Roughly speaking all economists can be divided into two groups--those who agree with Milton Friedman and those who do not. Both groups, however, espouse the view that science is a series of approximations to a demonstrated accord with reality. Methodological controversy in economics is now merely a Conventionalist argument over which comes first--simplicity or generality. Furthermore, this controversy in its current form is not compatible with one important new and up and coming economic (welfare) theory called "the theory of the (...) Second Best." In this paper I offer a Second Best meta-theory that says that (1) any compromise between simplicity and generality must yield a theory which is "third best" by these Conventionalist criteria; and (2) there exists a better way than a compromise. (shrink)

Concern about the role and the limits of modeling has heightened after repeated questions were raised regarding the dependability and suitability of the models that were used in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash. In this book, Lawrence Boland provides an overview of the practices of and the problems faced by model builders to explain the nature of models, the modeling process, and the possibility for and nature of their testing. In a reflective manner, the author raises serious (...) questions about the assumptions and judgments that model builders make in constructing models. In making his case, he examines the traditional microeconomics-macroeconomics separation with regard to how theoretical models are built and used and how they interact, paying particular attention to the use of equilibrium concepts in macroeconomic models and game theory and to the challenges involved in building empirical models, testing models, and using models to test theoretical explanations. (shrink)

This book is about forming effective critiques of neoclassical economics. Its focus is on constructive criticism of the foundations neoclassical theory, beginning with what Alfred Marshall called the `Principles of Economics'. It concludes that there is still much that can be done to make neoclassical economics more realistic.

Until quite recently, some economic methodologists (particularly, those who began their careers in the late 1970s) were of the opinion that Karl Popper was misguided about economics. Some others claimed that Popper said little about economics. Yet, many economics students who began their appreciation of Popper after reading his Open Society and Its Enemies have quickly realized how easy that book is to understand because it is a generalization of neoclassical economics in terms of both methodological individualism and situational analysis. (...) While today it might be easy to complain that basing one's understanding of Popper on neoclassical economics leads to a narrow and useless appreciation of Popper, this too is misleading. The problem is not neoclassical economics but neoclassical economists. After all, Popper himself thought the best way to teach economists about his views concerning methodology was to emphasize that his views can easily be understood as a generalization of neoclassical economics. (shrink)

continues to receive many reviews. Judging by recent reviews, this is a very controversial book. The question considered here is, how can one fairly review a controversial book—particularly when the book is widely popular and, for a history of economic thought book, a best seller? This essay uses Mirowski’s book as a case study to propose one answer for this question. In the process, it will examine how others seem to have answered this question. Key Words: methodology • reviews • (...) Mirowski • Machine Dreams. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

A general practice research project on ethics is underway at the University of New South Wales, funded by GPEP (General Practice Evaluation Program, Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, GPEP 386). Ethical issues, as defined and explored by general practitioners and consumers, are being examined across four areas of Sydney.So far, telephone interviews have been conducted (64% response rate) with a random sample of general practitioners (GPs). Face-to-face interviews have been conducted with 107 consumers, randomly sampled using ABS collection (...) district information. Focus groups have been formed to discuss acceptable solutions to GP and consumer identified ethical issues. This report will report on some preliminary findings to date and will explore professional and consumer roles in the formation of ethical solutions. (shrink)

A general practice research project on ethics is underway at the University of New South Wales, funded by GPEP. Ethical issues, as defined and explored by general practitioners and consumers, are being examined across four areas of Sydney.So far, telephone interviews have been conducted with a random sample of general practitioners. Face-to-face interviews have been conducted with 107 consumers, randomly sampled using ABS collection district information. Focus groups have been formed to discuss acceptable solutions to GP and consumer identified ethical (...) issues. This report will report on some preliminary findings to date and will explore professional and consumer roles in the formation of ethical solutions. (shrink)

This article considers `critique' as performative, being on the one hand a reiterative performance, that enacts the `critic' through the act of critique, and on the other hand reflecting the constitution of the subject. While this approach takes on the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's work, it differs by refusing critique — or its correlates; parody, subversion or similar — any special status. Like any other performance critique is taken here as a cultural practice, as a Foucauldian `technique of self', (...) though the complex genealogy of such a technique lies outside the scope of this article. In order to illustrate this argument I interpret a number of Butler's prefaces, interviews and digressions which diverge from her own theoretical framework, and argue that these `fictions' arise from critical `disavowals': that is, a `self-transformative' turn against power. The subjective `crisis' that prompts critique is then elaborated by comparison to Girard's work on imitation and sacrifice. (shrink)

This article addresses contemporary concerns about critique through an interpretation of the “writing prophets.” This approach draws on Foucauldian genealogy and suggests that alongside Greek parrhesia, Old Testament prophecy is a key forerunner of contemporary critical discourses. Our analysis draws upon Weber’s interpretative historical sociology and Gadamerian hermeneutics but shifts the emphasis from charisma to critique, through a direct engagement with prophetic texts. In particular, prophetic discourse claims to reveal injustice and idolatry and speaks from a position of transcendence within (...) immanent historical moments. Prophets position their own era as a moment of crisis, and themselves as liminal figures, opposed to the delusion of others and “false prophets” which resonates with contemporary conceptions of “ideology.” Rather than focusing on historical individuals, we approach prophecy as a discourse, multiple and hybrid, discontinuous, and contradictory, yet constituting a distinctive precursor which informs contemporary critique. (shrink)

