The many faces of unification and pluralism in economics: The case of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis

The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded off against less of the other. This paper will use the example of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) to argue that the relationship between pluralism and unification is often more complex than this simple dichotomy suggests. In particular, Samuelson's Foundations is invariably presented as a key text in the unification of modern economics during the middle of the twentieth century; and in many ways that is entirely correct. But Samuelson's unification was not at the theoretical (causal and explanatory) level, but rather at the purely mathematical derivational level. Although this fact is recognized in the literature on Samuelson, what seems to be less recognized is that for Samuelson, much of the motivation for this unification was pluralist in spirit: not to narrow scientific economics into one single theory, but rather to allow for more than one theory to co-exist under a single unified derivational technique. This hidden pluralism will be discussed in detail. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for more recent developments in economics.     

The explanatory role of abstraction processes in models: The case of aggregations

Though it is held that some models in science have explanatory value, there is no conclusive agreement on what provides them with this value. One common view is that models have explanatory value vis-à-vis some target systems because they are developed using an abstraction process (i.e., a process which involves omitting features). Though I think this is correct, I believe it is not the whole picture. In this paper, I argue that, in addition to the well-known process of abstraction understood as an omission of features or information, there is also a family of abstraction processes that involve aggregation of features or information and that these processes play an important role in endowing the models they are used to build with explanatory value. After offering a taxonomy of abstraction processes involving aggregation, I show by considering in detail several models drawn from different sciences that the abstraction processes involving aggregation that are used to build these models are responsible (at least partially) for their having explanatory value.     

On the structure of explanatory unification: the case of geographical economics

A newly emerged field within economics, known as geographical economics, claims to have provided a unified approach to the study of spatial agglomerations at different spatial scales by showing how these can be traced back to the same basic economic mechanisms. We analyse this contemporary episode of explanatory unification in relation to major philosophical accounts of unification. In particular, we examine the role of argument patterns in unifying derivations, the role of ontological convictions and mathematical structures in shaping unification, the distinction between derivational and ontological unification, the issue of how explanation and unification relate, and finally the idea that unification comes in degrees.     

The psychology of paranormal beliefs

Summary Investigation of paranormal claims has failed to find any repeatable paranormal phenomena, yet beliefs in such phenomena are extemely prevalent. Some of the psychological mechanisms which support these beliefs are described. Mental imagery, subjective validation, coincidence, hidden causes, and fraud all contributeto the folklore in this field. Magical thinking is as evident today as it ever has been. Recent research suggests that increased skepticism concerning paranormal claims can result from special educational procedures which emphasize critical thinking rather than learning scientific facts.     

The psychology of paranormal beliefs

Investigation of paranormal claims has failed to find any repeatable phenomena, yet beliefs in such phenomena are extremely prevalent. Some of the psychological mechanisms which support these beliefs are described. Mental imagery, subjective validation, coincidence, hidden causes, and fraud all contribute to the folklore in this field. Magical thinking is as evident today as it ever has been. Recent research suggests that increased skepticism concerning paranormal claims can result from special educational procedures which emphasize critical thinking rather than learning scientific facts.     

The role of interactional expertise in interpreting: the case of technology transfer in the steel industry

I analyse the case of three Japanese-Portuguese interpreters who have given support to technology transfer from a steel company in Japan to one in Brazil for more than thirty years. Their job requires them to be ‘interactional experts’ in steel-making. The Japanese–Portuguese interpreters are immersed in more than the language of steel-making as their job involves a great deal of ‘physical contiguity’ with steel-making practice. Physical contiguity undoubtedly makes the acquisition of interactional expertise easier. This draws attention to the lack of empirical work on the exact way that the physical and the linguistic interact in the acquisition of interactional expertise, or any other kind of expertise.     

The role of forecasting in corporate strategy: The xerox experience

This paper presents the system of analysis used by the Xerox Corporation to relate the external environment to company decisions. The system is sophisticated and elaborate, comes to grips with such issues as product forecasting, market monitoring, activity monitoring, materials and labour cost analysis, and product price analysis. In addition, the system examines the longer-term issues associated with corporate strategy, with the more recent initiatives directed toward the strategic focus The Xerox case illustrates very well how externally provided forecasts of economic environments, both at home and abroad, can be used as inputs to a variety of econometric products to serve the individual corporation. The challenge in this work is to build the bridges from the external forces to the critical company decisions. That is a task which requires sophisticated tools and skilled professionals to accomplish. This case study shows what can be done.     

Sex pheromone blend of the codling moth,Cydia pomonella: Evidence for a behavioral role of dodecan-1-ol

Summary Pheromone glands and effluvia of the codling moth female containE-8, E-10-dodecadien-1-ol as main component, accompanied by its geometric isomers, the corresponding acetate and aldehyde (both in gland extracts only),E-9-dodecen-1-ol and saturated alcohols of 10 to 18 carbons. Dodecan-1-ol as the most abundant secondary component (about 30% of the female blend) acts in the wind tunnel by widening the dose range over which codling moth males are optimally attracted toE-8, E-10-dodecadien-1-ol.This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We thank W. Riggenbach for supplying moths and T. Wildbolz, P. Charmillot and M. Tóth for conducting field trials.     

