Philosophy of Economics: Models and Policy
I started this project in my doctoral dissertation at UCSD (chaired by Nancy Cartwright), which develops an account of the models used in economics as well as other social and biological sciences. This account accommodates insights from the new fields of experimental economics and institution design. I argue that the main existing philosophical theories, which view models as supplying either ceteris paribus or capacity claims, are unable to account for the actual role of models in designing experiments and in constructing incentive-compatible institutions. I propose that we should view models instead as open formulae that specify a template for the construction of causal claims that we then use in turn to construct experiments, institutions and explanations. I have already explored how this makes sense of the role of game theoretical models in the design of the auctions used in the USA and all over Europe to distribute electromagnetic bandwidth. In the future, I would like to test my account in other areas of social and biological science. For example, does it apply to interventions in ecology? I also would like to explore the more general questions in philosophy of science: In what sense can open formulae be confirmed? What sort of economic knowledge should one be realist about?
Main Papers:
Making Models Count forthcoming in Philosophy of Science
"Progress in Economics: Lessons from the Spectrum Auctions" (with Robert Northcott) forthcoming in Harold Kincaid and Don Ross (Eds.) Handbook on the Philosophical Foundations of Economics as a Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Philosophy of Psychology: Measurement of Well-Being
What makes a measure of happiness a) accurate and b) relevant to policy evaluation or practical deliberation? This is a focus of a series of papers on various ways in which philosophers and social scientists conceptualize happiness and well-being. There is a variety of such notions (hedonic balance, life satisfaction, positive functioning, quality of life), but it is not clear which notion is right for which purposes. I seek to develop a taxonomy of various notions of happiness and well-being and a principled way of evaluating their applicability. A related interest is whether a unified notion of happiness and well-being is necessary and helpful for science, policy making and practical reasoning. My guess is that it isn't, so I am looking to borrow tools from contextualism and variantism in epistemology in order to develop a variantist view of well-being.
Main Papers:
Subjective Well-Being and Kahneman's 'Objective Happiness' Journal of Happiness Studies 2005
First Person Reports and the Measurement of Happiness, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology