The Economics of Science

Although scientific ideas are not usually considered to be scarce and hence economic goods, there certainly is an important economic dimension to scientific research: scientists receive salaries; laboratories and equipment cost money; scientists constantly have to make decisions about trade-offs between kinds of research and thus constantly face opportunity costs; scientists and their sponsors face perpetual uncertainty and thus need to engage in entrepreneurship; and so on and so forth.

Moreover, since the dramatic change in the philosophy of science following the work of Polanyi and Kuhn more emphasis is placed on the communal, institutional structure of scientific research, the ways scientists engage in exchanges and interactions and coordinate their efforts. An economic perspective may be very helpful in understanding the dynamics of scientific research and the production of scientific knowledge.

Currently I am especially concentrating on the role and nature of the price mechanism in coordinating scientific research.

Time and Abstraction in Economics

What is the nature of economic propositions such as 'An increase in the minimum wage will lead to equal or higher unemployment'? Because economic reality is messy and complex with tons of factos playing a role, it may very well be an increase in the minimum wage is exactly followed by a decrease in unemployment. Does this invalidate the economic proposition? One solution would be to specify in more detail the conditions under which the prediction holds. But this is difficult and likely impossible because of the enormous number of relevant factors. Another possible solution is to specify ceteris paribus or ceteris absentibus clauses that state that either all else stays the same or that no other factors influence the process stipulated in the proposition. But with this solution the proposition would only be true of unrealistic worlds.

Roderick Long and Guido Hulsmann propose a different kind of solution, namely counterfactual analysis. A prediction would compare a before-state with an after-state with all the problems mentioned above associated with it, but in a counterfactual analysis we compare two wholly realistic states: one in which the minimum wage did increase and one in which it did not. We do not say that all the other factors stayed the same or that they did not exert any influence, but only that changes in them make no difference for the comparison of the actual scenario with that of the counterfactual scenario. In other words, a non-precisive and thus counterfactual analysis would not say ‘An increase in the minimum wage results in equal or greater unemployment’ but ‘Unemployment will be equal to or greater than it would have been without the increase in the minimum wage’.

But this solution too has its problems because it may exactly be the case that the increase in the minimum wage sets into motion a countervailing force (e.g. abolishing licensing laws) that would not have occured without that increase (e.g. if the increase in the minimum wage and the abolition of licensing laws are negotiated together in a collective bargaining agreement), so that one could no longer say that unemployment would be equal to or greater than it would have been without the increase in the minimum wage.

I think there is a possible solution to this problem however and I'm currently working on writing a publishable article about it.

Wittgenstein on Logic, Language and Religious Belief

In my (abandoned) dissertation I argued that by focussing on Wittgenstein's views on the nature of religious belief and religious mythology we can get a good sense of both the fundamental continuity as well as the important changes in his work.

Wittgenstein saw religious language as neither literal nor metaphorical. In his early work Wittgenstein admonished us to be (philosophically) silent about ethics and aesthetics because we could not help but talk nonsense if we tried to give words to these out-of-this-world-ly values. Religious language is a prime example of such nonsensical language, but it is exactly its nonsensicality that expresses the transcendent value of ethics and aesthetics. This followed from his picture theory of language and his views on the nature of logic. "Only the Supernatural can express the supernatural"

I argue that these views do not change in his later work, but that the changes in his philosophy of language and logic allow him to pay more (philosophical) attention to what exactly happens in religious mythology and what role it plays in people's lives, how it makes sense of and shapes their experiences in the ethical struggle of becoming a good person that they're engaged in. But ultimately, and this is another fundamental source of continuity, his view that ultimately religious language and mythology has to be given up or overcome (like the Tractarian ladder) does not change.

Although I abandoned the dissertation, I am still fascinated by this topic.

Analogies, Perception and Cognition

Douglas Hofstadter has written brilliant works on the role of analogies in human cognition. He argues that the ability to make analogies fundamentally is the ability to see things or situations as other things and situations (a situation as a 'the pot calling the kettle black' situation, or a book as a hammer) and that this ability is not some special cognitive module but the basis for all human intelligence.

Whereas many cognitive scientists make a strict operational distinction between perception and cognition, Hofstadter argues that the two cannot be separated. The tough part of making analogies is not the mapping of two pre-given representations onto each other, but in exactly coming up with the interestingly relevant representations in the first place. And in this process perception and cognition are fundamentally intertwined. Hofstadter tries to create computer models that simulate the suspected cognitive processes involved in this process.

Although I tend to agree with a lot of what Hofstadter says about the ability to see things as other things as the basis for human intelligence, and about his remarks on the integration of perception and cognition in this ability, I think he goes astray in his attempts to model this process with computer models. Applying Wittgenstein's ideas on the nature of concepts (and concept learning) I hope to be able to show that the dichotomy and for Hofstadter the distinction) between perception and cognition is not an empirical dichotomy or distinction, but a grammatical one (in the Wittgensteinian sense of the word). Once one realizes that one realizes that situational and bodily aspects are integral aspects of the ability to see things as other things, and that one cannot simply map the distinctions one makes in the rational reconstruction of analogies onto real cognitive processes. If I am right about this, then the hopes for computer models that can make analogies and that do so in a way similar to how humans do this, are not very realistic.

Comedy analysis

What makes jokes work? How far can one go in crossing or transgressing well-established boundaries while still being funny? How do the situational and the structural aspects of (making a) joke relate to each other? Are they separate at all? Can such jokes reveal boundaries that hitherto had been invisibe?

This is an ongoing fascination of mine, but I have not written anything about it yet and instead explore the topic casually by trying to analyze, think of and make such jokes and seeing what ensues.