath: the discipline of economics is among the candidates for the major blame for failure. I will first outline some thoughts about the characteristics disciplinary conventions that guide and constrain modeling in economics. I will then summarize my account of the very ideas of models and modeling. Finally, within the framework of that account, I will highlight some major issues of contestation and sketch the respective notions of potential success and failure in economic modeling with illustrations. These notions are motivated by my subscription to a (flexible and discipline-sensitive) realist philosophy of science (e.g. Mäki 2005).

This article shows how the MISS account of models—as isolations and surrogate systems—accommodates and elaborates Sugden’s account of models as credible worlds and Hausman’s account of models as explorations. Theoretical models typically isolate by means of idealization, and they are representatives of some target system, which prompts issues of resemblance between the two to arise. Models as representations are constrained both ontologically (by their targets) and pragmatically (by the purposes and audiences of the modeller), and these relations are coordinated by a model commentary. Surrogate models are often about single mechanisms. They are distinguishable from substitute models, which are examined without any concern about their connections with the target. Models as credible worlds are surrogate models that are believed to provide access to their targets on account of their credibility (of which a few senses are distinguished).

A few aspects of the issue of realism are addressed in the context of a social science. The paper looks for adjustments needed in our conceptions of scientiflc realism to accommodate some peculiarities of economics. Ontologically speaking, economics appears to be closely linked to commonsense conceptions of the world, thus the problem of theoretical concepts does not emerge in the same form it is often taken to exist in physics. Theory formation is largely a matter of idealization and isolation among observables rather than postulation of unobservables. Given that isolative theories violate the truth in many ways, truth is more of a problem than existence in a realism pertaining to economics. The idea of significant truth -which is able to tolerare varieties of untruths in theories- is suggested to be based on the notion of the way the world works; this is a matter of the causal structure and functioning of the world. None of this is undermined by the acknowledgement that economist’s attittudes and decisions are shapped by rhetorical persuasion

For the last three decades, the discussion on Hilary Putnam’s provocative suggestions around the issue of realism has raged widely. Putnam’s various formulations of, and arguments for, what he called internal realism in contrast to what he called metaphysical realism have been scrutinised from a variety of perspectives. One angle of attack has been missing, though: the view from the social sciences and the ontology of society. This perspective, I believe, will provide further confirmation to the observation that Putnam’s two concepts of realism are all too aggregative in that they conflate elements that had better be kept distinct, at least for many important purposes (e.g. Niiniluoto 1996). The present essay can be read as an argument for a topic-specific examination of realism. This means that it challenges the overall validity of Richard Boyd’s arguments against what he calls “realism about”, that is, against “a certain fragmented conception of scientific realism, one according to which realism is deeply topic specific” (Boyd 1990, p. 175). Boyd takes the ‘x’ in realism about x” to designate two kinds of things: entities postulated in scientific theories (“realism about the ether” and “realism about higher taxa”) and scientific disciplines (“realism about physics” and “realism about biology”) (ibid., pp. 175, 190). He also suggests that “it seems possible cogently to accept realism about the natural sciences while denying it about at least some of the social sciences” (ibid., p. 191). In Boyd’s view, the possibility of realism about social sciences is undermined by their weak instrumental success; it is the instrumental reliability of method that he takes as the basis for a realist account of science. I do not underwrite this connection between realism and instrumental success, thus I am not compelled to reject realism about social sciences on these grounds; and, as we shall see, social sciences have other peculiarities as well (see Mäki 1996). I think we should, at least to some degree, disaggregate and relativize the issue of realism. I do have sympathy with Boyd’s strategic arguments against “realisms about”, but yet I believe realists will be better off by adopting a more concrete and localized approach to the issue (Mäki 2005). Social objects and social sciences deserve a separate treatment. There are two strategies that can be followed in examining a realism about x (type of entity, theory, discipline). One is to first fix the meaning of realism’ and then specify the extension of ‘x’. This is Boyd’s strategy. The other is to fix some part of the extension of ‘x’ and then adjust the meaning of ‘realism’ so as to accommodate whatever peculiarities the x in question may have (and finally to check whether the adjusted meaning of ‘realism’ meets the criteria of a minimal notion of realism; it would be here that we encounter a relatively fixed idea of some minimal realism, or a set of realist intuitions). The latter is my approach here. I begin with the interconnected ideas of “realism about social objects” andrealism about social sciences”. I am not only interested in what comes after ‘about’; I am also interested in what goes before it, namely ‘realism’ itself. Here is one premise of the discussion: the issue of proper forms of realism for dealing with specific problems is an issue to be settled at least partly a posteriori. Here is the problem for which a solution will be sought: what constraints, if any, does what we know about the social sciences and society (as depicted by the social sciences and our commonsense views) impose upon the forms of realism that can justifiably be adopted about them? This paper suggests to offer only some partial insight into this issue. It seeks to do so indirectly by discussing Putnam’s characterizations of internal and metaphysical realism. The focus will be on two aspects of Putnam’s realisms: [1] the role and kinds of independence and dependence (in relation to the human mind and related things); and [2] the possibility of error. It is shown that the nature of social objects has implications concerning the appropriate constraints on [1] and [2], and thereby on the kinds of realism that are available to social scientists.

