26 found
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  1. Can We Detect Bias in Political Fact-Checking? Evidence from a Spanish Case Study.David Teira, Alejandro Fernandez-Roldan, Carlos Elías & Carlos Santiago-Caballero - 2023 - Journalism Practice 10.
    Political fact-checkers evaluate the truthfulness of politicians’ claims. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly debate on whether fact-checkers treat political parties differently in a systematic manner depending on their ideology (bias). We first examine the available approaches to analyze bias and then present a new approach in two steps. First, we propose a logistic regression model to analyze the outcomes of fact-checks and calculate how likely each political party will obtain a truth score. We test our model with a (...)
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  2. Rules versus Standards: What Are the Costs of Epistemic Norms in Drug Regulation?David Teira & Mattia Andreoletti - 2019 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 44 (6):1093-1115.
    Over the last decade, philosophers of science have extensively criticized the epistemic superiority of randomized controlled trials for testing safety and effectiveness of new drugs, defending instead various forms of evidential pluralism. We argue that scientific methods in regulatory decision-making cannot be assessed in epistemic terms only: there are costs involved. Drawing on the legal distinction between rules and standards, we show that drug regulation based on evidential pluralism has much higher costs than our current RCT-based system. We analyze these (...)
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  3. Disease-mongering through clinical trials.María González-Moreno, Cristian Saborido & David Teira - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51:11-18.
    Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known problems in the (...)
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  4. A Defence of Pharmaceutical Paternalism.David Teira - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):528-542.
    Pharmaceutical paternalism is the normative stance upheld by pharmaceutical regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration. These agencies prevent patients from accessing treatments declared safe and ineffective for the patient’s good without their consent. Libertarian critics of the FDA have shown a number of significant flaws in regulatory paternalism. Against these objections, I will argue that, in order to make an informed decision about treatments, a libertarian patient should request full disclosure of the uncertainty about an experimental treatment. (...)
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  5. Blinding and the Non-interference Assumption in Medical and Social Trials.David Teira - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3):358-372.
    This paper discusses the so-called non-interference assumption (NIA) grounding causal inference in trials in both medicine and the social sciences. It states that for each participant in the experiment, the value of the potential outcome depends only upon whether she or he gets the treatment. Drawing on methodological discussion in clinical trials and laboratory experiments in economics, I defend the necessity of partial forms of blinding as a warrant of the NIA, to control the participants’ expectations and their strategic interactions (...)
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  6. A Contractarian Solution to the Experimenter’s Regress.David Teira - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):709-720.
    Debiasing procedures are experimental methods aimed at correcting errors arising from the cognitive biases of the experimenter. We discuss two of these methods, the predesignation rule and randomization, showing to what extent they are open to the experimenter’s regress: there is no metarule to prove that, after implementing the procedure, the experimental data are actually free from biases. We claim that, from a contractarian perspective, these procedures are nonetheless defensible since they provide a warrant of the impartiality of the experiment: (...)
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  7. What was fair in actuarial fairness?Antonio J. Heras, Pierre-Charles Pradier & David Teira - 2020 - History of the Human Sciences 33 (2):91-114.
    In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...)
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  8. Placebo trials without mechanisms: How far can they go?David Teira - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 77 (C):101177.
    In this paper, Isuggest that placebo effects, as we know them today, should be understood as experimental phenomena, low-level regularities whose causal structure is grasped through particular experimental designs with little theoretical guidance. Focusing on placebo interventions with needles for pain reduction -one of the few placebo regularities that seems to arise in meta-analytical studies- I discuss the extent to which it is possible to decompose the different factors at play through more fine-grained randomized clinical trials. My sceptical argument is (...)
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  9. Facts, norms and expected utility functions.Sophie Jallais, Pierre-Charles Pradier & David Teira - 2008 - History of the Human Sciences 21 (2):45-62.
    In this article we explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our expected utility since this is the criterion effectively applied by those who are considered wisest in making risky choices (be it gamblers or businessmen). Yet, to justify the adoption of this rule, it should be proven that this is empirically (...)
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  10. A Contractarian Approach to Actuarial Fairness.Antonio J. Heras, Pierre-Charles Pradier & David Teira - 2024 - Journal of Business Ethics.