Captivity affects behavioral physiology: plasticity in signaling sexual identity

Little is known about the link between captivity, physiology, and behavior in wild-caught vertebrates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that hormonal changes are responsible for behavioral changes in wild animals brought into captivity. Studying the effects of captivity on reproduction is hampered because wild animals often fail to exhibit sexual behavior under captive conditions. In weakly discharging electric fish, field studies have reported sex differences in electric organ discharges which are rarely seen in the laboratory. I now report the results of a series of laboratory investigations which show that Gnathonemus petersii exhibits seasonal, hormone-dependent, phase-specific sex differences in electric organ discharges. Captivity dramatically alters and may even reverse these sex differences as a result of rapid changes in endogenous plasma hormone levels. These findings have broad implications for research on animal physiology and behavior performed in laboratory settings.     

The behavioral effects of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-alkyl amphetamines

Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences - Le comportement des rats a été fortement influencé par des dérivés de la 2,5-diméthoxyamphétamine Le mécanisme...     

The role of repair in radiobiology

Apart from cancer and mutation induction, radiobiological effects on mammals are mostly attributable to cell 'death', defined as loss of proliferative capacity. Survival curves relate retention of that capacity to radiation dose, and often manifest a quasi-threshold ('shoulder'). The shoulder is attributable to an initial mechanism of repair ('Q-repair') which is gradually depleted as dose increases. Another form of repair, which is not depleted ('P-repair'), increases the dose required to deliver an average of one lethal event per cell (dose 'D0'). Neither form of repair can unambiguously be linked with repair of defects in isolated DNA. An important initial lesion may well be disruption of the complex structural relationship between the DNA, nuclear membrane and associated proteins. One form of P-repair may be restoration of that structural relationship.     

The chatfield-prothero case study: Another look

The Chatfield-Prothero case study in time series, ‘Sales of a company X’, is analysed from a perspective different to that of the authors. More accurate forecasting performance for these data is obtained by adopting the following two tactics: (1) shifting from a problem in transformation of the original series to one of seasonality adjustment; (2) assuming a mixed seasonality type model in contrast to employing a multiplicative assumption.     

The role of phosphoenolpyruvate in insulin secretion: the effect of L-phenylalanine

Summary Incubation of rat islets with phenylalanine increased the tissue content of phosophoenolpyruvate, both in the presence and in the absence of glucose. At the same time, L-phenylalanine neither stimulated nor inhibited insulin release. It is unlikely that insulin secretion is tightly coupled to the availability of phosphoenolpyruvate in rat islets.     

The diffusion of scientific innovations: A role typology

How do scientific innovations spread within and across scientific communities? In this paper, we propose a general account of the diffusion of scientific innovations. This account acknowledges that novel ideas must be elaborated on and conceptually translated before they can be adopted and applied to field-specific problems. We motivate our account by examining an exemplary case of knowledge diffusion, namely, the early spread of theories of rational decision-making. These theories were grounded in a set of novel mathematical tools and concepts that originated in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944/1947) and subsequently spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. Introducing a network-based diffusion measure, we trace the spread of those tools and concepts into distinct research areas. We furthermore present an analytically tractable typology for classifying publications according to their roles in the diffusion process. The proposed framework allows for a systematic examination of the conditions under which scientific innovations spread within and across preexisting and newly emerging scientific communities.     

Forecasting US GNP growth: The role of uncertainty

A large number of models have been developed in the literature to analyze and forecast changes in output dynamics. The objective of this paper was to compare the predictive ability of univariate and bivariate models, in terms of forecasting US gross national product (GNP) growth at different forecasting horizons, with the bivariate models containing information on a measure of economic uncertainty. Based on point and density forecast accuracy measures, as well as on equal predictive ability (EPA) and superior predictive ability (SPA) tests, we evaluate the relative forecasting performance of different model specifications over the quarterly period of 1919:Q2 until 2014:Q4. We find that the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index should improve the accuracy of US GNP growth forecasts in bivariate models. We also find that the EPU exhibits similar forecasting ability to the term spread and outperforms other uncertainty measures such as the volatility index and geopolitical risk in predicting US recessions. While the Markov switching time‐varying parameter vector autoregressive model yields the lowest values for the root mean squared error in most cases, we observe relatively low values for the log predictive density score, when using the Bayesian vector regression model with stochastic volatility. More importantly, our results highlight the importance of uncertainty in forecasting US GNP growth rates.     

Pictures and pedagogy: The role of diagrams in Feynman's early lectures

This paper aims to give a substantive account of how Feynman used diagrams in the first lectures in which he explained his new approach to quantum electrodynamics. By critically examining unpublished lecture notes, Feynman's use and interpretation of both “Feynman diagrams” and other visual representations will be illuminated. This paper will discuss how the morphology of Feynman's early diagrams were determined by both highly contextual issues, which molded his images to local needs and particular physical characterizations, and an overarching common diagrammatic style, which facilitated Feynman's movement between different diagrams despite their divergent forms and significance.