Projet

The question of the epistemological status of modeling in economics lies at the heart of work in the philosophy of economics (e.g., Mäki 2009; Morgan 2012). For a long time, models were primarily considered in terms of their descriptive relationship to the external world—as representations of reality or ideals, caricatures, or instruments for revealing causal mechanisms. More recent approaches, however, have shifted the focus toward the pragmatic character of modeling: modeling is a practice situated within a specific community. Understanding how economists build their models therefore requires understanding the rules of construction inherent to the social environment of modeling itself. This is notably argued by Cyril Hédoin (2012) in economics, and more generally by Mauricio Suárez (2004) in the philosophy of modeling. For Suárez, models cannot be separated from the modelers themselves.

Nevertheless, these approaches retain an important feature of traditional epistemological analyses: models are still treated primarily as descriptive tools in a broad sense—that is, as theoretical objects intended to produce discourse about the world.

The aim of this project is to extend the analysis of modeling to the plurality of actions performed by economists when they model. Economists certainly produce descriptions of the world, but they also participate in academic competition, rely on normatively charged representations, and contribute to the legitimation of certain practices. In other words, this project seeks to understand the place of models within various social fields, each animated by its own specific power relations.

This research is being developed in collaboration with Dorian Jullien. 

References

Hédoin, C. (2012). Models in Economics Are Not (Always) Nomological Machines : A Pragmatic Approach to Economists’ Modeling Practices. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 20(10), 424–459.

Mäki, U. (2009). Missing the World. Models as Isolations and Credible Surrogate Systems. Erkenntnis, 70(1), 29–43.

Morgan, M. (2012). The World in the Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Suárez, M. (2004). An Inferential Conception of Scientific Representation. Philosophy of Science, 71(5), 767–779.

Publications 

2018. With Dorian Jullien, The model (also) in the world: extending the sociological theory of fields to economic models. Journal of Economic Methodology, In Press. 

2018. Models as Speech Acts: the telling case of financial models. Journal of Economic Methodology. 28(1) : 21-41.

2015. La double dimension de la performativité : de la construction de la finance contemporaine. Citées. Philosophie, Politique, Histoire. 64(4), p. 39-52.