Episode Ninety Six

Introduction

0:00welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics podcast happy new year to all of you our dear listeners and welcome back i'm jennifer john one of your hosts and i'm joined here today by my co-host francois allison who is in lausanne francois happy new year to you thank you very much jennifer happy new year to you and to all our listeners um i'm in

0:33lausanne that's true and the snow is already gone but the sun is back so it's a it's a good day oh

Guest Introduction

0:39very lovely more importantly we are joined rejoined by our guest today who you've met on the show before on episode 21 i believe this is our first guest who's come back to visit us again professor katherine herfeld is here she is professor of philosophy and history of economics at the institute of philosophy at leibniz university handover in germany and she's currently running a project entitled model transfer which is running until 2029 funded by a starting grant from the european research council which we'll be talking about that today but we'll also talk about some

1:13of our work on rational choice theory in particular a book that's coming out this month called conversations on rational choice with cambridge university press hi catherine happy new year

Rational Choice Theory

1:25happy new year jen so francois you've got the first couple of questions so let's kick us kick things off yes and i suggest to start with a very simple question um hi catherine uh how would you define the field in which you work yeah um thanks for the question francois that's a it's a hard one so um because and it's a hard one because i i don't think too much about this so i i'm not

1:57constantly sitting there thinking of how to box myself but um i um when i think about uh it in terms of you know where do i publish what what do i think is my audience and so forth i feel like oftentimes i i publish and and work in for two separate fields so there is work that i do in the you know history of economics where i do these i at least think it's like the proper historical work going to the archives like write an article that takes a long time um because you know you go you dig deep

2:32into the history of something and then you publish it in some history journal but then i also feel like i do um work in philosophy and methodology of economics and um yeah oftentimes these are actually separate things so a separate kind of project is if you will at least they have been uh in the past but then of course you you know you do this kind of work and you think how do these fields relate and of course you know especially methodology of economics has a tradition of how this is integrated

3:06somehow with you know historical like methodological questions uh integrated somehow with methodological with his with methodological questions and so um you know um i i feel that if if you um the if you ask me well if this integration you you take seriously this integration does this field exist for which you work where you want to fuse both or put these together it should be something like integrated history and philosophy of economics i think and that comes from of course this more general term of integrated

3:41history and philosophy of science where the idea is well philosophy of science is informed by and draws upon um the history of science or historical cases case studies and um these historical case studies are at the same time informed by you know a conceptual framework if you will that is given by philosophy of science thank you very much for someone who haven't thought a lot about it that's a very self-reflexive

Book Background

4:14um and and and made to answer i would say um let's now talk uh about your forthcoming book uh that um jennifer mentioned uh on rational choice theory this book involved the long gestation period and required interviews with over 20 uh economists including several nobel prize winners how would you describe this whole adventure and yeah perhaps which interview surprised you the most um yeah so

4:48so this is the book conversations on rational choice right that's just to make exactly clear so there are these two books um one is still in the making the other one was also very very for a very long time in the making the one is called many faces of rational choice the other one is called conversations on rational choice and the one that's coming out is the conversation one but they are related in the sense that um the conversation book uh grew out of my dissertation research and the other one is about my dissertation so um indeed it took a very long time to finish this book

5:25um and uh it grew out of you know a general curiosity when i was um doing my research for my dissertation where um the idea was or the goal was to actually write like an epistemologically informed history of rational choice theory how how rational choice theory has been used in economics um throughout you know uh historical period and there i started actually with adam smith and ended uh today which was not a great

5:57idea but i you know it took slightly a huge historical time span i started i did a lot of research there and i thought okay i should you know given that there was so much discussion um in this debate um about rational choice theory um that goes also back in into its history the history of economics there was so much there was always this debate going on about the homo economicos and why we should think about people

6:29as rational or as self-interested depending on what kind of interpretation um people gave that i was curious about this debate and i thought okay if this debate is not only going on today you know for instance uh manifesting in the research that grew out of you know these early work of behavioral economists but was there for a very long time how is it possible that the smart you know scientific community like economics uh doesn't pick up on this and change you know the way in which

