Seán M. Muller

A recent strand of literature argues that the importance of epistemic virtues is overstated and that knowledge generation and transmission benefit from traits that can be characterised as epistemic vices. This goes against the stance of the research integrity literature, which takes it as given that epistemic vices are bad and should be combated. Arguments ‘in defence of vice’ utilise qualitative, historical cases of epistemic vice that contributed to desirable scientific outcomes or knowledge transmission, and formal models of scientific research in which virtues can be harmful and vices beneficial. A typical stance is that negative effects of individual-level vices will be addressed at the level of the scientific or research community. I argue that singular case studies and highly stylised formal models only demonstrate possibility results with no established relation to the actual dynamics of research or even to the universe of possible models. While historical evidence does serve as a counterexample to the claim that epistemic virtues are always beneficial and epistemic vices are always harmful, that extreme stance is not needed to endorse epistemic virtues and integrity. The harms of basic epistemic vices to the modern research enterprise are evident from considering their implications for components of the research process such as peer review. While economics is the inspiration for many formal modelling exercises, the literature neglects economic literature on market failures, the importance of social norms, and trust. Recent contributions have not provided an adequate basis for treating research integrity and traditional epistemic virtues as anything less than fundamental to the process of inquiry and knowledge generation.

Recent work has deployed the logic of jury theorems to assert that crowd-sourced peer review is superior to traditional peer review. That argument is shown to fail by counterexample: in a model of scientific communities with incumbents that favour work consistent with their own, the probability of genuinely revolutionary ideas being published tends to zero as the size of the “jury” increases. A related problem is that the fundamental purpose of peer review in the context of intellectual inquiry and progress is given inadequate consideration. Remedying that calls into question the appropriateness of the jury theorem logic. The broader argument made for crowd-sourced peer review suffers from problems on three additional dimensions. First, it does not clearly establish what the problems are with traditional peer review that need to be resolved. Second, its appeals to diversity are suspect, contradicted by the counterexample, and arguably inadmissible because they find no expression in the formal model used. Finally, the assertion that these matters can be resolved by empirical evidence from implementation of alternative systems is premised on questionable epistemic assumptions that are neither stated nor defended. The conclusion drawn is that no case has been established for the implementation of crowd-sourced peer review, and claims made in that regard evince a concerning epistemic gap between the soundness of their arguments and the strength of their proposals.

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields.

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in literature on decolonisation of knowledge. The impression often given in recent literature is of wholesale neglect of the concerns of the decolonisation literature in what might be called ‘Western thought’ of preceding decades. This paper argues that Feyerabend was a notable figure within Western epistemic communities who expressed positions analogous to those of proponents of decolonisation. The first section presents the most striking contributions from Feyerabend’s work that, I suggest, bear on questions of decolonisation. Four specific issues are identified based on those: the curriculum and the role of universities; the inspirational role of student protests; the concept of ‘epistemicide’; and, indigenous knowledge systems. The second section suggests a range of limitations of, and weaknesses in, Feyerabend’s analysis: no substantive engagement with history or literature on decolonisation; implicitly accepting the Сclaimed inherent association of science, rationalism and various forms of modernity with Western countries and cultures; the (rhetorical) construction of an unnecessary binary choice between science and traditional knowledge systems; underplaying agency through a form of othering; creating an unnecessarily stark binary of Western science and non-Western indigenous knowledge; and, as a consequence of all these, providing no substantive analysis of how science might be integrated with other knowledge systems and cultures. The concluding section provides a brief summary and identifies areas for future work.

Whether economics warrants public trust depends on the extent to which assertions by economists can be deemed credible. Three examples from microeconomics are examined to assess how the discipline performs in this regard. First, a purely theoretical argument with broad conceptual implications: a quasi-evolutionary argument for rational choice based on the notion of money pumps. Second, a modelling-related claim with significant social implications: economists’ objection to minimum wages based on a simple supply-demand model. Third, methodological choices with implications for all empirical work in microeconomics: the recent proclamation of a ‘credibility revolution’ in applied microeconomics through the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods. These are assessed against proposed criteria for credibility: epistemic validity, epistemic reliability, and epistemic reflexivity. On the basis of the performance of the discipline against these criteria on the examples considered, I conclude that public distrust of economics and economists can be well-founded.

The core thesis of this book is that to understand the implications of incentive structures in modern higher education, we require a deeper understanding of associated issues in the philosophy of science. Significant public and philanthropic resources are directed towards various forms of research in the hope of addressing key societal problems. That view, and the associated allocation of resources, relies on the assumption that academic research will tend towards finding truth – or at least selecting the best approximations of it. The present book builds on, and extends, contributions in philosophy and higher education to argue that this assumption is misplaced: with serious implications for modern higher education and its role in informing societal decisions and government policy. The book develops a philosophical foundation for the analysis of the connection between higher education incentives, scientific progress and societal outcomes. That in turn is used to demonstrate how the current approach to incentivising intellectual and scientific progress is likely not only to fail, but in fact to cause harm on the very dimensions it purports to improve. The arguments presented are illustrated with examples from medicine and academic economics, making the book one of the first to examine issues of scientific progress and social consequences across the human and social sciences. In doing so, it develops a novel critique of modern economics that in turn provides a more philosophically substantive foundation for popular critiques of economics than has existed to date.

Reichenbach’s ‘principle of the common cause’ is a foundational assumption of some important recent contributions to quantitative social science methodology but no similar principle appears in econometrics. Angrist et al. has argued that the principle is necessary for instrumental variables methods in econometrics, and Angrist Krueger builds a framework using it that he proposes as a means of resolving an important methodological dispute among econometricians. Through analysis of instrumental variables methods and the issue of multicollinearity, we aim to show that the relationship of the principle to econometric methods is more nuanced than implied by previous work but nevertheless may make a valuable contribution to the coherence and validity of existing methods.

Reluctance to endorse mask wearing to slow transmission of SARS-Cov-2 has been rationalized by the failure of randomized control trials (RCTs) to provide supportive evidence. In contrast, a mechanism-based approach suggests that mask wearing should be expected to reduce transmission: so that contrary evidence from RCTs likely reflects the need to focus policy attention on addressing interacting or mediating factors that offset the basic positive effect. The differing conclusions that result from these two approaches reflect the limitations of RCT-based approaches that are compounded in scenarios, such as pandemics, where urgent decisions are required with limited evidence.

Reichenbach's 'principle of the common cause' is a foundational assumption of some important recent contributions to quantitative social science methodology but no similar principle appears in econometrics. Reiss (2005) has argued that the principle is necessary for instrumental variables methods in econometrics, and Pearl (2009) builds a framework using it that he proposes as a means of resolving an important methodological dispute among econometricians. We aim to show, through analysis of the main problem instrumental variables methods are used to resolve, that the relationship of the principle to econometric methods is more nuanced than implied by previous work, but nevertheless may make a valuable contribution to the coherence and validity of existing methods.