    We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...)
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  11. Debiasing Methods and the Acceptability of Experimental Outcomes.David Teira - 2016 - Perspectives on Science 24 (6):722-743.
    Why scientists reach an agreement on new experimental methods when there are conflicts of interest about the evidence they yield? I argue that debiasing methods play a crucial role in this consensus, providing a warrant about the impartiality of the outcome regarding the preferences of different parties involved in the experiment. From a contractarian perspective, I contend that an epistemic pre-requisite for scientists to agree on an experimental method is that this latter is neutral regarding their competing interests. I present (...)
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  12. On the impartiality of early British clinical trials.David Teira - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):412-418.
    Did the impartiality of clinical trials play any role in their acceptance as regulatory standards for the safety and efficacy of drugs? According to the standard account of early British trials in the 1930s and 1940s, their impartiality was just rhetorical: the public demanded fair tests and statistical devices such as randomization created an appearance of neutrality. In fact, the design of the experiment was difficult to understand and the British authorities took advantage of it to promote their own particular (...)
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  13.  68
    El acceso abierto y el futuro de la filosofía en España.Ramon Feenstra & David Teira - 2023 - Revista de Hispanismo Filosófico 28:121-135.
    During the 2010s, a radical transformation took place in the Spanish philosophical landscape: most philosophy journals started releasing their papers for free under a creative commons licence. Thanks to open access publication, Spanish philosophy has a bigger audience today than never before. Drawing on the authors’ experience as editors of two of these journals, Theoria and Recerca, this paper discusses what made this transformation possible, its consequences for the assessment of the Spanish philosophical output and, finally, how to strengthen Spanish (...)
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  14. What evidence for a cholera vaccine? Jaime Ferrán’s submissions to the Prix Bréant.David Teira & Clara Uzcanga - 2023 - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
    This article analyses how the French Academy of Sciences assessed Jaime Ferrán’s cholera vaccine submitted for the Prix Bréant in the 1880s. Ferrán, a Spanish independent physician, discovered the treatment in 1884 and tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outbreak in Valencia the following year. His evaluation sparked a controversy in Spain and abroad on the vaccine’s efficacy. The Bréant jury did not see any evidence for it in Ferrán’s submission, a decision usually interpreted in terms of (...)
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  15. Has classical gene position been practically reduced?Oriol Vidal & David Teira - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-20.
    One of the defining features of the classical gene was its position. In molecular genetics, positions are defined instead as nucleotide numbers and there is no clear correspondence with its classical counterpart. However, the classical gene position did not simply disappear with the development of the molecular approach, but survived in the lab associated to different genetic practices. The survival of classical gene position would illustrate Waters’ view about the practical persistence of the genetic approach beyond reductionism and anti-reductionist claims. (...)
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  16. On the normative dimension of the St. Petersburg paradox.David Teira - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (2):210-223.
    In this paper I offer an account of the normative dimension implicit in D. Bernoulli’s expected utility functions by means of an analysis of the juridical metaphors upon which the concept of mathematical expectation was moulded. Following a suggestion by the late E. Coumet, I show how this concept incorporated a certain standard of justice which was put in question by the St. Petersburg paradox. I contend that Bernoulli would have solved it by introducing an alternative normative criterion rather than (...)
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  17. Bayesian versus frequentist clinical trials.David Teira - 2011 - In Fred Gifford (ed.), Philosophy of Medicine. Boston: Elsevier. pp. 255-297.
    I will open the first part of this paper by trying to elucidate the frequentist foundations of RCTs. I will then present a number of methodological objections against the viability of these inferential principles in the conduct of actual clinical trials. In the following section, I will explore the main ethical issues in frequentist trials, namely those related to randomisation and the use of stopping rules. In the final section of the first part, I will analyse why RCTs were accepted (...)
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  18. ¿Cómo mide el riesgo el observador imparcial?Antonio J. Heras & David Teira - 2015 - Critica 47 (139):47-65.
