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Explaining causal modelling. Or, what a causal model ought to explain
No full textOne of the goals of the social sciences is to understand social phenomena, that is to exhibit the mechanism underlying and bringing them about. This task goes beyond description: to exhibit this mechanism requires identifying causal relations between variables of interest. In quantitative social research, causal models are used to provide such explanations of social phenomena. This paper investigates whether causal models can be seen as models of explanation, and argues that causal modelling, by modelling causal mechanisms, provides (or ought to provide) genuine causal explanations and should be considered as a model of explanation, notably a hypothetico-deductive model of explanation
New Essays in Logic and Philosophy of Science
No full textThe volume has been presented as a collection of refereed papers originated in the SILFS conference (Milan, October 2007)
Philosophy of Mind between Reduction, Elimination, and Enrichment
No full texta cura di M. D'Agostino, G. Giorello, F. Laudisa, T. Pievani e C. Sinigagli
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
On Value Judgement and the Ethical Nature of Economic Optimality
No full textHerewith we are going to address the issue of value judgment in economics (and therefore of value measurability) with an essential concern for its ethical significance. This issue represents the main explicit joint between economics and ethics and underlies the idea of economic efficiency as something per se valuable. We are targeting the axioms that support the Paretian notion of economic optimality with special reference to the axiom of transitivity, which is shown to be violable without irrationality, insofar as we reject a basic Utilitarian model of value
How contemporary cosmology bypasses Kantian prohibition against a science of the universe
No full textIt is well-known that Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason , discusses explicitly the conceptual limitations, to which all our cosmological speculations are subjected. He suggests that the universe as a whole, the object of cosmological explanation, is not an object of possible experience, and, consequently, of knowledge; whence his renunciation to a cosmology as a science, to a rational cosmology that can explain the cosmos in its totality. His meditations on cosmology claim to prove that the ultimate basic questions potentially pertaining cosmology about universe – its finiteness in space, its origin in time – do not stand up to critical examination and are rationally insoluble: it is possible to give apparently cogent reasons to support opposite views in both questions, then one arrives to what seems a contradiction (the so-called cosmological antinomies), and neither answer can be definitely accepted.
But how does Kant reach this result and, above all, which is its epistemological effect on modern cosmology, on its scientific status, in particular in the light of cosmological principle, generally considered a cornerstone in history and in foundations of cosmology, and one of the fundamental tenets of its modern standard relativistic models
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