Arizona State University
Philosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
PhD, 2012
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
  •  93
    In biomedical ethics, there is widespread acceptance of moral realism, the view that moral claims express a proposition and that at least some of these propositions are true. Biomedical ethics is also in the business of attributing moral obligations, such as “S should do X”. The problem, as we argue, is that against the background of moral realism, most of these attributions are erroneous or inaccurate. The typical obligation attribution issued by a biomedical ethicist fails to truly capture the…Read more
  •  134
    Ignorance and moral judgment: Testing the logical priority of the epistemic
    with Parker Crutchfield, Mark Justin Rzeszutek, Hayley Dawn Brown, and Cristal Cardoso Sao Mateus
    Consciousness and Cognition 108 (C): 103472. 2023.
    It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figu…Read more
  •  245
    How should we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis? In particular, if we wish to explain and predict political decisions and their consequences, if we wish to ensure that political action is as effective as it can be, how should we think of policymakers? Should we think of them as they are commonly conceived in traditional political analysis, i.e., as uniquely knowledgeable and as either altruistic (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their constituents…Read more
  •  280
    Ignorance and Moral Judgment: Testing the Logical Priority of the Epistemic
    with Parker Crutchfield, Cristal Cardoso Sao Mateus, Hayley Dawn Brown, and Mark Rzeszutek
    Consciousness and Cognition. forthcoming.
    It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figu…Read more
  •  167
    Complexity, Policymaking, and The Austrian Denial of Macroeconomics
    In Bert Tieben, Victoria Chick & Jesper Jespersen (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Macroeconomic Methodology, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Economists associated with the Austrian School of Economics are known to deny the value of macroeconomics as descended from the work of John Maynard Keynes and, especially, his followers. Yet, Austrian economists regularly engage in a related scientific activity: theorizing about the causes and consequences of economic fluctuations, i.e., the business cycle. What explains the Austrians’ willingness to engage in theorizing about the business cycle while denying the scientific import of macroecono…Read more
  •  165
    I examine the history of the concept of spontaneity in philosophy and the social sciences, particularly as it relates to monetary phenomena. I then offer an argument for the general significance of spontaneity. The essay concludes that scholars across the humanities and social sciences, whatever their (disciplinary, political, ideological, etc.) persuasion, would be well-served to further develop the theory of spontaneity and its social effects.
  •  191
    Political questions are typically framed in normative terms, in terms of the political actions that we (or our political representatives) “ought” to take or, alternatively, in terms of the political philosophies that “should” inform our political actions. “Should we be liberals or socialists, or should we (somehow) combine liberalism and socialism?” Such questions are typically posed and debates around such questions emerge with little, if any, prior consideration of a question that is, logical…Read more
  •  185
    Ludwig von Mises’s methodological apriorism is frequently attributed to the broader Austrian School of economics, of which, of course, Mises was a prominent member. However, there is considerable controversy concerning the meaning of Mises’s various attempts to justify his apriorism. There are prima facie inconsistencies within and across Mises’s methodological writings that engender massive confusion in the secondary literature. This confusion is aggravated by the fact that Mises’s apriorism ca…Read more
  •  135
    Karl Menger as Son of Carl Menger
    with Reinhard Schumacher
    History of Political Economy 50 (4): 649-678. 2018.
    Although their contributions to the history of economic thought and their scholarly reputations are firmly established, relatively little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics, and his son, Karl Menger, the mathematician, geometer, logician, and philosopher of science, whose famous Mathematical Colloquium at the University of Vienna was central to the early literature on the existence of general equilibrium and the concomitant developmen…Read more
  •  149
    Ignorance and the Incentive Structure confronting Policymakers
    Cosmos + Taxis Studies in Emergent Order and Organization 7 (1 + 2): 39-51. 2019.
    The paper examines one of the considerations that determines the extent to which policymakers pursue the objec- tives demanded by constituents. The nature and extent of their ignorance serve to determine the incentives confronted by policymakers to pursue their constituents’ demands. The paper also considers several other consequences of policymaker ig- norance and its relationship to expert failure.
