Economic forms of analysis have penetrated to many disciplines in the last 30 years: political science, sociology, law, social and political philosophy, and so forth. We wish to extend the economic paradigm to certain problems in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Scientific agents, and scholarly inquirers generally, act in some ways like vendors, trying to "sell" their findings, theories, analyses, or arguments to an audience of prospective "buyers". The analogy with the marketplace is imperfect. The ideas or discoveries that (...) a scientist offers are not private goods in the economist's sense. Nonetheless, there are parallels with the marketplace that are worth exploring. (shrink)

The relationship between economics and the philosophy of natural science has changed substantially during the last few years. What was once exclusively a one-way relationship from philosophy to economics now seems to be much closer to bilateral exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine this new relationship. First, I document the change. Second, I examine the situation within contemporary philosophy of science in order to explain why economics might have its current appeal. Third, I consider some of the (...) issues that might jeopardize the success of this philosophical project. (shrink)

J. Angelo Corlett suggests a revision in the scope of social epistemics as I have depicted it. Specifically, he suggests that social epistemics should encompass questions about certain psychological processes – viz. social cognitive processes – whereas my original proposal assigned the task of evaluating psychological processes to individual epistemics only. How compelling is this suggestion, and how consonant is it with the general program of epistemics?

The paper by Susan Feigenbaum and David Levy, 'The market for (ir)reproducible econometrics', has several meritorious features. It offers an interesting model of how econometric researchers might decide whether to replicate a previously published article and how journal editors might decide whether to publish such a replication study. It offers data about error rates involved in original studies and about the willingness of original researchers to submit their data to potential replicators. Finally, it endorses some plausible proposals for institutional changes (...) that are warranted by their model and empirical findings. What we especially like in their approach is its contribution to the truth-oriented mission of social epistemology, at least as we interpret their overall project. Unlike many investigators in the social studies of science, Feigenbaum and Levy (hereafter F & L) are not only interested in the variables affecting the behaviour of scientific agents, but in whether these variables have positive or negative outcomes for the scientific acquisition of truth, and in how the interest of truth might best be served. In this respect their work bears a close analogy to our own work in social epistemology, as we shall explain below. (shrink)