My philosophical intuitions are those of a scientific realist. In addition to being realist in its philosophical outlook, my philosophy of economics also aspires to be realistic in the sense of being descriptively adequate, or at least normatively non-utopian, about economics as a scientific discipline. The special challenge my philosophy of economics must meet is to provide a scientific realist account that is realistic of a discipline that deals with a complex subject matter and operates with highly unrealistic models. Unrealisticness in economic models must not constitute an obstacle to realism about those models. What follows is a selective and somewhat abstract summary of my thinking about economics, outlined from two perspectives: first historical and autobiographical, then systematic and comparative. The first angle helps understand motives and trajectories of ideas against their backgrounds in intellectual history. My story turns out to have both unique and generalizable aspects. The second approach outlines some of the key concepts and arguments as well as their interrelations in my philosophy of economics, with occasional comparisons to other views. More space will be devoted to this second perspective than to the first.

Modeling involves the use of false idealizations, yet there is typically a belief or hope that modeling somehow manages to deliver true information about the world. The paper discusses one possible way of reconciling truth and falsehood in modeling. The key trick is to relocate truth claims by reinterpreting an apparently false idealizing assumption in order to make clear what possibly true assertion is intended when using it. These include interpretations in terms of negligibility, applicability, tractability, early-step, and more. Elaborations are suggested about their precise formulations, mutual relationships, and truth-aptness.

Compared to the massive literature from other disciplinary perspectives on interdisciplinarity, philosophy of science is only slowly beginning to pay systematic attention to this powerful trend in contemporary science. The paper provides some metaphilosophical reflections on the emerging “Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity”. What? I propose a conception of PhID that has the qualities of being broad and neutral as well as stemming from within the agenda of philosophy of science. It will investigate features of science that reveal themselves when scientific disciplines are viewed in comparison or in contact with one another. PhID will therefore generate two kinds of information: comparative and contactual. Comparative information is about the similarities and differences between disciplines, while contactual information is about what happens and why when disciplines get in contact with each other. Virtually all issues and resources within the philosophy of science can be mobilized to bear on the project, including philosophical accounts of models, explanations, justification, evidence, progress, values, demarcation, incommensurability, and so on. Given that scientific disciplines are institutional entities, resources available in social epistemology and social ontology will also have to be invoked. Why? Establishing PhID is presently an obvious step to take for several reasons, including the following two. First, ID is an increasingly powerful characteristic of contemporary science and its management, and so it would be inappropriate for an empirically informed philosophy of science to ignore it. Second, contemporary philosophy of science happens to be particularly well equipped for addressing issues of ID thanks to the recent massive work in the more specialized fields of philosophies of special disciplines. How? Given the breadth and heterogeneity of its domain and tasks, the practice of PhID must be heavily collective. It must mobilize multiple competences and it must keep elaborating a systematic agenda. While a lot of new conceptual work is needed, the approach is bound to be emphatically empirical, with a cumulative and mutually complementary series of case studies to be conducted. Among the methods to be employed, good old textual analysis of scientific publications will be supplemented with interviews, ‘experimental’ techniques, participant observation as well as various interventionist approaches. The published work in PhID will often be authored jointly by philosophers and other scholars in science studies as well as practitioners in various scientific disciplines.