There are considerable difficulties in the way of the development of useful and reliable simulation models of social phenomena, including that any simulation necessarily includes many assumptions that are not directly supported by evidence. Despite these difficulties, many still hope to develop...

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Now that complex Agent-Based Models and computer simulations spread over economics and social sciences - as in most sciences of complex systems -, epistemological puzzles (re)emerge. We introduce new epistemological concepts so as to show to what extent authors are right when they focus on some...

Because of features that appear to be inherent in many social systems, modellers face complicated and subjective choices in positioning the scientific contribution of their research. This leads to a diversity of approaches and terminology, making interdisciplinary assessment of models highly...

Reported results of experiments are usually trustworthy, but some of them might be obtained from errors or deceptive behavior. When an agent only read articles about experimental results and use the articles to update his subjective opinions about different theories, the existence of deception...

Simulation is a widely-used research method going back to a long history in numerous disciplines and in many research communities. But the epistemological status of simulation remains unclear and very much depends on the individual propositions of the researcher. At this juncture, we develop a...

Recently Martins (Martins 2005) published an article in this journal analyzing the opinion dynamics of a neutral observer deciding between two competing scientific theories (Theory A and Theory B). The observer could not perform any experiments to verify either theory, but instead had to form...

This article studies what happens when someone tries to decide between two com¬peting ideas simply by reading descriptions of experiments done by others. The agent is modeled as rational person, adopting Bayesian rules and the effect that the possibility that each article might be a deception...

This special section includes papers originally presented at a workshop on \'Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation\' in July 2004 at the University of Koblenz, in which some thirty colleagues participated. It had been our impression that there was (and still is) a small, but growing number...