7:00they think about human agents and so i thought well maybe i should ask them and so the person then i asked first um because i started to study his um rational choice theory first or his approach to um to human behavior was gary becker so i went and visited him when he was still alive and i talked with him and i was so surprised by how much i could learn from him in i don't know 30 minutes or so about what he thought was justified criticism against his approach but also what he thought his

7:35approach was about what his approach can do and cannot do and so i got curious and and um i thought i maybe i should ask more and more people and i should not only ask those who actually defend theories of rational decision making or use them in their own work but also i should ask um people who criticize what do i think they criticize what exactly is there to criticize and maybe i can um you know confront them with each other's viewpoint in

8:06these conversations and um so at the beginning it was really just this curiosity and then i went and visited other people like i don't know kenneth arrow or thomas schelling like people who really had made fundamental contributions or had thought deeply about you know theories of rational decision making economics and um and then i showed this interview this first interview of

8:36becker to bruce caldwell she he should get some credit and he said you should really do something publish this and so this is how you know after a while after a couple of years um the idea grew that i might want to just do you know this more systematically transcribe them and then publish them in an in an interview book this whole thing took nine years or so and several people have already passed

9:08that i've interviewed um but it was also a very long time um in terms of the production process of this book this took um several years to actually finish it once i submitted the manuscript because it's very difficult if people pass to get the rights to publish these were the you know the these interviews that they have given um so copyright issues were were a thing and what the format was and so forth yeah

Interview Process

9:38wow thank you nine years that's uh impressive um can we just dive into the the the making of the interviews a bit more um especially did you send the question in advance or did you post them on the spot and um how did you handle reading the scholars work editing the interview and did you send it back to interviewers and how did it work uh with those who are still alive yeah maybe just to your quickly to your

10:14comment before it's like it's a long period and maybe i should say that of course you don't have money for these kinds of projects it's rather unconventional right and it also doesn't fit into a box so i was for a long time also worried to to put a lot of effort in this kind of work because it might not give you a job right uh because it it's not necessarily helpful to classify you and and um that's what counts when you want to have a a permanent position and it's not a clear genre so there were very few you know books of that sort and i've learned about them there were one in in moral philosophy and the

10:50other one in aesthetics by alex forhoever and um the other one that escapes my name the author of that book but um so there were there was not really a role model um and this goes also to to how to proceed with you know methodologically um with these interviews and the process was such that i actually um didn't send the questions in advance um what i did in advance was i read through a lot of the work that

11:25these people have been um done and um then i i started to have a red line for every interview by defining certain blocks topical blocks that i would want to talk about with them and some of these blocks were shared across interview partners but some of not all uh interviewees had the same like topical blocks so to say of course not because they were working

11:58in very different fields sometimes um i started off always with the same question and ended with the same question that was the only thing that was um you know always there in the interviews and um then we had the interview and i would have to make a lot up on the spot because and that is why it was very important to read the work beforehand because uh the interview would almost never go as i had planned

12:31so um you know the the whole point was to get stuff out of them that they wouldn't want to talk about necessarily in publication outlets and also sometimes play the devil's advocate right to say well but here maybe that's you know you should rethink this and and so if you send these questions in advance and have a very very clear-cut idea of how it works you might not get get this out of the interview so they didn't know what the the questions were but then what happened was i transcribed everything and i

13:05send it i had a minimal round of editing myself just to you know clean uh the the transcript up a little bit so that was readable and then they got the transcript and here there were very different experiences of how people handle this some people can very well live with their um you know the fact that your um spoken word is very different from your written word and the spoken word is sometimes written down but it's

13:42nevertheless not what you usually read right because it is more messy it might ramble more you know things like that and some people were very keen on getting this into like the written words that they used from are used from um when they are used um so some people were very much um you know interested in getting this edited in a very um clean way so that it was comparable to what they usually would write and publish

14:18and others were much much looser right they would accept this and would be fine with it and others just saw this and said i've never said you know i've never said this is impossible that that these are my words so you're not going to publish this i had all sorts of experiences here yeah that that was the basic process

Interdisciplinary Approach

14:41i wanted to ask about um it seems like um the the the motivation for the book was it i mean it feels very interdisciplinary from the start um was that something quite i mean that was that quite intentional

14:59well i mean it's hard uh of course now the book turns out to be very you know has a very interdisciplinary approach and so forth it was not quite intentional because it wasn't this project where you say well now i'm going to do this interview project and now this is going to look like this i really had no vision of that at the beginning at all it was just as i went you know and went along doing my phd research and given that i never had money for this project or that it was not something that i felt was it was always

15:31this side project was never like at the center of my research and so you know i met people when i happened to be there because of a conference or because of research visit and so eventually after a few of these conversations uh you know particularly with people like arrow or thomas schelling i mean these were very exciting people to talk to i felt like well you know um some of the things they would say were so surprising then i thought okay let's let's get up get the critics in right let's talk about

16:06behavioral economics with behavioral economists about this or with newer economists like have a camera and other people um so it's i think it's not it wasn't intentional in that sense it just grew and turned out to be this thing that it now is um maybe i should go back also to francois question of what i thought was very surprising because i think i missed this out you know this question that you had what were the surprising actually things that i've learned um um and i think this is these are things you learn

16:43because you maybe implicitly take an interdisciplinary approach in that you do yourself some history and some philosophy and you have i don't know some basic knowledge of economics so for instance uh what was very surprising was the thomas schelling interview where he suddenly said you know game theory had never any role to play in any political process or decision making so no one would ever talk about game theory in the political realm at you know at the time where the rand cooperation was very active

17:16uh in terms of research and and you know he has this whole if you look at the book he has this whole you know explanation for him and rationalization of this whole of this historical period and this is opposed to a lot of research historical research on game theory and so this was so extremely surprising to me and here of course trying to contrast this in the in the moment with some you know of the historical research that has been done on this particular period to see what he how he responds you know um was the

17:52kind of approach that i tried um to take um and i was also very surprised that becker knew about all of this criticism quite well he had thought about all of these issues right but he had ways to um i mean justify himself in a very um clear and thought through way so um that was very surprising and very very impressive as well and or or meeting kenneth arrow it was extremely impressive of how he how much he knew about the history of economics how much he read about the history of economics he cut this he cut his son

18:28actually cut this out later on in the book but then and uh and but he knew the details of of you know historical uh work and that has been recently done on for instance game theory and and the cold war and things like that so um these were very surprising results actually or surprising moments in these interviews um that's great i'm really happy that this book exists to be really to be really like it's a really

Rationality and Choice

18:58lovely product and it touches on a lot of touches on a lot of things that that that i've also been concerned about there's a there's a question i want to ask about um how philosophers and economists think about rational rationality and rational choice um how and this is this is one of the things that does come out in in the book uh how should we understand this difference the disconnect between the way philosophers and economists think and can it be reconciled does it clarify the economist usage

19:35how do you compare these theories that are produced by economists philosophers and even psychologists um are there concepts the logic the analogies their visions of rationality the same or very different complementary or mutually exclusive i guess it's hard to think about this question along the lines of disciplines i think it's more i mean at least to me it's easier to think about the difference between them or this diversity of theories of rational decision making along the lines of

20:11the projects that the scientists are engaged in so sometimes um so there are two ways in which philosophers of science are interested in theories of rational decision making or philosophers of economics if you will on the one hand they're using them themselves right so they apply expect utility theory or game theoretic models in their own work um to think about i don't know um the social organization of science or you know model certain community structures and things like that um and then there are on the other

20:47hand also interested in um appraising or criticizing theories of rational decision making as they are used in economics and so um of course um economists are also in some way engaged in both businesses if you will right there is methodological discussion within economics about these um these approaches to human behavior which are

