David Teira

I will open the first part of this paper by trying to elucidate the frequentist foundations of RCTs. I will then present a number of methodological objections against the viability of these inferential principles in the conduct of actual clinical trials. In the following section, I will explore the main ethical issues in frequentist trials, namely those related to randomisation and the use of stopping rules. In the final section of the first part, I will analyse why RCTs were accepted for regulatory purposes. I contend that their main virtue, from a regulatory viewpoint, is their impartiality, which is grounded in randomisation and fixed rules for the interpretation of the experiment. Thus the question will be whether Bayesian trials can match or exceed the achievements of frequentist RCTs in all these respects. In the second part of the paper, I will first present a quick glimpse of the introduction of Bayesianism in the field of medical experiments, followed by a summary presentation of the basic tenets of a Bayesian trial. The point here is to show that there is no such thing as “a” Bayesian trial. Bayesianism can ground many different approaches to medical experiments and we should assess their respective virtues separately. Thus I present two actual trials, planned with different goals in mind, and assess their respective epistemic, ethical and regulatory merits. In a tentative conclusion, I contend that, given the constraints imposed by our current regulatory framework, impartiality should preside over the design of clinical trials, even at the expense of many of their inferential and ethical virtues.

In this paper I study how the theoretical categories of consumption theory were used by Milton Friedman in order to classify empirical data and obtain predictions. Friedman advocated a case by case definition of these categories that traded theoretical coherence for empirical content. I contend that this methodological strategy puts a clear incentive to contest any prediction contrary to our interest: it can always be argued that these predictions rest on a wrong classification of data. My conjecture is that this methodological strategy can contribute to explain why Friedman’s predictions never generated the consensus he expected among his peers.

Did the impartiality of clinical trials play any role in their acceptance as regulatory standards for the safety and efficacy of drugs? According to the standard account of early British trials in the 1930s and 1940s, their impartiality was just rhetorical: the public demanded fair tests and statistical devices such as randomization created an appearance of neutrality. In fact, the design of the experiment was difficult to understand and the British authorities took advantage of it to promote their own particular interests. I claim that this account is based on a poorly defined concept of experimental fairness . I present an alternative approach in which a test would be impartial if it incorporates warrants of non-manipulability. With this concept, I reconstruct the history of British trials showing that they were indeed fair and this fairness played a role in their acceptance as regulatory yardsticks

Why scientists reach an agreement on new experimental methods when there are conflicts of interest about the evidence they yield? I argue that debiasing methods play a crucial role in this consensus, providing a warrant about the impartiality of the outcome regarding the preferences of different parties involved in the experiment. From a contractarian perspective, I contend that an epistemic pre-requisite for scientists to agree on an experimental method is that this latter is neutral regarding their competing interests. I present two medical experiments (on smallpox inoculation and Mesmerism) in which debiasing procedures such as blinding and data tabulation provided warrants of impartiality that made people agree on the experimental design even if they disagreed on the outcome.

In this article we explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our expected utility since this is the criterion effectively applied by those who are considered wisest in making risky choices (be it gamblers or businessmen). Yet, to justify the adoption of this rule, it should be proven that this is empirically true: i.e. that a given function allows us to predict the choices of that particular class of agents. We show how expected utility functions were introduced and contested in accordance with this pattern in the 18th century and how it recurred in the 1950s when Allais made his case against the neo-Bernoullians

In this paper I explore a positivist methodological tradition in early demand theory, as exemplified by several common traits that I draw from the works of V. Pareto, H. L. Moore and H. Schultz. Assuming a current approach to explanation in the social sciences, I will discuss the building of their various explanans, showing that the three authors agreed on two distinctive methodological features: the exclusion of any causal commitment to psychology when explaining individual choice and the mandate to test the truth of demand theory on aggregate data by statistical means. However, I also contend, from an epistemological point of view, that the truth of demand theory was conceived of in three different ways by our authors. Inspired by Poincaré, Pareto assumed that many different theories could account for the same data on individual choice, coming close to a kind of conventionalism -though I prefer to refer to this position as theoreticism. Moore was himself akin to Pearson's approach, which could be named descriptivist insofar as it resolved scientific laws into statistical descriptions of the data. Finally, Schultz tried to reconcile both approaches in an adequationist stance with no success, as we shall see.