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61Philosophy of economics (edited book)North Holland. 2012.This volume serves as a detailed introduction for those new to the field as well as a rich source of new insights and potential research agendas for those already engaged with the philosophy of economics.
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8The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline's traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism and…Read more
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21Scientific Imperialism: Exploring the Boundaries of Interdisciplinarity (edited book)Routledge. 2019.The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline’s traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism an…Read more
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126On the structure of explanatory unification: the case of geographical economicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (2): 185-195. 2009.A newly emerged field within economics, known as geographical economics claims to have provided a unified approach to the study of spatial agglomerations at different spatial scales by showing how these can be traced back to the same basic economic mechanisms. We analyze this contemporary episode of explanatory unification in relation to major philosophical accounts of unification. In particular, we examine the role of argument patterns in unifying derivations, the role of ontological conviction…Read more
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77Interdisciplinarity in action: philosophy of science perspectivesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (3): 323-326. 2016.Interdisciplinarity has become a dominant research policy imperative1 – exercised by European Research Council and other funding agencies at different scales – and a substantial topic in science studies fields outside philosophy of science, including science education, research management (particularly team management) and scientometrics. Philosophers of science have only recently begun to dedicate more attention to this feature of contemporary science. The present collection of studies aspires …Read more
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61Investigating Interdisciplinary Practice: Methodological Challenges (Introduction)Perspectives on Science 27 (4): 545-552. 2019.Interdisciplinarity is one of the most prominent ideas driving science and research policy today.1 It is applied widely as a conception of what particularly creative and socially relevant research processes should consist of, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, or elsewhere. Its advocates, many of whom are located in current science and research administration themselves, are using ideas of interdisciplinarity to reshape university organization and research fund…Read more
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22Introduction to the special issue: papers from the IX INEM Conference in HelsinkiJournal of Economic Methodology 21 (1): 1-2. 2014.Following an established tradition, the current special issue collects five articles that originate from papers presented at the IX Conference of the International Network for Economic Method. The conference took place in Helsinki on 1–3 September 2011 and was hosted by TINT (Trends and Tensions in Intellectual Integration), University of Helsinki. The conference was successful both in terms of the number of participants and the quality of the presentations. Although the sample of papers that ma…Read more
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75Extra-academic transdisciplinarity and scientific pluralism: what might they learn from one another?European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (3): 419-444. 2016.The paper looks at challenges related to the ideas of integration and knowledge systems in extra-academic transdisciplinarity. Philosophers of science are only starting to pay attention to the increasingly common practice of introducing extra-academic perspectives or engaging extra-academic parties in academic knowledge production. So far the rather scant philosophical discussion on the subject has mainly concentrated on the question whether such engagement is beneficial in science or not. Meanw…Read more
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669Introduction: Interdisciplinary model exchangesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 48 52-59. 2014.The five studies of this special section investigate the role of models and similar representational tools in interdisciplinarity. These studies were all written by philosophers of science, who focused on interdisciplinary episodes between disciplines and sub-disciplines ranging from physics, chemistry and biology to the computational sciences, sociology and economics. The reasons we present these divergent studies in a collective form are three. First, we want to establish model-exchange as a k…Read more
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22Notes on economics imperialism and norms of scientific inquiryRevue de Philosophie Économique 21 (1): 95-127. 2021.L’impérialisme économique, entendu comme une certaine relation entre disciplines scientifiques, est défendu par certains et rejeté par d’autres. Ces réactions sont toutefois rarement fondées sur des valeurs et des normes de recherche scientifique explicites. Or, lorsque l’on s’efforce de les rendre explicites, ces normes se révèlent plus complexes et plus floues qu’il n’y paraît. Certains considèrent qu’elles font partie intégrante de la définition du concept d’impérialisme économique ; d’autres…Read more
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19This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways –…Read more
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58Reflections on the Ontology of MoneyJournal of Social Ontology 6 (2): 245-263. 2020.The suggestions outlined here include the following. Money is a bundle of institutionally sustained causal powers. Money is an institutional universal instantiated in generic currencies and particular money tokens. John Searle’s account of institutional facts is not helpful for understanding the nature of money as an institution (while it may help to illuminate aspects of the nature of currencies and money particulars). The money universal is not a social convention in David Lewis’s sense (while…Read more
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23Notes on economics imperialism and norms of scientific inquiryRevue de Philosophie Économique 21 (1): 95-127. 2021.L’impérialisme économique, entendu comme une certaine relation entre disciplines scientifiques, est défendu par certains et rejeté par d’autres. Ces réactions sont toutefois rarement fondées sur des valeurs et des normes de recherche scientifique explicites. Or, lorsque l’on s’efforce de les rendre explicites, ces normes se révèlent plus complexes et plus floues qu’il n’y paraît. Certains considèrent qu’elles font partie intégrante de la définition du concept d’impérialisme économique ; d’autres…Read more
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29Puzzled by Idealizations and Understanding Their FunctionsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (3): 215-237. 2020.Idealization is ubiquitous in human cognition, and so is the inclination to be puzzled by it: what to make of ideal gas, infinitely large populations, homo economicus, perfectly just society, known to violate matters of fact? This is apparent in social science theorizing, recent philosophy of science analyzing scientific modeling, and the debate over ideal and non-ideal theory in political philosophy. I will offer a set of concepts and principles to improve transparency about the precise content…Read more
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42Rights and wrongs of economic modelling: refining RodrikJournal of Economic Methodology 25 (3): 218-236. 2018.ABSTRACTThis is a critical discussion and proposed refinement of the inspiring account of the successes and failures of economic modelling sketched in Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules. The refinements make use of a systematic framework of the structure of scientific modelling. The issues include distinguishing the discipline of economics from the behaviour and attitudes of economists as targets of normative assessment; nature and sources of success and failure in modelling; the key role of model co…Read more
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16Two philosophies of the rhetoric of economicsIn Rhetoric and Critical Thinking, Routledge. 1993.