21:17comparable to these appraisals that or criticisms that philosophers of science or philosophy of economics um offer um offer and then economists themselves use those theories so um i i think it really depends on more on the way in which they are used as opposed to the way in which disciplines um are or people with different disciplinary backgrounds engage in um in these two projects if that makes sense and i mean but then it

21:53becomes complicated of course right because then there are all these different research projects if you will or problems that you want to um that you're engaged in as a as a philosopher or scientist or psychologist i mean um there are also psychologists who use uh decision uh theory or rational this rational choice theories it's not only that they are you know um criticizing them so um there is more this overlap of um usages if you will then that doesn't necessarily map onto disciplinary boundaries i think that's what i'm

22:32saying and um but the problem the general problem that i saw and the reason for why i thought um we should we should uh we should think about this some way and the reason for why i thought it would be helpful to have these different views in one book is um because for a long time um if you read into the history of these criticisms as well against rational against the homo economicos and some variant of it um

23:02um i felt that economists were very well aware of this and but they also had very good justifications for doing nevertheless um doing the things that they did with these um theories of rational decision making and that i at the same time felt that these criticisms were not necessarily helpful or constructive there were oftentimes these all-round criticisms like the kind of criticisms that philip klitzer calls

23:36stake in the heart arguments so what you do is the opponent gets just like the knife into the heart and is dead that's the goal but that's not constructive right it is really unproductive um and it also relieves the it relieves you from the actual engagement with your if you will opponent or you know sometimes these critics criticisms get get so drastic that you might want to talk about an enemy right and so i think um my motivation here was to say well let's hear each other let's talk to

24:17each other sometimes you might think as a psychologist or philosopher you are very distant from what the economists are doing but you're actually not and sometimes you think within economics oh sure there's my fellow economists we agree on you know when it when it comes to theories of rational decision making but we actually don't we don't even have a clear-cut and shared understanding of what they are we have very different understandings and we use them in very different ways and turns out we think that in

24:49in different ways about their limitations as well so um as a phd student i was too humble to say i tell you as philosopher or you know where the limitations and the boundaries of those theories are but i was very curious to hear what all the people who have really thought deeply about this think these boundaries are and so revealing this diversity that doesn't necessarily overlap with disciplinary affiliation was

25:20fascinating to me excellent uh perhaps the last question on on this book uh before we move on to other

Book Takeaway

25:30researchers of you um because your book contains a lot of information about how rational choice was theory was initially motivated and about the the criticism that you just mentioned and perhaps my question now is what is one lesson you want readers to take away from your book yeah that's also a hard um hard thing to answer right because um of course in the moment where it's out people do whatever

26:01they do with it um and maybe one way to answer this is to think about it in terms of readership so the main readership that i had in mind was me as a phd student actually so uh i feel like maybe it's a it's an interesting and good resource for a resource for a phd student or you know even a masters or bachelor student who have um you know have a first encounter with these ideas and are puzzled as i was

26:33and want to learn more about what scientists think what they are doing and um the fascinating thing about theories of rational decision making is that they connect so if you ask questions about them they connect so closely to other issues that are relevant for doing either work in economics for instance you know mathematical modeling uh empirical testing um you know how does theory model relate to data i mean all these kinds of questions that you might

27:08have as a an up-and-coming economist if you will practicing economist but they also relate a lot to um what philosophers of economists are economics are asking themselves such as uh okay what is you know how is this a model how does it relate to the world um um and and so forth so i think um for economist students and philosopher students might be interesting um um and um then the the book content in each interview contains like a short summary where i try to give

27:48an introduction into the work of the scholar and how this view that we are now learning about in the interview connects to this work because a lot of um confusion i think about rational choice theories comes from the fact that we don't take into account how they are actually used so some people use them you know to in experiments other people use them in mathematical modeling and they use them as an actual scientific theory of individual behavior or they plug them into their market theory as a set of

28:25assumptions so um here i try to show how you know the different kinds of frameworks or practices if you will that are undertaken in economics how they relate to the view that they then have in the interview and so these intro and sometimes these are very technical um topics i mean people um like supers or arrow or um

28:55or becker they have um technically very sophisticated um you know uh con made contributions that they made and so students might not always be able to access this easily um i think what i also would like to um to achieve with this book is that people just sometimes take more risks and just do interesting stuff in in science and philosophy i feel sometimes or i felt for a long time very constrained by

29:32disciplinary disciplinary boundaries and what were to publish and what to do and how things are do done in a good way and so maybe it can be also an example of doing something interesting um that might not fit any genre or you know any of these kinds of constraints and then lastly i might want to say that of course it can serve as a source of inspiration for historians as well

30:06given that a lot of um these economists are um you know at the time of the interview very old go into their own historical roots and so forth but i would appreciate if people um see that um it is okay that there is disagreement in science it's okay that and um that you know economists um they are sometimes confused there's a lot of misunderstanding but they sometimes also

30:42disagree in a meaningful way and so i think this book shows this disagreement and where they disagree i hope at least and um and that's that's fine that's science how that's how it should be and people should see it

31:00thank you for this insightful answer and i hope that the call for courageous works will be heard

Model Transfer

31:07that um let's move now to uh another topic if if you like uh catherine you recently wrote um an entry on model transfer in science for the wroteledge handbook of philosophy of scientific modeling and so my question is what is model transfer and why are you interested in it and you mentioned in this chapter that the literature and model transfer is at an early stage and so can you discuss some of the

31:42unsettled or controversial aspects of this literature yes uh thank you for that question so this is a new project and um this is a project um in either model transfer and so it's called model transfer in its challenges in science the case of economics and i'm saying this because there's a lot of um stuff already in the title that i think the project is about so model transfer is just this very simple

32:14phenomenon in science um or like this very straightforward phenomenon that you know there are models that are used in some what we call source domain and then it has been established there it has been used there in a productive way and then these model these models or the model gets transferred into a different domain in a target in a new target domain if you will and domains um can be thought of as of

32:46course sub fields so a model can be transferred within a discipline such as economics for instance but it's more interesting if it's more interesting if it's transferred across disciplines and the reason for why this is interesting is um more interesting maybe uh um or in a different way interesting is that um it is surprising if you find that a model that is used in economics suddenly can also be um you know used in medicine and because medicine has these very different subject matter that it deals with

33:23than economics so this different set of target systems that it deals with and so um this is why and it raises a host of philosophical questions um and this is why this um topic is interesting

33:41so a classic example of model transfer uh is for instance the lottka volterra model so the lottka volterra model is this you know basically two um equations that most people um know about or have seen somewhere um somewhere um that are used or originate in population biology to study predator-prey interactions but then it has been transferred into medicine to for instance study the growth of cancer cells or

34:14transferred into economics macroeconomics to study the business cycle or interaction on the labor market and things like that so that that the lottka volterra model is one um i would say um showcase example that has been studied quite a bit in the literature other examples are game theoretic models of course that have been transferred into almost every discipline that we now by no know of so again here again theoretic models

34:47are used in all of science but um other models that um that we know less uh well in other fields that have been however been transferred from one discipline to another are physical models that have been transferred into economics or have at least been there has been an attempt to transfer those into economics um not echo economists not always agreed on that this is why we now have i think this is part of the

35:18reason for why we now have a separate field that's called econophysics that neither belongs to economics nor to physics but then another very prominent examples are network example is um network models of course that have been that originating computer science and then through computational social science now spread to to a lot of different fields

35:45so what are um open questions because as francois you asked um the the literature is still at an early stage i would say although people are getting more and more interested in that so one of uh one set of questions um is um or circulates around this idea of the unit of transfer so one big issue is what actually is transferred if we talk about model transfer is it the the full-fledged model is it you know part of a full-fledged model is it only you know a set of in the lot gavel terra case case the set of

36:20mathematical equations or is it just a piece of mathematics that's transferred um and so people have come up with um different um concepts to think about the unit of transfer and one of one such uh important concept has been uh proposed by paul humphries and it's called you know and he talks about um the unit of transfer being a template uh a template for model construction maybe we can go into the details a little later on um the other thing that is interesting uh and you know raises a host of

