Philosophy of Social Science

Philosophy of Social Science Philosophy of Social Science A New Introduction Edited by Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The several contributors 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. 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Acknowledgements Chapter 4: iPinCH (the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project), especially Sheila Greer for helpful advice and the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations for their generosity. Chapters 7, 14, 16: The Order project, Templeton Foundation (London School of Economics and University of California, San Diego); AHRC-funded research project on ‘Choices of Evidence’ (London School of Economics); in Chapter 7, material on suicide originally appeared in E. Montuschi, The Objects of Social Science (Continuum Press, 2003), chapter 2; and on AIDS/HIV spread in Africa in E. Montuschi, ‘Evidence, Objectivity, Social Policy’, in E. Viola (ed.), Epistemologies and the Knowledge Society: New and Old Challenges for 21st-Century Europe (Nemesis Publisher, Roma-Acireale, 2010). A version of the case study on Dutch RCT on heroin users appeared in E. Montuschi, ‘Questions of Evidence in Evidence-Based Policy’, Axiomathes, 19(14) (2009): 429–31. Chapter 13: National Science Foundation-funded research on the controversy over screening mammography (Award number SES-1152050). Some of the material in this chapter appeared in an early version in Miriam Solomon, ‘ “A Troubled Area”: Understanding the Controversy Over Screening Mammography for Women Aged 40–49’, in Christoph Jager and Winfried Loffler (eds),Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Proceedings of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium (Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2012), 271–84. Chapter 15: The British Academy and Wolfson Foundation-funded research project: ‘Re-Thinking Case Studies Across the Social Sciences’; parts of the chapter appeared in M. S. Morgan, ‘Case Studies: One Observation or Many? Justification or Discovery?’, Philosophy of Science, 79(5), (2012), 667–677. We are grateful to Alex Marcellesi, Rebecca Robinson, and Rosa Runhardt for editing and assisting with the completion of the volume. v Contents Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi Part I. Current Debates 1. Well-Being 9 Anna Alexandrova 2. Climate Change 31 Wendy Parker 3. Evidence-Based Policy 48 Eileen Munro 4. Community-Based Collaborative Archaeology 68 Alison Wylie Part II. Ontological Issues 5. Social Ontology 85 Deborah Tollefsen 6. Individuals or Populations? 102 Helen Longino Part III. Questions about Objectivity 7. Scientific Objectivity 123 Eleonora Montuschi 8. Feminist Standpoint Theory 145 Sharon Crasnow vii Contents 9. Values in Social Science 162 Heather Douglas Part IV. Using Formal Models 10. Choice Models 185 Katie Steele 11. Norms, Conventions, and the Power of Expectations 208 Cristina Bicchieri Part V. Methodological Perspectives 12. Interdisciplinarity in Action 233 Sophia Efstathiou and Zara Mirmalek 13. Social Epistemology in Practice 249 Miriam Solomon Part VI. Research Methods 14. Measurement 265 Nancy Cartwright and Rosa Runhardt 15. Case Studies 288 Mary S. Morgan 16. Causal Inference 308 Nancy Cartwright Index 327 viii Notes on Contributors Anna Alexandrova is a University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. She has written on the nature of rational choice explanation in the social sciences, the use of abstract and idealized models in science and policy, and on the science of well-being. Cristina Bicchieri is the S. J. P. Harvie Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of BeLab, the behavioural ethics lab at Penn. Her research interests include social norms and their dynamics, behavioural ethics, and social epistemology. Nancy Cartwright is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, and at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Her research interests include philosophy and history of science (especially physics and economics), causal inference, objectivity, and evidence, especially in evidence-based policy. Sharon Crasnow is Professor of Philosophy at Norco College in Southern California. Her current research interests include feminist philosophy of science and epistemological questions raised by methodologies in the social sciences. Heather Douglas is Waterloo Chair of Science and Society in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the science– policy interface and the role of values in scientific reasoning. Sophia Efstathiou is a Researcher in Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She is interested in the conditions of scientific innovation within interdisciplinary biomedical cultures, and especially in how scientific ideas are invented from common ones. Helen Longino is C. I. Lewis Professor in Philosophy at Stanford University. Her teaching and research interests are in philosophy of science, especially the interface between biology and social science, social epistemology, and feminist philosophy. Her latest work is on the relationship between logical, epistemological, and social aspects of behavioural research. Zara Mirmalek is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her research focuses on cultural, historical, and structural arrangements of science and ix Notes on Contributors technology, innovation and identity in post-industrial organizations, and politics of representation. Eleonora Montuschi is an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She works on scientific objectivity, on the theory and practice of evidence, and on methodological issues in the social sciences. Mary S. Morgan is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work ranges over the history and philosophy of statistics and the social sciences (especially economics). She is currently researching the ways in which cases and case studies are used in the generation of scientific knowledge. Eileen Munro is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current research interests include how best to combine intuitive and analytic reasoning in risk assessment and decision-making in child protection, and on the role of the wider organizational system in promoting or hindering good critical thinking. Wendy Parker is a Reader in Philosophy at Durham University. Her research interests include the epistemology of computer simulation (especially climate modelling), concepts of scientific evidence, and the roles of science in public policy. Rosa Runhardt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include measurement and concept formation for causal analysis in social science, especially international relations. Miriam Solomon is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Women’s Studies at Temple University. Her research interests are in philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, gender and science, bioethics, and social epistemology. Katie Steele is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research lies at the intersection of rational choice and scientific inference/evidence. She is interested in applications in both the social and natural sciences (particularly climate science and climate change economics) and in the

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