  •  190
    Karl Menger’s Unfinished Biography of His Father: New Insights into Carl Menger’s Life Through 1889
    with Reinhard Schumacher
    In Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Volume 38B, . 2020.
    During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred yea…Read more
  •  125
    A Brief Note Concerning Hayek’s Non-Standard Conception of Knowledge
    Review of Austrian Economics 29 (2): 205-210. 2016.
    Whatever F.A. Hayek meant by “knowledge” could not have been the justified true belief conception common in the Western intellectual tradition from at least the time of Plato onward. In this brief note, I aim to uncover and succinctly state Hayek’s unique definition of knowledge.
  •  106
    On the Method Appropriate to Hayek Studies
    Œconomia ­­– History / Methodology / Philosophy 9 (1): 29-35. 2019.
    The paper considers the significance of F. A. Hayek’s writings on the study of complex phenomena for the study of the very complex phenom- ena of Hayek’s own life and career. It is argued that the methodological principle which Hayek recommended for the investigation of complex phenomena is applicable to explanations of his own intellectual develop- ment. Indeed, it is argued that the extent to which a Hayek scholar re- spects this principle in their attempts to explain Hayek’s life and career i…Read more
  •  129
    Truth, Pragmatism, and Democracy: Another Route to the Liberal Values
    with Michael Gifford
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 58 (2): 97-113. 2022.
    Cheryl Misak (2000; 2008a; 2008b; Misak and Talisse 2014; Misak and Talisse 2021) has presented an argument for democracy based on her analysis of the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: If we care about the truth of our beliefs – as everyone does, according to Misak – then we ought to support democratic norms and democratic political institutions. We argue in the present paper that Misak’s argument does not adequately justify a democratic political system. Her argument does, however, justify a …Read more
  •  313
    A Case Study in the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance: Political Responses to COVID-19
    Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization 9 (5 + 6): 18-28. 2021.
    We apply the analysis that we have developed over the course of several publications on the significance of ignorance for decision-making, especially in surrogate (and, thus, in political) contexts, to political decision-making, such as it has been, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Scheall 2019; Crutchfield and Scheall 2019; Scheall and Crutchfield 2020; Scheall 2020). Policy responses to the coronavirus constitute a case study of the problem of policymaker ignorance. We argue that political re…Read more
  •  40
    "F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics is an exploration of an important problem that has largely been ignored: the problem of policymaker ignorance, and the limits of political epistemology. Scott Scheall explores Hayek's attitude to the philosophy of science and political philosophy, arguing that Hayek defended a philosophy of science that implied certain potential dangers of politicized science, and that his political philosophy established the potential dangers of misapplying scientif…Read more
  •  272
    The Priority of the Epistemic
    Episteme 18 (4): 726-737. 2021.
    Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor’s menu, while courses of action that seem to bear comparatively heavy epistemic burdens are systematically discounted in an actor’s menu relative to options that appear less epistemically burdensome. That ignorance se…Read more
  •  448
    Epistemic Burdens, Moral Intimacy, and Surrogate Decision Making
    with Parker Crutchfield
    American Journal of Bioethics 20 (2): 59-61. 2020.
    Berger (forthcoming) states that moral intimacy is important in applying the best interests standard. But what he calls moral intimacy requires that someone has overcome epistemic burdens needed to represent the patient. We argue elsewhere that good surrogate decision-making is first and foremost a matter of overcoming epistemic burdens, or those obstacles that stand in the way of a surrogate decision-maker knowing what a patient wants and how to satisfy those preferences. Berger’s notion of mor…Read more
  •  13
    Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (edited book)
    with Luca Fiorito and Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak
    Emerald Publishing. 2018.
    Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (RHETM) is a journal/book series dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to a broad range of topics related to the history and methodology of economics. Volumes are divided into four parts: a monothematic section dedicated to research articles focused on a particular issue in the journal’s core fields of interest, a section including research articles of a more general nature, a section of newly-discovered archival materials, and a s…Read more
  •  770
    Epistemic burdens and the incentives of surrogate decision-makers
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (4): 613-621. 2019.
