[You can read the first part here] (3) Positivism is the (philosophico-political) thesis that real knowledge reduces to the domain of established positive facts, and that all the other claims someone may make must not be taken as knowledge, but, at best, as more or less reasonable opinion . Positivism in this sense is a […]
(1) Imagine you are watching on the TV your favourite football match, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona, and that you can choose on your remote two digital channels in which the game is being broadcast, Telemadrid and TV3 (the Catalan public station). The experience of watching the match in one or other of these two channels […]
In this last article of the series about free will, I am going to defend what we can call ‘the regret hypotheses’, which basically asserts that the feeling of regret is the basic, and best, explanation of why we think we are free, in the sense (as we saw in the first article of the […]
The mysteries of quantum physics have been breeding ground for thousands of attempts to connect any kind of weird hypotheses to ‘science’. The underlying inferential schema in all these attempts seems to be something like the following: X is difficult to understand, and some common-sense intuitions and arguments seem to count against X Quantum physics […]
Amongst the many things science is useful for, explanation stands within the top. We use scientific knowledge to describe the world, to map it, to predict it, and to guide our actions thanks to the predictions about the consequences of our actions, but we also want science to provide us explanations, to help us understand […]
Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues, in the early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock, and whose brain electrical waves were […]
One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will. Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in general, is making the notion of ‘free will’ less and less tenable, it seems that the major difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with […]
The most distinctive feature of modern economics is probably its reliance on the methodology of mathematical model building. The final aim of scientific model building is illuminating real phenomena; furthermore, models are basically logical arguments, whose main virtue is that they allow us to see very clearly what follows, and also what does not follow […]
I will end this survey of the main contributions to the economics of scientific knowledge (ESK) by discussing the works which attempt to offer a more or less systematic conception of the process of scientific discovery; in this entry, I will talk about ‘institutionalist’ theories, i.e., those that abstain from using mathematical models. The first […]
Traditionally, economics is not only about the optimisation of some magnitudes, be they utility, profits, wealth, or social welfare. Beyond the assumption that economic agents are rational beings who always try to make the best possible choice, there is the indisputable fact that the objects of economic research are social phenomena, that have to do […]