On Material Indeterminacy

Quine on Indeterminacy

W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation is the theory which launched a thousand doctorates. During the 1970s it sometimes seemed to be as firmly entrenched a dogma among North American philosophers as the existence of God was among medieval theologians. Although now subject to much more by way of critical appraisal, Quine’s work is still, rightly, at the forefront of contemporar...

Historical Indeterminacy

In historical indeterminacy, it is known that an event stored in a temporal database did in fact occur, but it is not known exactly when the event occurred. We present the possible tuples data model, in which each indeterminate event is represented with a set of possible events that delimits when the event might have occurred, and a probability distribution over that set. We extend the TQuel qu...

Empirical Study on Location Indeterminacy of Localities

On the Indeterminacy of New-Keynesian Economics

We study identiÞcation in a class of three-equation monetary models. We argue that these models are typically not identiÞed. For any given exactly identiÞed model, we provide an algorithm that generates a class of equivalent models that have the same reduced form. We use our algorithm to provide four examples of the consequences of lack of identiÞcation. In our Þrst two examples we show that it...

Intersectoral Externalities and Indeterminacy

We consider a two-sector economy with positive intersectoral external effects and nonincreasing social returns. We show that if the discount factor r is close to 1 then local indeterminacy may be obtained with mild market imperfections. Moreover, with additional conditions, when r is made smaller the steady state becomes totally unstable and quasi-periodic cycles, along which equilibrium paths ...