Projects
ONGOING
Making data speak: Towards a philosophy of data-driven social science (2023-2027), Academy of Finland. Role: Participating researcher
Economics as Serviceable Social Knowledge (ESSK): Philosophical Investigations on the Policy Relevance of Economics in Post-Pandemic Society (2021-2025), Academy of Finland
Abstract. Economics holds a privileged and influential position in policy advice. Yet, it is also often criticized for failing to cope with real socioeconomic problems and crises, and thus it has been contested as a policy relevant social science. The tension between society’s confidence in economic expertise and the distrust in its actual capacities became manifest during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Currently, the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic—which is more massive in scale and reach than previous crises—may exacerbate this tension further.To find a way out of this tension, economics will have to readjust to be (and be perceived as) more agreeable and useful than it has seemed during the last decades. That is, economics will have to become a more serviceable social science.The main goal of ESSK is to assess the capacities of economics as a policy relevant social science and thereby contribute to steering scientific change in ways that enhance its usefulness without compromising its epistemic authority. ESSK advances a novel and richer framework for the assessment of the policy relevance of economics that embeds evidence-policy relations in a broad range of cognitive, organisational, institutional, and rhetorical processes, both in the scientific system and in the policy-making system. Webpage: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/essk-project/. Role: Participating researcher
Boosts vs. Nudges: A mechanism-based framework for assessing the effectiveness and normative acceptability of behavioral interventions for sustainable energy consumption (PI: Till Grüne-Yanoff) (2020 - 2025)
Abstract. Policymakers employ behavioural interventions to influence energy consumption, and claim that these policy choices are supported by scientific evidence. However, the currently available evidence typically does not say anything about the persistence of these desirable effects, nor about the absence of negative spillover effects. Nor do policymakers have a systematic way to choose between different possible interventions before any of them are implemented. Out project addresses these problems by providing mechanistic evidcence for behavioural policies. Knowledgeof an intervention's mechanism gives information under which conditions it succeeds, what side effects it might have, and whether it conflicts with ethical principles. We incorporate this information in a categorization tool for policymakers, helping them to design and evaluate interventions through categorization by mechanism type. We develop this tool through theoretical and experimental work. We run a large-scale long-term field experiment in a real housing setting. This will provide evidence about the effectiveness, persistence and spillover effects and normative acceptability of the most promising behavioural interventions in energy consumption behaviour. It will also provide evidence about the mechanisms through which these interventions operate, thus supporting our diagnostic tool.
Completed
Types of reactivity in the human sciences
NOS-HS exploratory workshops. With Marion Godman and Julie Zahle (2019-2020)
Abstract. The concept of reactivity refers to our reactions to being studied, classified or intervened upon by science, which in turn affect the science itself. These phenomena have worried many due to their possibly threatening the objectivity, scope and policy effectiveness of science. Reactivity has been the object of study in many philosophical and methodological debates, including the validity of laboratory experiments and social research (both qualitative and quantitative) the reality of human kinds, the challenges of forecasting, and the unintended effects of public measures and economic theories. Often these phenomena are studied in different fields and go under different labels such as “self-fulfilling prophecies”, “reactivity”, “looping effects”, “reflexivity”, and “performativity”. Furthermore, as reactivity affects several stages of the scientific lifespan, the philosophical and methodological studies of those stages tend to proceed separately. However, the mechanisms that bring about reactive effects seem to cut across both existing labels and these stages. Whether reactivity operates through subjects’ awareness, whether it is self-stabilizing, whether it is sought for, matters a great deal to both scientific methodology and the moral responsibilities of scientists. Therefore, charting the differential mechanisms is crucial for understanding how to meet the challenge posed to research design, scientific classification, and intervention.
The series is composed of three workshops: 1 Reactivity and the Research Process (Bergen 2020); 2 Reactivity and Human Categories (Copenhagen 2020); 3. Reactivity and Intervention (Helsinki 2020).
Project homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/thereactivityproject/home
Unification and progress in the social sciences. A contextual approach
Personal project. Academy Research Fellowship (1.09.2012-31.08.2017)
Public description. Scientific unification–the application of the same theoretical principles and tools to the study of phenomena from different domains–has been and still is a powerful driver of scientific development. But does unification promote the progress of science? Or, can the search for unified theories hinder progress because the world is after all disunified? Starting from the hypotheses that relevant features of unification vary across contexts and that scientific progress is multidimensional, the project aims to advance an account of how unification facilitates or inhibits progress in the social sciences. The project combines philosophical analysis and detailed study of scientific practice. If focuses on three contemporary scientific developments that strive for unity within the social sciences or between the social and the natural sciences: 1) neuroeconomics; 2) the application of evolutionary theory in the behavioural sciences; 3) the new science of networks.