Model Transfer Process

36:56question is um or concerns the model transfer process so what is going on in that process where a model gets transferred and the reason for why this is interesting is because there are different kinds of model transfers if you will and economics is a prime example where this comes to the fore so economics is a curious case of um to study model transfer because um for a long time um we had this

37:27preconception of economics as an isolated field right that economics uh thinks of itself as a little bit you know on a different level than the other social sciences and um by doing so isolating itself um from other social sciences and not engaging too much in interdisciplinary um work um which is however um and which is of course um not the case if we study the history more deeply and you know

38:03historians like philippe fontaine and verga buckhaus and others they have shown us how that has actually never been the case right economics was not that isolated but there is this preconception also among the other social sciences and at the same time there is this idea of economics imperialism so the idea that economics um as an isolated field however um you know goes into other field fields and you know

38:34studies all their problems with some kind of rational choice approach or model based upon a rational choice approach and um and so um exports quite a lot of um modeling techniques uh to other fields even in an imperialistic way so i think that makes it interesting um to to study economics as a case for model transfer um now coming back to this point about why we should study study the model transfer process

39:08um so imperializing a field is of course very different from um in terms of what is going on in the model transfer process might be very different from saying actual um attempt to integrate uh modeling techniques for from two fields say psychology and economics so how can we think about uh on the one hand imperial uh you know imperializing uh as opposed to integrate uh integration um as opposed to um other

39:43people have come up with this term of migration so there the different ways in which um the model transfer process unfolds is a novel thing to study and um is interesting uh for for those reasons the a third open

40:05issue is the question of the challenges to model transfer so okay um there are a lot of cases where uh transferring a model and i think econophysics as jennifer has shown a little bit in her work um would be a prominent um would be a promising you know transfer

40:31there are certain challenges that come in the way of such potentially promising transfers um and there have been a lot of attempts from physics to transfer you know to transfer their modeling techniques into economics but economists for various reasons were opposing this and so studying these these challenges that can come in the way allow us allows us to talk maybe a little bit about how we can

41:01ensure that model transfer can um not only be done in the case where it's promising epistemically speaking promises some epistemic benefits but also um um to learn when economics is progressing and that's the last you know um set of open issues that we try to tackle also in this project is to better understand in fields like economics where progress happens not anymore by coming up with

41:39alternative um general theories but rather by coming up all the time with new models and modeling techniques how can we think about progress in in that um in those kinds of fields particularly if we take the idea seriously that these modeling techniques that are developed are almost always nowadays also drawing on modeling techniques from other fields i have a couple of specific questions about

42:10what you've written concerning model transfer one thing i was curious about was about a distinction that you make between template based and analogy based ways of thinking about model transfer across different fields what's the difference between them so i think um so this this distinction between the template based account and the analogy analogy based account is is not new i it's not mine it arises from from um the literature and how the literature on model transfer has um i think evolved in

42:46philosophy of science and um what happened was that um the the idea that we focus on model transfer as a phenomenon arises from this more general idea that science um and its structure the way it is organized has changed and this this was an idea that was first pointed out by paul humphries in his books in his book uh extending ourselves where he said well science nowadays is really more organized around these you know we use computation models

43:25and um computation models um are best thought of as being the result of a model construction process that is based upon what he called a computational template which is a general mathematical you know structure that is um when you add a set of construction assumptions say idealizations abstractions and whatnot

43:57that is made um tractable and then once you give this whole thing an interpretation it becomes an applicable tractable and the specific thing about these templates these computational templates is that they are actually because they are separate from their from an interpretation

44:24they can be transferred they are also transferable and very flexible in that respect and so um he came up with this account of models actually not so much about um not so much thinking about model transfer at the time um but more with this idea of how we should think about models nowadays that people took this up and said yeah this is a way in which we can think about model models in model transfer to address this uh question about what the unit of transfer is namely templates

