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Civilization and Its Discounts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Philip Mirowski
Philip Mirowski
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Recent breakthroughs in the history and sociology of science have begun to help us to appreciate the vast complexity and intricate character of empirical endeavours in the sciences. The days when philosophers could blandly gesture towards “observation statements” or “falsification,” as if they were some readily understood phenomena or set of procedures, are gone, happily. This does not mean we can merely use the Duhem-Quine thesis as a shibboleth, however: we are now much more sensitive to immense difficulties in establishing viable claims to replication (Chen 1994) or establishing the absence of selectivity bias, or convincing others of adequacy of experimental controls. Yet, even so, I would still assert that modern science studies, with only a very few exceptions, have ignored the problem of the constitution of error in the context of precision quantitative measurement. While rather broad claims have been made concerning measurement by Hacking, Cartwright, Franklin and others, none goes so far as to examine the actual manipulation of the numerical data. More distressingly, in the areas of economics and economic methodology, we have not even got so far as have the researchers in science studies. This fact alone should provide grounds for scepticism about the claim in Cartwright (1989) that philosophy of scientific inference has something to learn from the history of econometrics.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Summer 1995 , pp. 541 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995

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