Research

The question I want to help answer in my dissertation is: what is the epistemic status of social scientific models? My focus is on how similarity judgments from models are used in the methodology of social sciences — in particular, in economics and political science.

I am co-supervised by Lauren Ross and Cailin O’Connor.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

(2024). Formal Models and Justifications of Democracy. Synthese.

• I show that Hong and Page’s [2004] computational results are not robust under both minor and more substantial parameter changes. I then examine the consequences this has for the use of the models in political philosophy, especially with respect to Landemore’s [2013] defense of democratic theory.   

(2020). How to Think About Analogical Inference: A Reply to Norton . Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A.

• I note some issues with John Norton’s “material theory” of analogy and propose some ways forward.

Book Reviews

(2024). Book Review: Economizing Our Lives. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 

• Book review of Erik Angner’s How Economics Can Save the World that cautions against metaphorically framing all aspects of our lives in terms of economics.

Under Review

Inferring Unobservable Relations by Analogy 

• I show that there is a particular kind of analogical inference that has not been appreciated by philosophers and cognitive scientists. I argue that this kind of inference plays an important role in scientific — especially economic — practice.

The Easy and Hard Problem of Similarity

• I distinguish between two kinds of similarity judgments made when reasoning analogically from models: an easy and a hard kind. I then show how some of the most forceful recent objections against the similarity view of model representation are substantially mitigated when this distinction is taken into account.

Works in Progress

Channels of Model Performativity

• Models are generally taken to be representative of their targets but some models “perform” the world in that they change the target phenomenon. Drawing from case-studies in financial economics and epidemiology, I argue for three ways that models can perform the world.

Inductive Logic and Analogies: A History.

• I provide a conceptual history of the development of work on analogy in inductive logic. I show that many paradigmatic examples used are not captured by the frameworks proposed. 

Competence in Formal Epistemology

• I propose an intuitive pragmatic criterion for normative formal epistemological models to be useful and argue that these models do not—and cannot—satisfy this criterion.

Dissertation Abstract

Reasoning from models is widely practiced in the social sciences. However, notable shortcomings—such as the failure of macroeconomic models in predicting the 2008 financial crisis—have cast doubts about their epistemic status.

This dissertation examines how reasoning by similarity is used in social scientific methodology. I focus on reasoning by similarity because the justifications for a model’s explanatory and/or predictive power is often taken to be—explicitly or implicitly—because the model is deemed relevantly similar to the target phenomenon. The dissertation consists of four chapters, each using scientifically informed philosophical analysis to provide insights into what kinds of similarity judgments are useful when making inferences from models.

The first chapter (“Inferring Relations by Analogy”) focuses on analogical reasoning, which is one of the main ways we reason by similarity—I argue that there’s a kind of analogical inference commonly used by social scientists from their models that has not been appreciated by philosophers and cognitive scientists. The second chapter (“The Hard and Easy Problem of Similarity”) builds on distinctions made in the previous chapter to distinguish between two kinds of similarity judgments made when reasoning analogically from models—this distinction helps resolve some debates in discussions of model-representation. In the third chapter (“Formal Models and Justifications of Democracy”), I apply some of the insights of similarity reasoning from models to a concrete case in political philosophy and draw some lessons for how to successfully apply such models to the political realm. The last chapter (“Channels of Model Performativity”) starts from the observation that an important product of a large class of models is that they change the world rather than representing it. Drawing on similarity considerations, I examine how models can perform the social world.