45:02computational templates so since then people have taken taken up this idea this idea most prominently taylor nutila and andrea loetgas and they you know have come up with an alternative template notion that also stresses the idea of or the role of analogies to some degree some degree but indeed this template based account is motivated in the first instance by refraining from

45:32um giving analogies a big role in explaining model transfer and the reason for why that is is because at least this is how i read humphreys is because it is um it is indeed the case that you know the presence of analogies that you can identify as a scientist between say um two systems they might have similar

46:02properties in domain a and domain b and then you see well the model that worked for this target system in domain b domain a with that property with these or this set of properties works also in for that system in domain b with that these very similar properties because of these analogies right because um but he said well this is a psychological you know notion and we want to for justificatory

46:36purposes we don't want to have that so this is why the template based account i think came into being and was taken up so the analogy based account in contrast is an account where the idea is scientists reason analogically and this is a cognitive strategy that they apply when they transfer tools models uh techniques that have been successful in one domain to another domain because of

47:12the analogies they identify or the similarities they identify between um two systems in these two different domains the kinds of questions that you're asking um really pull together philosophy and science in a way that i find like really really impressive um and something that i wish i saw more of um and so this is a question that i think about a lot and it's a general question about what the

Philosophy and Science

47:41relationship between philosophy of science and science should be so how should these two different fields interface with each other in your opinion i think that's an extremely hard question and i think um it's partly hard to answer because um i think many philosophers um would answer this question very differently depending on what they are engaged in and i think the answer to that question actually it depends on what kind of um questions you are

48:16uh interested in yourself right um so i mean of course traditionally the idea of philosophy of science was to you know formulate like normative standards if you will for science like um and thereby uh engaging in some kind of external evaluation of science and i think this project still has um you know is still to some degree um to be justified um but it's uh it's not so effective i think i mentioned this earlier with

48:53that book uh is that the best criticism you know that um makes you stumble and takes all of the ground that you're staying away in the is even if it's you know very well articulated and it goes right to the point if it's um not constructive and effective it is i think useless and what do i mean by that

49:25is that in science needs to function science has certain roles i think to play if you take economics it is a policy science i think that's not under to be underappreciated it needs to it needs to produce results and um it is one um thing to say well you know the results should be taken with a grain of salt we should be careful with what we can actually um stay in light of these um and recommend

49:56in light of these um results that we generate in economics but it needs to somehow go on and so like these very idealistic normative standards um might somehow go um somehow sometimes beside the point um so coming up with a set of necessary and sufficient condition for what a good explanation is might be valuable but not useful and so i guess i feel i i i think very strongly about philosophy being

50:34useful although i don't you know always live up to this standard myself because it's always a trade-off between your work being useful versus you do whatever you think is interesting um but in general i i think one should make an attempt to engage you know um and make make the work that you're doing useful for someone or something um

51:02so um by generating these norms and principles that philosophers use to appraise say economics um it is very important to understand um you know uh on the one hand what does science want to achieve what do we you know what do economists themselves want and in light of that assess whether they achieve

51:32their own goal own set goal but then also the question of or but but also take into consideration what is science um what is science able to achieve so we need to have this continuous dialogue to understand what's feasible and so ideally um and this is very complicated of course it gets very messy um but ideally i would like to uh for the two the philosophy of economics and history of economics

52:07to be related in this kind of iterative cycle that chance model um or hasok chang proposes when he talks about the relationship between philosophy of science and historical case studies namely that it is a continuous you know iteration where philosophers can come up with new concepts new theories new claims about science in light of cases in light of cases in order to refine these concepts and you know theories and claims

52:45as they go along but then also that um

52:52these cases show philosophers how science changes continuously and that leads to again another change in the philosophy so it's this i think it's this continuous iteration which in one way i see um implemented in in a continuous conversation

53:12fantastic thank you so much for that answer i'm super sympathetic to that and um i'll keep thinking about what you just said uh after our interview is over we've got through all the questions katherine thank you so much for joining us once again on the show it's nice to see you again and until next time thanks so much jennifer and francois thank you katherine you

53:46you you