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76Models as Mediating InstrumentsIn Mary S. Morgan & Margaret Morrison (eds.), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science, Cambridge University Press. 1999.Morrison and Morgan argue for a view of models as 'mediating instruments' whose role in scientific theorising goes beyond applying theory. Models are partially independent of both theories and the world. This autonomy allows for a unified account of their role as instruments that allow for exploration of both theories and the world.
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Case studiesIn Nancy Cartwright & Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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30Insider apology for microeconomic theorising?Journal of Economic Methodology 1-12. forthcoming.This comment on 'Economic theories and their Dueling interpretations' questions the descriptive adequacy of the ‘sociology of economics' proposed by Gilboa, Postlewaite, Samuelson, and Schmeidler (GPSS) (2022). We ask whether economists still perceive the role of microeconomic theory as central as do GPSS. In particular, is present-day economics unified by the principles of maximising, subject to constraints and equilibrium analysis? We argue that this is not the case. GPSS’ appeal to the interp…Read more
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Glass ceilings and sticky floors : drawing new ontologiesIn Karine Chemla & Evelyn Fox Keller (eds.), Cultures without culturalism: the making of scientific knowledge, Duke University Press. 2017.
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21Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing Since 1800 (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2022.Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from geology to psychology, chemistry, physics, botany, m…Read more
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18Do you see it this way? Visualising as a tool of sense-makingStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 101 (C): 30-39. 2023.
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4Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1999.Models as Mediators discusses the ways in which models function in modern science, particularly in the fields of physics and economics. Models play a variety of roles in the sciences: they are used in the development, exploration and application of theories and in measurement methods. They also provide instruments for using scientific concepts and principles to intervene in the world. The editors provide a framework which covers the construction and function of scientific models, and explore the…Read more
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15Models and stories in Hadron physicsIn Mary S. Morgan & Margaret Morrison (eds.), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 326-346. 1999.
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155Modeling Practices in the Social and Human Sciences. An Interdisciplinary ExchangePerspectives on Science 21 (2): 143-156. 2013.Philosophers of science studying scientific practice often consider it a methodological requirement that their conceptualization of "model" closely connects with the understanding and use of models by practicing scientists. Occasionally, this connection has been explicitly made (Hutten 1954, Suppes 1961, Morgan and Morrison 1999, Bailer-Jones 2002, Lehtinen and Kuorikoski 2007, Kuorikoski 2007, Morgan 2012a). These studies have been dominated by a focus on the—relatively similar forms of—mathema…Read more
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43‘If p? Then What?’ Thinking within, with, and from casesHistory of the Human Sciences 33 (3-4): 198-217. 2020.The provocative paper by John Forrester ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This article investigates this mode of science – namely thinking in cases – by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what foll…Read more
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227Nature’s Experiments and Natural Experiments in the Social SciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3): 341-357. 2013.This article explores the characteristics of research sites that scientists have called “natural experiments” to understand and develop usable distinctions for the social sciences between “Nature’s or Society’s experiments” and “natural experiments.” In this analysis, natural experiments emerge as the retro-fitting by social scientists of events that have happened in the social world into the traditional forms of field or randomized trial experiments. By contrast, “Society’s experiments” figure …Read more
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53How well do facts travel?: the dissemination of reliable knowledge (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2011.Facts often acquire a life of their own; the stories in this book explain why.
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39Exemplification and the use-values of cases and case studiesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78 (C): 5-13. 2019.
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60Narrative ordering and explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 86-97. 2017.
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58Narrative science and narrative knowing. Introduction to special issue on narrative scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 1-5. 2017.
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53Resituating Knowledge: Generic Strategies and Case StudiesPhilosophy of Science 81 (5): 1012-1024. 2014.This paper addresses the problem of how scientific knowledge, which is always locally generated, becomes accepted in other sites. The analysis suggests that there are a small number of strategies that enable scientists to resituate knowledge and that these strategies are generic: they are not restricted to specific disciplines or modes of doing science but rather are found in a variety of different forms across the sciences
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141Case Studies: One Observation or Many? Justification or Discovery?Philosophy of Science 79 (5): 667-677. 2012.Critiques of case studies as an epistemic genre usually focus on the domain of justification and hinge on comparisons with statistics and laboratory experiments. In this domain, case studies can be defended by the notion of “infirming”: they use many different bits of evidence, each of which may independently “infirm” the account. Yet their efficacy may be more powerful in the domain of discovery, in which these same different bits of evi- dence must be fully integrated to create an explanatory …Read more
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80A long-standing tradition presents economic activity in terms of the flow of fluids. This metaphor lies behind a small but influential practice of hydraulic modelling in economics. Yet turning the metaphor into a three-dimensional hydraulic model of the economic system entails making numerous and detailed commitments about the analogy between hydraulics and the economy. The most famous 3-D model in economics is probably the Phillips machine, the central object of this paper.
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25The World in the Model: How Economists Work and ThinkCambridge University Press: Cambridge. 2012.During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be …Read more
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London School of EconomicsRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |