We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as 'gatekeepers', monitoring the...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

Caldwell's Beyond Positivism was a key publication that helped to precipitate the consolidation of the methodology of economics into a distinct subfield within economics. Reconsidering it after thirty-five years, it is striking for its anti-naturalism (i.e., its lack of deference to the actual...

This paper investigates the relationship between methodological individualism (MI) and Agent-Based Simulation (ABS). We discuss and analyze a thesis defended by philosophers Caterina Marchionni and Petri Ylikoski (2013). The thesis maintains that, since MI is often considered to be a...

This paper discusses the similarities and differences in the plurality of practices regarding the use of interviews by historians of economics - i.e., either the use of someone else's interviews as sources or the use of interviews conducted by the historian for her or his work.

This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in the plurality of practices regarding the use of interviews by historians of economics - i.e., either the use of someone else's interviews as sources or the use of interviews conducted by the historian for her or his work. It draws on...

A transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub on his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub's early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary...

In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found the subject essentially intractable. The present paper discusses how that assessment fits in Samuelson's...

Trygve Haavelmo's The Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944) has been widely regarded as the foundation document of modern econometrics. Nevertheless, its significance has been interpreted in widely different ways. Some modern economists regard it as a blueprint for a provocative, but...

Combining concrete policy-oriented modeling strategies of World War II with what was received as traditional neoclassical theory, in 1956 Robert Solow constructed a simple, clean, and smooth-functioning "design" model that served many different purposes. As a working object it enabled...