Jakob Ortmann

Despite the breadth of the literature on ‘values in science’, it has paid little explicit attention to the phenomenon of ‘reflexive performativity’. A scientific assertion is reflexively performative when its downstream consequences affect the assertion’s referents in a way that bears on the assertion’s veracity. Famous examples include so-called ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ in social sciences, or ‘looping effects’. We show how attention to reflexive performativity generates conceptual problems as well as potential improvements for at least three key issues in the literature: (i) prohibitions on wishful thinking; (ii) the direct/indirect roles distinction; and (iii) desiderata for solutions to the New Demarcation Problem.

The dissemination of economic models and predictions can affect social outcomes; this is roughly what has been called the "performativity of economics." For example, consider an economist's prediction of a bank failure, which may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy contributing to a bank run. Recent contributions have argued that economists have responsibility towards the performative effects they cause. We argue that a more complex picture emerges once we make explicit widely acknowledged conditions for moral responsibility that are currently only implicitly alluded to in the literature. Towards this aim, we highlight four factors relevant for assessing the responsibility of economists, and systematically explore the impact of their different conceptualizations and specifications for assigning moral responsibility for performative effects: 1. the foreseeability of the performative effect in question, 2. its causal strength, 3. the degree to which causal control is distributed, and 4. how we conceptualize the social role of economists.

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behaviour to fit our model, rather than the other way around. But while this problem of the performativity of the ToC has been noted in a recent paper in this journal by Matthew Kopec, his proposed strategies for dealing with their self-fulfilling nature fall short of providing an adequate solution. Instead of relying on the idea that modelling assumptions are always strictly speaking false, this paper shows that the problem may be better framed as a problem of underdetermination between competing explanations. Our goal here is to provide a framework for choosing between this set of competing models that allows us to avoid a ‘Russian Roulette’-like situation in which we gamble with existential risk.

Ever since its introduction by John L. Austin, ‘performativity’ has meant many things to many scholars—something that did not change when phrases like ‘performativity of science’ became popular. Such equivocations might have been unproblematic, were it not for their tendency to obscure important debates in philosophy of science. In this paper, I revisit Austin’s original use of the term ‘performativity’ and propose a nomenclature of three kinds of performativity in science. This project revises earlier attempts to classify and identify ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ performativity in science and instead advances an integrative disambiguation—one that preserves what scholars in STS and philosophy of science have found helpful about the concept while addressing demonstrable areas of conceptual conflation.

Performativity refers to the phenomenon that scientific conceptualisations can sometimes change their target systems or referents. A widely held view in the literature is that scientists ought not to deliberately deploy performative models or theories with the aim of eliciting desirable changes in their target systems. This paper has three aims. First, I cast and defend this received view as a worry about autonomy-infringing paternalism and, to that end, develop a taxonomy of the harms it can impose. Second, I consider various approaches to this worry within the extant literature and argue that these offer only unsatisfactory responses. Third, I propose two positive claims. Manipulation of target systems is (a) not inherently paternalist and can be unproblematic, and is (b) sometimes paternalist, but whenever such paternalism is inescapable, it has got to be justifiable. I generalise an example of modelling international climate change coordination to develop this point.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are epistemically opaque in the sense that their inner functioning is often unintelligible to human investigators. Inkeri Koskinen has recently argued that this poses special problems for a widespread view in social epistemology according to which thick normative trust between researchers is necessary to handle opacity: if DNNs are essentially opaque, there simply exists nobody who could be trusted to understand all the aspects a DNN picks up during training. In this paper, I present a counterexample from scientific practice, AlphaFold2. I argue that for epistemic reliance on an opaque system, trust is not necessary, but reliability is. What matters is whether, for a given context, the reliability of a DNN has been compellingly established by empirical means and whether there exist trustable researchers who have performed such evaluations adequately.

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behaviour to fit our model, rather than the other way around. But while this problem of the performativity of the ToC has been noted in a recent paper in this journal by Matthew Kopec, his proposed strategies for dealing with their self-fulfilling nature fall short of providing an adequate solution. Instead of relying on the idea that modelling assumptions are always strictly speaking false, this paper shows that the problem may be better framed as a problem of underdetermination between competing explanations. Our goal here is to provide a framework for choosing between this set of competing models that allows us to avoid a ‘Russian Roulette’-like situation in which we gamble with existential risk.