•  743
    The article identifies a latent debate in the recent literature on the role and worth of experiments in economics and other social sciences concerning the relationship between the external and the internal validity of experimental designs. Our work identifies two incompatible views regarding the relationship between internal and external validity of experiments. While in the methodological literature references to the idea that there is a trade-off between the internal and external validity of e…Read more
  •  390
    Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of…Read more
  •  70
    Experiments in economics and philosophy
    with James Konow, Eric Schwitzgebel, Cristina Bicchieri, and Jason Dana
    Economics and Philosophy 29 (2): 151-153. 2013.
    Not so long ago, many economists and philosophers felt that their disciplines had no use for experimental methods. An experimental study was, by its nature, ‘not economics’ or ‘not philosophy’ – psychology maybe. Opinion has changed dramatically. This issue of Economics and Philosophy represents a collection of recent contributions to experimental research that explicitly deal with empirical findings or methodological questions in the intersection of the two disciplines. To the best of our knowl…Read more
  •  49
    Much of the methodological discussion around experiments in economics and other social sciences is framed in terms of the notions of internal and external validity. The standard view is that internal validity and external validity stand in a relationship best described as a _trade-off_. However, it is also commonly held that internal validity is a _prerequisite_ to external validity. This article addresses the problem of the compatibility of these two ideas and analyzes critically the standard a…Read more
  •  47
    Artificiality, Reactivity, and Demand Effects in Experimental Economics
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (1): 3-23. 2016.
    A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which “artificiality” has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality may be directly as well as inversely correlated with d…Read more
  •  46
    Non Experts: Which Ones Would Trust You?
    Social Epistemology 37 (5): 610-625. 2023.
    Following Goldman’s seminal work, most contemporary philosophical contributions on the novice-expert relation have adopted a normative, expert-focused approach. In this paper, we aim to shift the focus of the philosophical analysis towards the characteristics of the novices, and how they might determine the choices that experts make. On the bases of recent empirical evidence from social psychology, we discuss how novices evaluate the messages that they receive and distinguish diverse kinds of no…Read more
  •  43
    What Can Mechanisms Do for You? Mechanisms and the Problem of Confounders in the Social Sciences
    with Juan Carlos Squitieri
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 49 (3): 210-231. 2019.
    The idea that mechanisms are crucially important to differentiate between genuine and spurious causal relations is ubiquitous both in the philosophical and in the social scientific literature. Yet...
  •  33
    Philosophy of economics: a contemporary introduction
    Journal of Economic Methodology 21 (2): 198-202. 2014.
    (2014). Philosophy of economics: a contemporary introduction. Journal of Economic Methodology: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 198-202. doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2014.910935
  •  30
    The experimental revolution in the social sciences is one of the most significant methodological shifts undergone by the field since the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the nineteenth century. One of the often valued features of social science experimentation is precisely the fact that there are clear methodological rules regarding hypothesis testing that come from the methods of the natural sciences and from the methodology of RCTs in the biomedical sciences, and that allow for the adjudication am…Read more
  •  28
    ¿Más allá de la ciencia académica?: modo 2, ciencia posnormal y ciencia posacadémica
    with Irene Ramos Vielba
    Arbor 185 (738): 721-737. 2009.
  •  27
    The Last Dictator Game? Dominance, Reactivity, and the Methodological Artefact in Experimental Economics
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (3): 295-310. 2015.
    The Dictator Game, one of the best-known designs in experimental social science, has been extensively criticized, and declared by some to be defunct, on the grounds that its results are the product of a research artefact. Critics of the DG argue that the behaviour observed in the game is not the outcome of genuine pro-social preferences but must, instead, be interpreted as a response to the cues given by the experimental design, where these cues signal that the game is about ‘sharing’. Despite t…Read more
  •  24
    Coming full circle: Incentives, reactivity, and the experimental turn
    In Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán Torres & Fernando Aguiar (eds.), Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy., Routledge. 2023.
    For years, the phenomenon of experimental reactivity (defined as the alteration of the subject’s behaviour as a result of their awareness of being studied) seemed to be of little or no concern to experimental economists. With their clear-cut methodological stance shaped by Vernon Smith’s list of precepts, economists could avoid the worries associated with subjects’ reactivity through a rigorous control over the incentives proposed by the experimental setting as designed in the game. More recentl…Read more
  •  21
    Causality and Modelling in the Sciences: Introduction
    Disputatio 9 (47): 423-427. 2017.
    The advantage of examining causality from the perspective of modelling is thus that it puts us naturally closer to the practice of the sciences. This means being able to set up an interdisciplinary dialogue that contrasts and compares modelling practices in different fields, say economics and biology, medicine and statistics, climate change and physics. It also means that it helps philosophers looking for questions that go beyond the narrow ‘what-is-causality’ or ‘what-are-relata’ and thus puts …Read more
  •  13
    Steel & Guala, eds. 2011. The Philosophy of Social Science Reader (review)
    Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 28 (2): 337-339. 2013.
  •  2
    Elección racional/Teoría de la decisión/Teoría de juegos
    In Luis Vega and Paula Olmos (ed.), Compendio de Lógica, Argumentación y Retórica, Editorial Trotta. pp. 221--222. 2011.
  •  1
    Descriptivo/Normativo, enunciado
    In Luis Vega and Paula Olmos (ed.), Compendio de Lógica, Argumentación y Retórica, Editorial Trotta. pp. 190--191. 2011.
  • Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of…Read more