Mary Morgan

Deidealization as a topic in its own right has attracted remarkably little philosophical interest despite the extensive literature on idealization. One reason for this is the often implicit assumption that idealization and deidealization are, potentially at least, reversible processes. We question this assumption by analyzing the challenges of deidealization within a menu of four broad categories: deidealizing as recomposing, deidealizing as reformulating, deidealizing as concretizing, and deidealizing as situating. On closer inspection, models turn out much more inflexible than the reversal thesis would have us believe, and deidealization emerges as a creative part of modeling.

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 interpretative flexibility of economic theories appears apologetic, especially the suggestion that theories and models, which once were considered positive descriptions or predictive instruments, are now cast as analytical or methodological exercises. We conclude on a more constructive note, drawing from the recent philosophical discussion of modelling which, quite paradoxically, grants highly idealized and simplified models a more important role than GPSS appear to allow.

How do scientists make sense of what appears (in their community) to be a new phenomenon? That is, how do they get to grips with its evidence; figure out its elements and their relationships; conceptualise it in ways that provide resources to think with; place it with respect to other phenomena in their field; and create representations of it that will enable them to investigate it in various ways? The activity of initial sense-making: making sense of something new, or reconceptualising a phenomenon in new ways, might include visualising it into some form, categorizing it under some labels, or narrative-making about how its elements fit together. This paper considers the importance of visualisation as a sense-making project along the lines and roles recently suggested for narrative-making in the sciences.

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 ways in which they enable us to learn about both theories and the world. The contributors to the volume offer their own individual theoretical perspectives to cover a wide range of examples of modelling, from physics, economics and chemistry. These papers provide ideal case-study material for understanding both the concepts and typical elements of modelling, using analytical approaches from the philosophy and history of science.

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—mathematical models in physics and economics. Yet it has become increasingly evident that the way models are conceptualized is very different in some other sciences, where philosophers' accounts of models' characteristics and ..

The provocative paper by John Forrester ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ (1996) 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 follows in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterize how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears.

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 as events in the world that happen in circumstances that are already sufficiently “controlled” to be open for direct analysis without reconstruction work

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 account with internal validity.

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 of interest to economists and science studies scholars. But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in.