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277On playing the economics trump card in the philosophy of science: Why it did not work for Michael PolanyiPhilosophy of Science 64 (4): 138. 1997.The failure of the attempt by Michael Polanyi to capture the social organization of science by comparing it to the operation of a market bears salutary lessons for modern philosophers of science in their rush to appropriate market models and metaphors. In this case, an initially plausible invisible hand argument ended up as crude propaganda for the uniquely privileged social support of science
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147A brief history of neoliberalism, David Harvey. Oxford university press, 2005, VII + 247 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 24 (1): 111-117. 2008.
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139Economics, science and knowledge: Polanyi vs. HayekTradition and Discovery 25 (1): 1998-1999. 1998.The relationship between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi is documented and explored with respect to philosophy and economics. Their respective positions on epistemology and science are shown to fundamentally govern their differences with regard to the efficacy of government policy with regard to the economy
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111The scientific dimensions of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (2): 283-326. 2004.The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the “social dimensions of scientific knowledge” is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of “democracy” are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend…Read more
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73Shall I Compare Thee to a Minkowski-Ricardo-Leontief-Metzler Matrix of the Mosak-Hicks Type?: Or, Rhetoric, Mathematics, and the Nature of Neoclassical Economic TheoryEconomics and Philosophy 3 (1): 67-95. 1987.Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin ver…Read more
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71The Modern Commercialization of Science is a Passel of Ponzi Schemes1Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 285-310. 2012.A wide array of phenomena lumped together under the rubric of the ?commercialization of science,? the ?commodification of research,? and the ?marketplace of ideas? are both figuratively and literally Ponzi schemes. This thesis grows out of my experience of working on two concurrent projects: the first, an attempt to understand the forces behind the progressive commercialization of science; and the second, when it dawned upon me that the financial crisis then unfolding was resulting in the deepes…Read more
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68Economics, Science, and KnowledgeTradition and Discovery 25 (1): 29-42. 1998.The relationship between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi is documented and explored with respect to philosophy and economics. Their respective positions on epistemology and science are shown to fundamentally govern their differences with regard to the efficacy of government policy with regard to the economy
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66Economics and Evolution, Geoffrey Hodgson. University of Michigan Press, 1993, xi + 381 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 11 (2): 366. 1995.
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61How not to do Things with Metaphors: Paul Samuelson and the Science of Neoclassical EconomicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 20 (2): 175. 1989.
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60The unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in modern economicsIn Uskali Mäki, Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard & John Woods (eds.), Philosophy of Economics, North Holland. pp. 159. 2012.
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60The role of conservation principles in twentieth-century economic theoryPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 14 (4): 461-473. 1984.
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50A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar. Simon & Schuster, 1998, 461 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 15 (2): 302. 1999.
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47The Pure and the Applied: Bourbakism Comes to Mathematical EconomicsScience in Context 7 (2): 245-272. 1994.The ArgumentIn the minds of many, the Bourbakist trend in mathematics was characterized by pursuit of rigor to the detriment of concern for applications or didactic concessions to the nonmathematician, which would seem to render the concept of a Bourbakist incursion into a field of applied mathematices an oxymoron. We argue that such a conjuncture did in fact happen in postwar mathematical economics, and describe the career of Gérard Debreu to illustrate how it happened. Using the work of Leo Co…Read more
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39Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960 (review)Isis 102 574-575. 2011.
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39Postface:Defining NeoliberalismIn Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, With a New Preface, Harvard University Press. pp. 417-456. 2015.
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38Looking for Those Natural Numbers: Dimensionless Constants and the Idea of Natural MeasurementScience in Context 5 (1): 165-188. 1992.The ArgumentMany find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external w…Read more
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37Learning the Meaning of a Dollar: Conservation Principles and the Social Theory of Value in Economic TheorySocial Research: An International Quarterly 57 689-718. 1990.
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37A Visible Hand in the Marketplace of Ideas: Precision Measurement as ArbitageScience in Context 7 (3): 563-589. 1994.The ArgumentWhile there has been muchattention given to experiment in modern science studies, there has been astoundingly little concern spared over the practice ofquanitataivemeasurment.Thus myths about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematice in science still abound. This paper presents: An explicit mathematical model of the stabilization of quantitative constants in a mathematical science to rival older Bayesian and classical accounts;a framework for writing a history of pracitces with r…Read more
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36L'irraisonnable efficacité des mathématiques en économie moderneRue Descartes 74 (2): 117. 2012.
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334. The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of NeoliberalismIn Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, With a New Preface, Harvard University Press. pp. 139-178. 2015.
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32Hoedown at the OK Corral: more reflections on the ‘social’ in current philosophy of scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 36 (4): 790-800. 2005.
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26Paul Erickson. The World the Game Theorists Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 384. $35.00Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (1): 160-163. 2017.
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25Why there is (as yet) no such thing as an economics of knowledgeIn Harold Kincaid & Don Ross (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, Oxford University Press. pp. 99--156. 2009.
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24Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the making of modern economics. Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2005. Pp. XXII+330. Isbn 0-521-82712-4. $75.00 (review)British Journal for the History of Science 40 (2): 297-298. 2007.
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2020 The spontaneous methodology of orthodoxy, and other economists' afflictions in the Great RecessionIn J. B. Davis & D. W. Hands (eds.), Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology, Edward Elgar Publishers. pp. 473. 2011.