I would like to think that the first work devoted to something that we might call ‘the problem of scientific method’ was written by Democritus (around 460-370 BC), the author the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle were constructed against , and whose ideas were so revolutionary that it seems that nobody in the last […]
Since this will be a series of entries about something as weird as the ‘prehistory’ of philosophy of science, I think readers deserve a little explanation about what I do exactly mean by that. ‘Philosophy of science’, to begin with, is a topic that took its current status as an autonomous academic field (I mean […]
As we saw in the previous entry, the fundamental role of our beliefs consists in telling us what consequences will most probably our actions have, given the current circumstances . Any influence from any factor that leads to systematic biases in those predictions will be detrimental for the very same reason why we want to […]
Ideology is a concept that has always made me feel a bit perplexed. I have thought a lot about this question in the last weeks, when comparing the reactions and suggestions of different people about the shocking events the world is now involved into. Why do people have so much disparate ideas about the facts […]
Doing Ancient History is a difficult job. You may be thinking about the lot of hard work historians have to perform in order to learn just a little bit of what happened millennia ago, but I would like to invite you to consider another more fundamental obstacle in a discipline like this: the fact that […]
In the previous entry, I presented some critical thesis by historian Ylva Hasselberg regarding the applicability of economic theoretic tools to the study of the social construction of scientific knowledge. To those claims, I think we can respond with the following arguments. In the first place, we have to make a clear and emphatic distinction […]
As readers of this blog will surely know, the economics of scientific knowledge is a topic on which I have worked extensively, and also written here not a few entries. Now I want to tackle a common objection to that field in itself: the idea that studying science “as if it were a market” commits […]
2020 marks exactly half a century from the publication of one of the most important papers in the crossing of economics, philosophy, and political science (and, taking into account that it barely contained six skimpy pages, probably one of the most influential papers per page ever): Amartya Sen’s “The impossibility of a Paretian liberal”. It […]
In a recent entry, I provided a summary of Brian Caplan’s views (in his book The Case against Education ) about the main evils of our contemporary education system. In a nutshell, the main problem is, in the first place, that most of what is taught in schools and colleges is basically not learnt, or […]
In the first entry of this series, I briefly explained Christian List’s attempt to vindicate the ontological and scientific reality of intentional action as a real emergent phenomenon. In a nutshell, intentional, deliberate and often ‘rational’ action is not a fiction (as some skeptics like Alex Rosenberg have defended ), but a totally legitimate inhabitant […]