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10858A Conversation with Daniel KahnemanIn Catherine Herfeld (ed.), Conversations on Rational Choice, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
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882Imagination Rather Than Observation in Econometrics: Ragnar Frisch’s Hypothetical Experiments as Thought ExperimentsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 35-74. 2019.In economics, thought experiments are frequently justified by the difficulty of conducting controlled experiments. They serve several functions, such as establishing causal facts, isolating tendencies, and allowing inferences from models to reality. In this paper, I argue that thought experiments served a further function in economics: facilitating the quantitative definition and measurement of the theoretical concept of utility, thereby bridging the gap between theory and statistical data. I su…Read more
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250The Role of Narratives in Transferring Rational Choice Models into Political ScienceHistory of Political Economy. forthcoming.One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William Riker – a major protagonist in pushing the adoption of game theoretic models in political science – this article examines the transfer process as one of ‘translation’ by which abstract and mathematical rat…Read more
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208How Academic Opinion Leaders Shape Scientific Ideas: An Acknowledgment AnalysisScientometrics. forthcoming.In this paper, we examine how a research institution’s social structure and academic opinion leaders’ presence shaped the early adoption of a scientific innovation. Our case considers the early engagement of mathematical economists at the Cowles Commission with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We argue that scholars with administrative leadership functions who were not only scientifically but also organizationally central – in our case the director …Read more
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190Progress in EconomicsIn Yafeng Shan (ed.), New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progres. forthcoming.In this chapter, we discuss a specific kind of progress that occurs in most branches of economics today: progress involving the repeated use of mathematical models. We adopt a functional account of progress to argue that progress in economics occurs through the use of what we call “common recipes” and model templates for defining and solving problems of relevance for economists. We support our argument by discussing the case of 20th century business cycle research. By presenting this case study …Read more
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145Model Transfer in ScienceIn Tarja Knuuttila, Natalia Carrillo & Rami Koskinen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling, Routledge. 2024.A conspicuous feature of contemporary modelling practices is the use of the same mathematical forms and modelling methods across different scientific domains. This model transfer raises many philosophical questions concerning, for example, the exact object of transfer, the relationship between the model and the target domain, the specific challenges such transfer confronts, and the ways in which model transfer relates to scientific progress. While the interest in studying model transfer has incr…Read more
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98The Diversity of Rational Choice Theory: A Review NoteTopoi 39 (2): 329-347. 2020.In this paper, I review the literature on rational choice theory to scrutinize a number of criticisms that philosophers have voiced against its usefulness in economics. The paper has three goals: first, I argue that the debates about RCT have been characterized by disunity and confusion about the object under scrutiny, which calls into question the effectiveness of those criticisms. Second, I argue that RCT is not a single and unified choice theory—let alone an empirical theory of human behavior…Read more
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94Book Review: Epstein Brian The Ant Trap : Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 298 pp. $36.04. ISBN 978-0-19-938110-4 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (1): 105-128. 2018.
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94Book Review: Zahle, Julie, Collin, FinnRethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate, Berlin: Springer, 2014. 255 pp. $129 . ISBN: 978-3-319-05342-1 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (2): 247-261. 2018.Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate edited by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin is reviewed. Each of the contributions contained in the volume is summarized. The review concludes by assessing the volume’s usefulness for bringing clarity into the debate in the light of the editors’ self-set goal of rethinking the individualism-holism debate as one of the more important yet confused debates in philosophy of the social sciences.
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79The diffusion of scientific innovations: A role typologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 77 64-80. 2019.How do scientific innovations spread within and across scientific communities? In this paper, we propose a general account of the diffusion of scientific innovations. This account acknowledges that novel ideas must be elaborated on and conceptually translated before they can be adopted and applied to field-specific problems. We motivate our account by examining an exemplary case of knowledge diffusion, namely, the early spread of theories of rational decision-making. These theories were grounded…Read more
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68The potentials and limitations of rational choice theory: an interview with Gary BeckerErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 5 (1): 73. 2012.
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62The Motive of Commitment and Its Implications for Rational Choice TheoryAnalyse & Kritik 31 (2): 291-317. 2009.This paper addresses the explanatory role of the concept of a motive for action in economics. The aim of the paper is to show the difficulty economists have to accommodate the motive of commitment into their explanatory and predictive framework, i.e. rational choice theory. One difficulty is that the economists’ explanation becomes analytic when assuming preferences of commitment. Another difficulty is that it is highly doubtful whether commitment can be represented by current frameworks while (…Read more
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55Revisiting the criticisms of rational choice theoriesPhilosophy Compass 17 (1). 2021.Theories of rational choice are arguably the most prominent approaches to human behaviour in the social and behavioral sciences. At the same time, they have faced persistent criticism. In this paper, I revisit some of the core criticisms that have for a long time been levelled against them and discuss to what extent those criticisms are still effective, not only in light of recent advancements in the literature but also of the fact that there are different variants of rational choice theories th…Read more
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52From theories of human behavior to rules of rational choiceHistory of Political Economy 50 (1): 1-48. 2018.This article traces a normative turn between the middle of the 1940s and the early 1950s reflected in the reformulation, interpretation, and use of rational choice theories at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. This turn is paralleled by a transition from Jacob Marschak’s to Tjalling Koopmans’s research program. While rational choice theories initially raised high hopes that they would serve as empirical accounts to inform testable hypotheses about economic regularities, they becam…Read more
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48The importance of commitment for morality: How Harry Frankfurt’s concept of care contributes to Rational Choice TheoryIn Bert Musschenga & Anton van Harskamp (eds.), What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral, Springer. pp. 51-72. 2013.Using Rational Choice Theory to account for moral agency has always had some uncomfortable aspect to it. Economists’ attempts to include the moral dimension of behaviour either as a preference for moral behaviour or as an external constraint on self-interested choice, have been criticized for relying on tautologies or lacking a realistic picture of motivation. Homo Oeconomicus, even when conceptually enriched by all kinds of motivations, is ultimately still characterized as caring only for what …Read more
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47Thick Concepts in Economics: The Case of Becker and Murphy’s Theory of Rational AddictionPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 51 (4): 371-399. 2021.In this paper, we examine the viability of avoiding value judgments encoded in thick concepts when these concepts are used in economic theories. We focus on what implications the use of such thick concepts might have for the tenability of the fact/value dichotomy in economics. Thick concepts have an evaluative and a descriptive component. Our suggestion is that despite attempts to rid thick concepts of their evaluative component, economists are often not successful. We focus on the strategy of e…Read more
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46Rational choice as a toolbox for the economist: an interview with Itzhak GilboaErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7 (2): 116-141. 2014.