Plausibility models are Kripke models that agents use to reason about knowledge and belief, both of themselves and of each other. Such models are used to interpret the notions of conditional belief, degrees of belief, and safe belief. The logic of conditional belief contains that modality and also the knowledge modality, and similarly for the logic of degrees of belief and the logic of safe belief. With respect to these logics, plausibility models may contain too much information. A proper notion (...) of bisimulation is required that characterises them. We define that notion of bisimulation and prove the required characterisations: on the class of image-finite and preimage-finite models, two pointed Kripke models are modally equivalent in either of the three logics, if and only if they are bisimilar. As a result, the information content of such a model can be similarly expressed in the logic of conditional belief, or the logic of degrees of belief, or that of safe belief. This, we found a surprising result. Still, that does not mean that the logics are equally expressive: the logics of conditional and degrees of belief are incomparable, the logics of degrees of belief and safe belief are incomparable, while the logic of safe belief is more expressive than the logic of conditional belief. In view of the result on bisimulation characterisation, this is an equally surprising result. We hope our insights may contribute to the growing community of formal epistemology and on the relation between qualitative and quantitative modelling. (shrink)

While Latour criticises the tautologies of the ‘sociologists of the social’ as an intellectual shortcut, here sociology in the broadest sense is reconsidered as informed by unrecognised theological ideas, inter alia. Durkheim’s classic account of religion, wherein ‘society is God’ is taken as a starting point to explore the intersection of sociology and theology. Thereafter the article examines three social theorists, Elias, Giddens and Boltanski, each of whom attempt a re-casting of sociology, yet rearticulate theological models. In particular, this includes (...) an ontological conception of society, structure or system in terms of over-arching and invisible forces which is derived – inter alia – from religious models of divine will and providential order, which incorporates human choice – or agency in contemporary parlance. Accompanying this ontology is an epistemology of deciphering ‘deeper’ or ‘structural’ or ‘transcendent’ aspects of society by observing trends, cases or culture, akin to divining the providential will by observing its manifestations, which can be conducted in a more critical or forgiving manner. By examining these theological strands which persist in sociology, this aim is not to critically repudiate them, but to recognise the productive contribution of these models of thinking to imagining the ‘social’. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright claims that "Causality is a hot topic today both in philosophy and economics." She may be right about philosophers, but not when it comes to economists. Cartwright talks about "economics" but nothing she says about it corresponds to what is taught in economics classes. Today, economics is dominated by model builders—but not all models involve econometrics. While all model builders do respect an endogenous-exogenous distinction between variables, this distinction will not be on the basis of which type of (...) variable "causes" which, but on which variables are "determined" (and hence explained) by the model and those which are not. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the use of event models for automated planning. Event models are the action defining structures used to define a semantics for dynamic epistemic logic. Using event models, two issues in planning can be addressed: Partial observability of the environment and knowledge. In planning, partial observability gives rise to an uncertainty about the world. For single-agent domains, this uncertainty can come from incomplete knowledge of the starting situation and from the nondeterminism of actions. In multi-agent domains, (...) an additional uncertainty arises from the fact that other agents can act in the world, causing changes that are not instigated by the agent itself. For an agent to successfully construct and execute plans in an uncertain environment, the most widely used formalism in the literature on automated planning is “belief states”: sets of different alternatives for the current state of the world. Epistemic logic is a significantly more expressive and theoretically better founded method for representing knowledge and ignorance about the world. Further, epistemic logic allows for planning according to the knowledge (and iterated knowledge) of other agents, allowing the specification of a more complex class of planning domains, than those simply concerned with simple facts about the world. We show how to model multi-agent planning problems using Kripke-models for representing world states, and event models for representing actions. Our mechanism makes use of slight modifications to these concepts, in order to model the internal view of agents, rather than that of an external observer. We define a type of planning domain called epistemic planning domains, a generalisation of classical planning domains, and show how epistemic planning can successfully deal with partial observability, nondeterminism, knowledge and multiple agents. Finally, we show epistemic planning to be decidable in the single-agent case, but only semi-decidable in the multi-agent case. (shrink)

Plausibility models are Kripke models that agents use to reason about knowledge and belief, both of themselves and of each other. Such models are used to interpret the notions of conditional belief, degrees of belief, and safe belief. The logic of conditional belief contains that modality and also the knowledge modality, and similarly for the logic of degrees of belief and the logic of safe belief. With respect to these logics, plausibility models may contain too much information. A proper notion (...) of bisimulation is required that characterises them. We define that notion of bisimulation and prove the required characterisations: on the class of image-finite and preimage-finite models, two pointed Kripke models are modally equivalent in either of the three logics, if and only if they are bisimilar. As a result, the information content of such a model can be similarly expressed in the logic of conditional belief, or the logic of degrees of belief, or that of safe belief. This, we found a surprising result. Still, that does not mean that the logics are equally expressive: the logics of conditional and degrees of belief are incomparable, the logics of degrees of belief and safe belief are incomparable, while the logic of safe belief is more expressive than the logic of conditional belief. In view of the result on bisimulation characterisation, this is an equally surprising result. We hope our insights may contribute to the growing community of formal epistemology and on the relation between qualitative and quantitative modelling. (shrink)

