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6Lawrence A. Boland's Model building in economics: its purposes and limitations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 298 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 8 (2): 111. 2015.
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28Economics as Hermeneutics: Rationality and Explanation in Economics, Maurice Lagueux. Routledge, 2010. xx + 275 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 27 (2): 203-208. 2011.
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86Economics Imperialism and Solution Concepts in Political SciencePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (3): 347-374. 2010.Political science and economic science . . . make use of the same language, the same mode of abstraction, the same instruments of thought and the same method of reasoning. (Black 1998, 354) Proponents as well as opponents of economics imperialism agree that imperialism is a matter of unification; providing a unified framework for social scientific analysis. Uskali Mäki distinguishes between derivational and ontological unification and argues that the latter should serve as a constraint for the f…Read more
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108How to Be a Humean InterventionistPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 333-351. 2013.This paper aims to provide Humean metaphysics for the interventionist theory of causation. This is done by appealing to the hierarchical picture of causal relations as being realized by mechanisms, which in turn are identified with lower-level causal structures. The modal content of invariances at the lowest level of this hierarchy, at which mechanisms are reduced to strict natural laws, is then explained in terms of projectivism based on the best-system view of laws
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129External representations and scientific understandingSynthese 192 (12): 3817-3837. 2015.This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are lite…Read more
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131Incredible Worlds, Credible ResultsErkenntnis 70 (1): 119-131. 2009.Robert Sugden argues that robustness analysis cannot play an epistemic role in grounding model-world relationships because the procedure is only a matter of comparing models with each other. We posit that this argument is based on a view of models as being surrogate systems in too literal a sense. In contrast, the epistemic importance of robustness analysis is easy to explicate if modelling is viewed as extended cognition, as inference from assumptions to conclusions. Robustness analysis is abou…Read more
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54Explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries: the case of neuroeconomicsJournal of Economic Methodology 17 (2). 2010.Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent philosophical work on mechanistic research programmes and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, we argue that explaining an explanatory presupposition or providing a lower-level explanation does not necessarily constitute explanatory improvement. Neurosc…Read more
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13Explaining with equilibria68In Johannes Persson & Petri Ylikoski (eds.), Rethinking Explanation, Springer. pp. 149--162. 2007.
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58How organization explainsIn Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), Epsa11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 69--80. 2013.Constitutivemechanisticexplanationsexplainapropertyofawholewith the properties of its parts and their organization. Carl Craver’s mutual manipulability criterion for constitutive relevance only captures the explanatory relevance of causal properties of parts and leaves the organization side of mechanistic explanation unaccounted for. We use the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation and an account of the dimensions of organization to build a typology of organizational dependence. We an…Read more
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20Broadening the Perspective: Epistemic, Social, and Historical Aspects of Scientific ModellingPerspectives on Science 23 (4): 381-385. 2015.The recognition that models and simulations play a central role in the epistemology of science is about fifteen years old. Although models had long been discussed as possible foundational units in the logical analysis of scientific knowledge, the philosophical study of modelling as a distinct epistemic practice really got going in the wake of the Models as Mediators anthology edited by Margaret Morrison and Mary Morgan. In spite of the broad agreement that in fact much of science is model-based,…Read more
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63Contrastive statistical explanation and causal heterogeneityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3): 435-452. 2012.Probabilistic phenomena are often perceived as being problematic targets for contrastive explanation. It is usually thought that the possibility of contrastive explanation hinges on whether or not the probabilistic behaviour is irreducibly indeterministic, and that the possible remaining contrastive explananda are token event probabilities or complete probability distributions over such token outcomes. This paper uses the invariance-under-interventions account of contrastive explanation to argue…Read more
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University of HelsinkiDepartment of Philosophy (Theoretical Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy in Swedish)Professor