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45Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, Ivan Moscati. Oxford University Press, 2019, vii + 326 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 37 (1): 144-150. 2021.
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44The world in axioms: an interview with Patrick SuppesJournal of Economic Methodology 23 (3): 333-346. 2016.
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44Knowledge transfer and its contextsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 77 1-10. 2019.Knowledge transfer across different contexts has become an increasingly prevalent feature of current science. As such, it is a relevant topic also for history and philosophy of science. This special issue presents a set of papers that study knowledge transfer in various disciplines. The contributions approach the topic from either an integrated history and philosophy of science perspective, 2) a systematic philosophical perspective, or 3) a historical perspective. This overview article is organi…Read more
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43Concept formation has recently become a widely discussed topic in philosophy under the headings of “conceptual engineering”, “conceptual ethics”, and “ameliorative analysis”. Much of this work has been inspired either by the method of explication or by ameliorative projects. In the former case, concept formation is usually seen as a tool of the sciences, of formal disciplines, and of philosophy. In the latter case, concept formation is seen as a tool in the service of social progress. While rece…Read more
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40Introduction: first principles in science—their status and justificationSynthese 198 (Suppl 14): 3297-3308. 2020.
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40Review: Marcel Boumans: Science outside the Laboratory (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
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40The many faces of rational choice theoryErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 6 (2): 117. 2013.
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33Five reasons for the use of network analysis in the history of economicsJournal of Economic Methodology 25 (4): 311-328. 2018.Network analysis is increasingly appreciated as a methodology in the social sciences. In recent years, it is also receiving attention among historians of science. History of economics is no exception in that researchers have begun to use network analysis to study a variety of topics, including collaborations and interactions in scientific communities, the spread of economic theories within and across fields, or the formation of new specialties in the discipline of economics. Against this backdro…Read more
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33Book Review: How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, Michael D. Gordin. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London (2013). 272 pp (review)Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 56 88-90. 2015.
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32Rational choice explanations in political scienceIn Harold Kincaid & Jeroen van Bouwel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science, Oxford University Press. 2023.In this chapter, it is described and assessed how political scientists use rational choice theories to offer causal explanations. We observe that the ways in which rational choice theories are considered to be successful in political science differs, depending on the explanandum in question. Political scientists use empirical variants of rational choice theories to explain the political behavior of individual agents and analytical variants to explain the behavior of collective actors. Both varia…Read more
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28Between mathematical formalism, normative choice rules, and the behavioural sciences : The emergence of rational choice theories in the late 1940s and early 1950sEuropean Journal of the History of Economic Thought 24 (6): 1277-1317. 2017.This paper discusses why mathematical economists of the early Cold War period favored formal-axiomatic over behavioral choice theories. One reason was that formal-axiomatic theories allowed mathematical economists to improve the conceptual and theoretical foundations of economics and thereby to increase its scientific status. Furthermore, the separation between mathematical economics and other behavioral sciences was not as clear-cut as often argued. While economists did not modify their behavio…Read more
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24Understanding the rationality principle in economics as a functional a priori principleSynthese 198 (Suppl 14): 3329-3358. 2020.Since the early days of economics, the rationality principle has been a core element of economic theorizing. It is part of almost any theoretical framework that economists use to generate knowledge. Despite its central role, the principle’s epistemic status and function continue to be debated between empiricists and rationalists, and a clear winner is yet to emerge. One point of contention is that we cannot explain the principle’s special status in light of clear evidence against its empirical v…Read more
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Ludwig-Maximilians-University MunichMunich Center For Mathematical PhilosophyResearcher
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George Mason UniversityPolitics, and Economics At The Mercatus CenterResearch Affiliate (Part-time)
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Ludwig Maximilians Universität, MünchenMunich Centre for Mathematical PhilosophyExternal Member (Part-time)
Witten/Herdecke University
Alumnus, 2013
Hannover, NDS, Germany
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Philosophy of Economics |
History of Economics |
Methodology of Economics |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Sociology of Science |
Philosophy of Sociology |