    We aim to establish the following claim: other factors held constant, the relative weights of the epistemic burdens of competing treatment options serve to determine the options that patient surrogates pursue. Simply put, surrogates confront an incentive, ceteris paribus, to pursue treatment options with respect to which their knowledge is most adequate to the requirements of the case. Regardless of what the patient would choose, options that require more knowledge than the surrogate possesses (…Read more
  •  174
    F.A. Hayek argued that the sciences of complex phenomena, including (perhaps especially) economics, are limited to incomplete “explanations of the principle” and “pattern predictions.” According to Hayek, these disciplines suffer from (what I call) a data problem, i.e., the hopelessness of populating theoretical models with data adequate to full explanations and precise predictions. In Hayek’s terms, explanations in these fields are always a matter of “degree.” However, Hayek’s methodology impli…Read more
  •  19
    What is extreme about Mises’s extreme apriorism?
    Journal of Economic Methodology 24 (3): 226-249. 2017.
    There is something extreme about Ludwig von Mises’s methodological apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises’s epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have neglected what is extreme about Mises’s apriorism. Thus, the argument is directed less against Mises than against those contributions to the secondary literature that assert his methodolog…Read more
  •  365
    Hayek's Epistemic Theory of Industrial Fluctuations
    History of Economic Ideas (1): 101-122. 2015.
    F.A. Hayek essentially quit economic theory and gave up the phenomena of industrial fluctuations as an explicit object of theoretical investigation following the publication of his last work in technical economics, 1941’s The Pure Theory of Capital. Nonetheless, several of Hayek’s more methodologically-oriented writings bear important implications for economic phenomena, especially those of industrial fluctuations. Decisions (usually, for Hayek, of a political nature) taken on the basis of a “pr…Read more
  •  128
    Later Wittgenstein and the Problem of Easy Knowledge
    Philosophical Investigations 34 (3): 268-286. 2010.
    Consider the following epistemological principle:KR: A knowledge source K can yield knowledge for subject S only if S knows K is reliable.Traditional epistemologists face a dilemma: either reject KR and confront what Stewart Cohen calls “the Problem of Easy Knowledge” or embrace KR and deny that unreflective beings can possess knowledge. In order to avoid this dilemma, an epistemological theory must allow for knowledge on the part of unreflective beings without falling prey to the problem of eas…Read more
  •  464
    Hayek the Apriorist?
    Journal of the History of Economic Thought 87-110. 2015.
    The paper aims to establish that Terence Hutchison’s argument in The Politics and Philosophy of Economics (1981) to the effect that the young F.A. Hayek maintained a methodological position markedly similar to that of Ludwig von Mises fails to establish the relevant conclusion. The first problem with Hutchison’s argument is that it is not clear exactly what conclusion he meant to establish with regard to the methodological views of the two paragons of 20th century Austrian economics. Mises (in)f…Read more
  •  340
    From the early-1950s on, F.A. Hayek was concerned with the development of a methodology of sciences that study systems of complex phenomena. Hayek argued that the knowledge that can be acquired about such systems is, in virtue of their complexity (and the comparatively narrow boundaries of human cognitive faculties), relatively limited. The paper aims to elucidate the implications of Hayek’s methodology with respect to the specific dimensions along which the scientist’s knowledge of some complex…Read more
  •  398
    A Hayekian Explanation of Hayek's 'Epistemic Turn'
    Economic Thought 4 (2): 32. 2015.
    The present essay aims to account for F.A. Hayek's oft-noted 'turn' away from technical economics to concerns of a more philosophical nature. In particular, the paper seeks an explanatory principle that reconciles various elements of both continuity and discontinuity in Hayek's intellectual development, especially with respect to the evolution of his arguments concerning economic fluctuations. The essay uncovers such an explanatory principle in Hayek's own methodology of sciences of complex phen…Read more
  •  619
    The present essay addresses the epistemic difficulties involved in achieving consensus with respect to the Hayek–Keynes debate. It is argued that the empirical implications of the relevant theories are such that, regardless of what is observed, both theories can be interpreted as true, or at least, as not falsified. The essay explicates the respects in which the empirical evidence underdetermines the choice between the relevant theories. In particular, it is argued both that there are convenient…Read more