The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

Social Sciences
• The legitimacy of data mining
Data mining is the repeated use of statistical techniques in search of results
that support a given model. The practice is widespread in the social sciences,
particularly economics. Yet there is strong disagreement over its legitimacy
(Backhouse and Morgan, 2000).
• The nature of measurement
The social sciences provide apparently quantitative data in a number of areas.
Yet quantitative measurement seems to rest on a number of assumptions about
the thing being measured – that it is amenable to an additive scale for example.
It is not clear such requirements always hold for social phenomena, though
social scientists proceed nonetheless (Michell, 1999). Is there any justification
for doing so? Can data derived from measures that do not meet strict requirements
of quantitative measurement nonetheless be probative? How and where?
• Nonstatistical inference practices
Among social scientists there is a growing literature on the use of cases and
comparative analysis to draw conclusions from observational data (Ragin,
1987; Ragin and Becker, 1992). The strengths and weaknesses of these
approaches, their relation to standard models of confirmation, and other such
questions are open areas of inquiry.
• Evaluating counterfactuals
Counterfactual claims are widespread in the social sciences (Hawthorn, 1991),
though there is very little attention to what their assertion requires. Some discussion
occurs in the literature on causal modeling (Pearl, 2000), but those
are special circumstances with explicitly defined functional relations. What can
be said about areas where such constraints are not available?
• The place of game theory
Game-theoretical models dominate parts of economics and are increasingly
important in political science and elsewhere (Bicchieri, 1993). These applications
raise in a concrete way the ceteris paribus problem, for the models in
question invoke strong idealizations and abstractions (Kincaid, 2001). Are
those models well confirmed and explanatory nonetheless? When and where?
Particularly of relevance to philosophers of science are the assumptions such
models make about rationality, both rational action and rational inference by
agents.
• The place of experimental methods
Experimental methods are increasingly important in the social sciences, especially
economics (Kagel and Roth, 1995). Exactly how such methods work and
with what force in the social sciences remains to be determined. Old debates
about the ecological relevance of psychological experiments resurface again,
this time about whether artificial experimental results tell us anything about
real markets, for example.
The social sciences will no doubt continue to raise challenging issues in the philosophy
of science.
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