Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The issue of causal comparability in the social sciences underlies matters of both generalization and extrapolation (or external validity). After critiquing two existing interpretations of comparability, due to Hitchcock and Hausman, I propose a distinction between ontological and epistemic comparability. While the former refers to whether two cases are actually comparable, the latter respects that in cases of incomplete information, we need to rely on whatever evidence we have of comparability. I argue, using a political science case study, that in those cases of imperfect information, an epistemic homogeneity criterion can be an adequate justification for generalization.

The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some important principles relevant for its measurement. I argue that well-being science has good reasons to accommodate these principles, but currently fails to do so.

Declarations like “this meeting is adjourned” make certain facts the case by representing them as being the case. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the mechanism whereby the utterance of a declaration can bring about a new state of affairs. In this paper, we use the incentivization account of institutional facts to address this issue. We argue that declarations can serve to bring about new states of affairs as their utterance have game theoretical import, typically in virtue of the utterer signaling a commitment to act in an incentive-changing way.

The early research of Karl Popper both in psychology and in philosophy of science is described; its basis for his later breakthroughs in the philosophy of science is explained. His debt to Otto Selz’s thought psychology is thereby detailed. Otto Selz’s philosophy of science is then explained, and its conflict with Popper’s early as well as his later views is portrayed. These studies of the conflicting views of Popper’s early views and Selz’s philosophy of science provide the basis for demonstrating the mistakes that Michel ter Hark has made in claiming that the alleged originality of Popper’s views occurred only in the 1970s and are little more than a rehash of Selz’s alleged evolutionary epistemology.