    Exploramos aquí la conexión entre los conceptos de riesgo e igualdad en el argumento del observador imparcial. La concepción de la justicia que elegiría un observador imparcial se justifica por la pureza del procedimiento de elección. Sin embargo, si modelizamos esta decisión utilizando medidas del riesgo habituales en matemática financiera, veremos cómo el criterio de elección del observador bajo el velo de la ignorancia contiene una preferencia implícita por el grado de desigualdad resultante. Esto nos obliga a reconsiderar la pureza (...)
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  19. On the Limits of Cultural Relativism as a Debiasing Method.David Teira - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):1079-1089.
    I analyze cultural relativism as a methodological strategy to correct for ethnocentric biases in anthropological fieldwork. I discuss the format debiasing norms may adopt depending on whether a discipline has a causal or interpretative outlook. Franz Boas and his school advocated for an interpretative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, in which cultural relativism was implemented as a standard to be interpreted by expert third parties. Legitimate as it may be as a debiasing method, it does not allow anthropologists to adjudicate their (...)
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  20. Probabilidad y contratos. Sobre el pragmatismo de Roberto Torretti.David Teira - 2016 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 8:251-268.
    I want to expand the pragmatist view of probability advocated by Roberto Torretti, drawing on the propensity approach. In the first part, I will show how the concept of mathematical expectation originally formalized an Aristotelian principle of justice. In the second half, I will present the game-theoretic approach to probability developed by Shafer and Vovk, showing how it allows us to interpret the original normativity of mathematical expectations. I will finally discuss how this latter view contributes to a pragmatist understanding (...)
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  21. Why Friedman's methodology did not generate consensus among economists?David Teira - 2009 - Journal of the History of Economic Thought 31 (2):201-214.
    In this paper I study how the theoretical categories of consumption theory were used by Milton Friedman in order to classify empirical data and obtain predictions. Friedman advocated a case by case definition of these categories that traded theoretical coherence for empirical content. I contend that this methodological strategy puts a clear incentive to contest any prediction contrary to our interest: it can always be argued that these predictions rest on a wrong classification of data. My conjecture is that this (...)
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  22. Choosing expert statistical advice: Practical costs and epistemic justification.Javier González De Prado Salas & David Teira - 2015 - Episteme 12 (1):117-129.
    We discuss the role of practical costs in the epistemic justification of a novice choosing expert advice, taking as a case study the choice of an expert statistician by a lay politician. First, we refine Goldman’s criteria for the assessment of this choice, showing how the costs of not being impartial impinge on the epistemic justification of the different actors involved in the choice. Then, drawing on two case studies, we discuss in which institutional setting the costs of partiality can (...)
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  23. Continental Philosophies of the social sciences.David Teira - 2011 - In Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences. SAGE Publications. pp. 81-102.
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  24. Milton Friedman, the Statistical Methodologist.David Teira - 2007 - History of Political Economy 39 (3):511-28.
    In this paper I study Milton Friedman’s statistical education, paying special attention to the different methodological approaches (Fisher, Neyman and Savage) to which he was exposed. I contend that these statistical procedures involved different views as to the evaluation of statistical predictions. In this light, the thesis defended in Friedman’s 1953 methodological essay appears substantially ungrounded.
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  25. A Positivist Tradition in Early Demand Theory.David Teira - 2006 - Journal of Economic Methodology 13 (1):25-47.
    In this paper I explore a positivist methodological tradition in early demand theory, as exemplified by several common traits that I draw from the works of V. Pareto, H. L. Moore and H. Schultz. Assuming a current approach to explanation in the social sciences, I will discuss the building of their various explanans, showing that the three authors agreed on two distinctive methodological features: the exclusion of any causal commitment to psychology when explaining individual choice and the mandate to test (...)
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  26. The prospects of for-profit Open Access in philosophy of science journals | A report. [REVIEW]Sophia Crüwell, Chiara Lisciandra & David Teira - manuscript
    Publishers are signing transformative agreements with different research institutions and funding bodies across the world. These agreements establish that the institution or funder makes a block payment in exchange for an annual quota of OA papers allowing their affiliated authors to publish OA in an agreed list of journals, at no extra cost to the individual author. This is a step towards the transformation of these journals into a Gold (commercial) Open Access regime. -/- In January 2023, the members of (...)
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