Criminalistics laboratories routinely provide cold hits in police investigations by comparing DNA profiles from crime scenes to offenders residing in the Combined DNA Index System. Forensic DNA analysis is often glamorized in popular culture, where the perpetrators are identified and crimes solved within a single television episode. In reality forensic DNA hits can identify perpetrators of violent offenses, link multiple crimes committed by the same individual, or exclude suspects and exonerate the falsely accused. Unlike the media portrayals, downstream activities after (...) a DNA identification or cold hit are often more complex. While the Federal Bureau of Investigation cites a national Data Bank of more than 7.2 million DNA profiles and 94,000 identifications nationwide, an in-depth analysis of public safety improvements made with CODIS is currently unavailable to forensic practitioners and public policy analysts. A review of case resolutions for 198 DNA database hits in San Francisco created performance metrics to provide a concrete measure of the effectiveness of DNA databasing efforts at the city and county level. (shrink)

We present a logic which we call Hybrid Duration Calculus. HDC is obtained by adding the following hybrid logical machinery to the Restricted Duration Calculus : nominals, satisfaction operators, down-arrow binder, and the global modality. RDC is known to be decidable, and in this paper we show that decidability is retained when adding the hybrid logical machinery. Decidability of HDC is shown by reducing the satisfiability problem to satisfiability of Monadic Second-Order Theory of Order. We illustrate the increased expressive power (...) obtained in hybridizing RDC by showing that HDC, in contrast to RDC, can express all of the 13 possible relations between intervals. (shrink)

Have employment equity programs achieved the goal of equity for women in the workplace? We argue that they have not because gender stereotypes still persist. In fact, they may have created resentment and antagonism towards successful women and employment equity initiatives. Arguments are developed for the Canadian government to create a self-regulating system, in which the government plays a role of educator as opposed to monitor.

In this paper we show how to formalise false-belief tasks like the Sally-Anne task and the second-order chocolate task in Dynamic Epistemic Logic. False-belief tasks are used to test the strength of the Theory of Mind of humans, that is, a human’s ability to attribute mental states to other agents. Having a ToM is known to be essential to human social intelligence, and hence likely to be essential to social intelligence of artificial agents as well. It is therefore important to (...) find ways of implementing a ToM in artificial agents, and to show that such agents can then solve false-belief tasks. In this paper, the approach is to use DEL as a formal framework for representing ToM, and use reasoning in DEL to solve false-belief tasks. In addition to formalising several false-belief tasks in DEL, the paper introduces some extensions of DEL itself: edge-conditioned event models and observability propositions. These extensions are introduced to provide better formalisations of the false-belief tasks, but expected to have independent future interest. (shrink)

Over the past decade, the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) has increased solvability of violent crimes by linking evidence DNA profiles to known offenders. At present, an in-depth analysis of the United States National DNA Data Bank effort has not assessed the success of this national public safety endeavor. Critics of this effort often focus on laboratory and police investigators unable to provide timely investigative support as a root cause(s) of CODIS' failure to increase public safety. By studying a group (...) of nearly 200 DNA cold hits obtained in SFPD criminal investigations from 2001–2006, three key performance metrics (Significance of Cold Hits, Case Progression & Judicial Resolution, and Potential Reduction of Future Criminal Activity) provide a proper context in which to define the impact of CODIS at the City and County level. Further, the analysis of a recidivist group of cold hit offenders and their past interaction with law enforcement established five noteworthy criminal case resolution trends; these trends signify challenges to CODIS in achieving meaningful case resolutions. CODIS' effectiveness and critical activities to support case resolutions are the responsibility of all criminal justice partners in order to achieve long-lasting public safety within the United States. (shrink)

In this paper we define a family of many-valued semantics for hybrid logic, where each semantics is based on a finite Heyting algebra of truth-values. We provide sound and complete tableau systems for these semantics. Moreover, we show how the tableau systems can be made terminating and thereby give rise to decision procedures for the logics in question. Our many-valued hybrid logics turn out to be "intermediate" logics between intuitionistic hybrid logic and classical hybrid logic in a specific sense explained (...) in the paper. Our results show that many-valued hybrid logic is indeed a natural enterprise. (shrink)

In this paper we define a family of many-valued semantics for hybrid logic, where each semantics is based on a finite Heyting algebra of truth-values. We provide sound and complete tableau systems for these semantics. Moreover, we show how the tableau systems can be made terminating and thereby give rise to decision procedures for the logics in question. Our many-valued hybrid logics turn out to be "intermediate" logics between intuitionistic hybrid logic and classical hybrid logic in a specific sense explained (...) in the paper. Our results show that many-valued hybrid logic is indeed a natural enterprise. (shrink)