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74Costs and Benefits of Diverse Plurality in EconomicsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences. forthcoming.The literature on pluralism in economics has focused on the benefits expected from the plurality of theories, methods, and frameworks. This overlooks half of the picture: the costs. Neither have the multifarious costs been systematically analyzed in philosophy of science. We begin rectifying this neglect. We discuss how the benefits of plurality and diversity in science presuppose distinct types of plurality and how various benefit and plurality types are associated with different types of costs…Read more
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62Philosophy 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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9The 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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22Scientific 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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98On 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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81Interdisciplinarity 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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76Investigating 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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24Introduction 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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79Extra-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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727Introduction: 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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25Notes 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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28This 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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64Reflections 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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28Notes 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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34Puzzled 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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50Rights 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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17Two philosophies of the rhetoric of economicsIn Rhetoric and Critical Thinking, Routledge. 1993.
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24Models, metaphors, narrative, and rhetoric: Philosophical aspectsIn Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier. pp. 15--9931. 2001.Contemporary philosophers of science argue that models are a major vehicle of scientific knowledge. This applies to highly theoretical inquiry as well as to experimental or otherwise observational research, in both the natural and the social sciences. Making this claim is not yet very illuminating, given that there is a large variety of different kinds of model, and a number of ways in which they function in the service of science. The ambiguity of the term ‘model’ and the multiplicity of kinds …Read more
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1124It is argued that rather than a well defined F-Twist, Milton Friedman’s “Methodology of positive economics” offers an F-Mix: a pool of ambiguous and inconsistent ingredients that can be used for putting together a number of different methodological positions. This concerns issues such as the very concept of being unrealistic, the goal of predictive tests, the as-if formulation of theories, explanatory unification, social construction, and more. Both friends and foes of Friedman’s essay have igno…Read more
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71Explanatory Unification: Double and DoubtfulPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 31 (4): 488-506. 2001.Explanatory unification—the urge to “explain much by little”—serves as an ideal of theorizing not only in natural sciences but also in the social sciences, most notably in economics. The ideal is occasionally challenged by appealing to the complexity and diversity of social systems and processes in space and time. This article proposes to accommodate such doubts by making a distinction between two kinds of unification and suggesting that while such doubts may be justified in regard to mere deriv…Read more
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45Realism, Economics, and RhetoricEconomics and Philosophy 4 (1): 167. 1988.Economists often seem to hold the belief that it is in the nature of a model that it cannot but be false. Once this view is adopted, any further truth talk in connection to models becomes obsolete or irrelevant. I want to resist this conclusion. I grant that a model may appear to be false in the sense that the world does not seem to be the way it is being represented in the model. In earlier work, I have entertained the idea that what appears to be false may be true after all, and I have shown s…Read more
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128Realism and antirealism about economicsIn Handbook of the Philosophy of Economics, . pp. 3--24. 2012.Economics is a controversial scientific discipline. One of the traditional issues that has kept economists and their critics busy is about whether economic theories and models are about anything real at all. The critics have argued that economic models are based on assumptions that are so utterly unrealistic that those models become purely fictional and have nothing informative to say about the real world. Many also claim that an antirealist instrumentalism (allegedly outlined by Milton Friedman…Read more
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85Symposium on explanations and social ontology 2: Explanatory ecumenism and economics imperialismEconomics and Philosophy 18 (2): 235-257. 2002.In a series of insightful publications, Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson have argued for an explanatory ecumenism that is designed to justify a variety of types of social scientific explanation of different , including structural and rational choice explanations. Their arguments are put in terms of different kinds of explanatory information; the distinction between causal efficacy, causal relevance and explanatory relevance within their program model of explanation; and virtual reality and resili…Read more
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7877Filosofia 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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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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158Isolation, 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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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 |