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180On the method of isolation in economicsPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 26 19-54. 1992.
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7819Filosofia y metodologia an la economiaIn Juan José Jardón Urrieta (ed.), Temas de Teoria Economica y so Metodo, Universidade De Santiago De Compostela. 2008.Este documento analiza las siguientes cuestiones: 1) La metodología de la economía y su actual institucionalización. 2) La definición de Economía. 3) Las perspectivas de los economistas acerca de la Economía, sus métodos y justificación. 4) Comprobación y progreso: Popper y Lakatos.5) Los modelos y sus supuestos. 6) Persuasión retórica y verdad. 7) La Economía como un recurso para la Filosofía de la Ciencia. 8) Expansionismo explicativo y relaciones interdisciplinares.
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153Isolation, idealization and truth in economicsPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 38 147-168. 1994.Challenges the widely held view that good models must necessarily be simplifications and hence cannot be true. This is done by distinguishing between whole truth (complete description) and truth (essential description, attained by the method of isolation).
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554Science as a Free Market: A Reflexivity Test in an Economics of EconomicsPerspectives on Science 7 (4): 486-509. 1999.One prominent aspect of recent developments in science studies has been the increasing employment of economic concepts and models in the depiction of science, including the notion of a free market for scientific ideas. This gives rise to the issue of the adequacy of the conceptual resources of economics for this purpose. This paper suggests an adequacy test by putting a version of free market economics to a self-referential scrutiny. The outcome is that either free market economics is self-defea…Read more
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47Is Coase a Realist?Philosophy of the Social Sciences 28 (1): 5-31. 1998.Ronald Coase has been a vigorous critic of mainstream economic theory, arguing that it is unrealistic and that a good theory is realistic. The attributes "realistic" and "unrealistic" appear in three senses at least in Coase: one related to narrow ness and breadth; another related to abstracting from particularities (and the issue of "blackboard economics"); and the third related to correspondence with the legal. This does not yet make Coase an advocate of realism. It is therefore separately arg…Read more
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684Scientific realism and ontologyIn Steven N. Durlauf & Lawrence E. Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics : volume 7 : real balances - stochastic volatility models, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.Economists customarily talk about the ‘realism’ of economic models and of their assumptions and make descriptive and prescriptive judgements about them: this model has more realism in it than that, the realism of assumptions does not matter, and so on. This is not the way philosophers mostly use the term ‘realism’ thus there is a major terminological discontinuity between the two disciplines. The following remarks organise and critically elaborate some of the philosophical usages of the term and…Read more
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615Realisms and their opponentsIn N. J. Smelser & B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, . pp. 19--12815. 2001.In everyday usage, ‘realism’ is often used as a name for a practically or epistemically low-ambition attitude, while ‘idealism’ is often taken to denote a highambition—if not utopian—attitude. In philosophcal usage, mostly, it is the other way around: those who are called realists tend to claim more than their opponents—they are the philosophical optimists. Within philosophy itself, ‘realism’ adopts a variety of interrelated and contested meanings. It is used as the name for doctrines about issu…Read more
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38Mark Blaug's unrealistic crusade for realistic economicsErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 6 (3): 87-103. 2013.Mark Blaug’s normative methodology of economics is an attempt to articulate certain intuitions about how economic science could be improved by making it more “realistic”. I discuss two such articulations, one in terms of falsificationist principles, the other in terms of an alleged trade-off between relevance and mathematical rigour. My conclusion is that Blaug’s methodology is itself unrealistic, both descriptively and normatively. His (well intended) methodological prescriptions for the improv…Read more
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63Contested modelling: The case of economicsIn Ulrich Gähde, Stephan Hartmann & Jörn Henning Wolf (eds.), Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity, De Gruyter. pp. 87-106. 2013.Economics is a culturally and politically powerful and contested discipline, and it has been that way as long as it has existed. For some commentators, economics is the "queen of the social sciences", while others view it as a "dismal science" (and both of these epithets allow for diverse interpretations; see Mäki 2002). Economics is also a discipline that deals with a dynamically complex subject matter and has a tradition of reducing this complexity by using systematic procedures of simplificat…Read more
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342MISSing the World. Models as Isolations and Credible Surrogate SystemsErkenntnis 70 (1): 29-43. 2009.This article shows how the MISS account of models—as isolations and surrogate systems—accommodates and elaborates Sugden’s account of models as credible worlds and Hausman’s account of models as explorations. Theoretical models typically isolate by means of idealization, and they are representatives of some target system, which prompts issues of resemblance between the two to arise. Models as representations are constrained both ontologically (by their targets) and pragmatically (by the purposes…Read more
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77Aspects of realism about economicsTheoria 13 (2): 301-319. 1998.A few aspects of the issue of realism are addressed in the context of a social science. The paper looks for adjustments needed in our conceptions of scientiflc realism to accommodate some peculiarities of economics. Ontologically speaking, economics appears to be closely linked to commonsense conceptions of the world, thus the problem of theoretical concepts does not emerge in the same form it is often taken to exist in physics. Theory formation is largely a matter of idealization and isolation …Read more
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University of HelsinkiDepartment of Philosophy (Theoretical Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy in Swedish)Retired faculty
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Social Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
General Philosophy of Science |