As part of a book symposium on Erwin Dekker's Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) and the Rise Economic Expertise (2021), Michele Alacevich reflects Tinbergen's vision economic expertise as a-political.

Probability theory, especially Bayesian probability, is widely misunderstood by the general public. Lawyers are no different from ordinary members of the public in falling victim to arguments that have been known to mathematicians for decades to be fallacies. The so-called prosecutor’s fallacy and the defendant’s fallacy are two well-known examples that arise from a basic misunderstanding of co...

Abstract Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy thinking that there is a fixed amount for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible it. The pie fallacy, argue, because how an agent some outcome fully grounded in facts agent, relationships between them; it does not depend, particular, on an...

Reacting to the original papers outlining the importance of “social mechanisms,” thispaper contrasts two views of the social process, the mechanismal and the relational. In the sourceshere analyzed, the mechanismal perspective is largely based on methodological individualismand generally presupposes rational, or at least intentional, action. A fundamental assumption ofthis appro...

Randomised trials vary in methodological quality, and flaws in trial conduct can lead to biased estimation of the intervention effect. If a meta-analysis makes no allowance for methodological flaws, there’s a danger that the results could be biased and over-precise, or that some lowerquality trials could be given too much influence in the meta-analysis. Cochrane review authors now use a specifi...

This article presents a theoretical foundation for marketing based on the ideas of the Austrian school of economists. After a discussion of the methodological foundations of Austrian economics, which reject the statistical and experimental methods of the physical sciences as the means to verify theory in the social sciences, the article presents the Austrians' principle of methodological indivi...

Intelligent Design Theory (ID) has been much maligned recently as Neo-Creationist pseudoscience. This paper looks briefly at the common arguments used against ID, including arguments from methodological naturalism (MN), falsifiability, productivity, and religious fundamentalism. Ultimately it goes on to explain why the theory could be beneficial to our society today and suggests a need for a me...