In this article, the author offers a discussion of the evidential role of the Galilean constant in the history of physics. The author argues that measurable constants help theories constrain data. Theories are engines for research, and this helps explain why the Duhem-Quine thesis does not...

This paper conducts a systematic comparison of behavioral economics’s challenges to the standard accounts of economic behaviors within three dimensions: under risk, over time and regarding other people. A new perspective on two underlying methodological issues, i.e., interdisciplinarity and...

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...

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...

A relevance, distinctiveness and plausibility (RDP) analysis is a conceptual framework that can be used to identify when potential confounds are a problem for interpreting experimental results. We illustrate this analysis using the creation or enhancement of natural group identity by the means...

This note paper considers briefly whether dictator games are a good tool to measure altruism. The answer is negative: behavior in dictator games is seriously confounded by what I shall label experimenter demand effects. Section 2 briefly defines dictator games and reviews some of its purported...

Economists have two basic methodologies: structuralism, in which formal economic models control the analysis, and experimentalism, in which economic theory guides the analysis, but data from experiments determines the policy recommendation. The choice between the two approaches is often quite...

In the social sciences we hardly can create laboratory conditions, we only can try to find out which kinds of experiments Nature has carried out. Knowledge about Nature’s designs can be used to infer conditions for reliable predictions. This problem was explicitly dealt with in Haavelmo’s...