Catherine Herfeld

Network Analysis in the History of Economics

We present social network analysis as a complement to other methods in the history of economics. We first discuss why social network analysis is especially promising for the study of the history of recent economics. We then use an example of research using it to highlight some of its characteristics.

The world in axioms: an interview with Patrick Suppes

I met Patrick Suppes on 18 March 2014 in his office at Stanford’s Center for Study of Language and Information. Until his passing away in November of that same year, he was still actively engaged in research at the Suppes Brain Research Lab, a laboratory that he had founded in the 1990s and where he investigated questions around language and human cognition. We had arranged the interview long before our meeting, and when he entered the center, it became clear how busy he still was: responsibilities from various sides before the interview; phone calls and signature requests in between the interview. He had already reached the age of 92, but seemed more energetic than many colleagues half a century younger. This energy was also what struck me during the interview. I had probably not met somebody as broadly literate and eloquently articulated as Suppes before. That itself might not mean much. And it confirmed in a way what I had repeatedly read and heard about him from his former colleagues and his admirers who had interacted with and had followed him throughout his career. But what means much, I think, is that I was able to confirm this observation when he had reached his 90s. Patrick Suppes had received his B.S. in meteorology at the University of Chicago in 1943 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University under the supervision of Ernest Nagel in 1950. In that same year, he was appointed assistant and subsequently associate professor of philosophy at Stanford University, where he first came into contact with Tarski’s logic and set-theoretical models. In 1959, Suppes was appointed professor for philosophy as well as director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. He had stayed at Stanford ever since, and he never really retired. I conducted the interview for a book project entitled Conversations on Rational Choice Theory, which aims at bringing together the views of scholars who were and still are engaged with developing and applying various approaches of rational decisionmaking within and beyond economics. An interview with Suppes was a natural choice for such a project and for multiple reasons. One reason was that throughout his life, Suppes had been one of the strongest defenders of the axiomatic method in his work, a major ingredient of modern theories of rational choice. He had been deeply involved in working on the foundations of psychology and was one of the pioneers in using formal mathematical tools to approach human decision-making when they had been introduced in the 1950s and 1960s into the social and behavioral sciences. Beyond that, Suppes

Axiomatic Choice Theory Traveling between Mathematical Formalism, Normative Choice Rules and Psychological Measurement, 1944-1956

The following analysis is meant to contribute to a history of rational choice theory. More specifically, I provide a multi-layered account of rational choice theory in terms of its biography as a scientific object. I argue that its axiomatic version, choice theory traveled between different research sites, became specified through different mathematical formalisms and occupied distinct epistemic functions; it was being applied to prescribe rules of proper behavior, as representation of behavioral hypotheses, and as measurement device to capture individual values. New modifications of what I call ‘axiomatic choice theory’ did not fully replace old versions of it, which prevents the reconstruction of its journey as a continuous process of progressive knowledge production and suggests a more nuanced account of axiomatic choice theory that acknowledges its different versions currently used in the social sciences. Furthermore, by revealing the diversity of its manifestations within the context of social networks and within particular research sites, the account of axiomatic choice theory developed here will ultimately contributes to an explanation of the disunity and confusion surrounding current debates about rational choice theory and allows for providing a more nuanced picture of its nature and scope. Jacob Marschak’s professional development is used as a guide through this history of axiomatic choice theory to illustrate its journey.

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism DebateZahleJulieCollinFinnRethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate, Berlin: Springer, 2014. 255 pp.

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate edited by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin is reviewed. Each of the contributions contained in the volume is summarized. The review concludes by assessing the volume’s usefulness for bringing clarity into the debate in the light of the editors’ self-set goal of rethinking the individualism-holism debate as one of the more important yet confused debates in philosophy of the social sciences.

129 (hbk). ISBN: 978-3-319-05342-1.

This essay gives an overview of a set of selected articles published between 2016 and 2017 in the major journals that cover the history of economic thought. In surveying the literature, we focus on three major aspects – the scope, the sources, and the methods – with reference to which we discuss the novelties that we find in the recent literature on the history of economic thought.

New Scope, New Sources, New Methods? An Essay on Contemporary Scholarship in History of Economic Thought Journals, 2016-2017

This article traces a normative turn between the middle of the 1940s and the early 1950s reflected in the reformulation, interpretation, and use of rational choice theories at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. This turn is paralleled by a transition from Jacob Marschak’s to Tjalling Koopmans’s research program. While rational choice theories initially raised high hopes that they would serve as empirical accounts to inform testable hypotheses about economic regularities, they became increasingly modified and interpreted as normative approaches offering behavioral recommendations for individual agents, organizations, government, and teams. The predefined elements constitutive of these accounts, inspired by simple rules of logic, were now meant to represent the basic demands of rationality and theories of rational decision making specified rules of conduct that were meant to shape rather than explain behavior.

From Theories of Human Behavior to Rules of Rational Choice

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate edited by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin is reviewed. Each of the contributions contained in the volume is summarized. The review concludes by assessing the volume’s usefulness for bringing clarity into the debate in the light of the editors’ self-set goal of rethinking the individualism-holism debate as one of the more important yet confused debates in philosophy of the social sciences.

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate edited by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin is reviewed. Each of the contributions contained in the volume is summarized. The review concludes by assessing the volume’s usefulness for bringing clarity into the debate in the light of the editors’ self-set goal of rethinking the individualism-holism debate as one of the more important yet confused debates in philosophy of the social sciences.

Book Review: Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate, by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin

Abstract This paper discusses why mathematical economists of the early Cold War period favored formal-axiomatic over behavioral choice theories. One reason was that formal-axiomatic theories allowed mathematical economists to improve the conceptual and theoretical foundations of economics and thereby to increase its scientific status. Furthermore, the separation between mathematical economics and other behavioral sciences was not as clear-cut as often argued. While economists did not modify their behavioral assumptions, some acknowledged the empirical shortcomings of their models. The paper reveals the multifaceted nature of rational choice theories reflected in the changing interpretations and roles of the theories in those early years.

Between mathematical formalism, normative choice rules, and the behavioural sciences: The emergence of rational choice theories in the late 1940s and early 1950s

Using Rational Choice Theory to account for moral agency has always had some uncomfortable aspect to it. Economists’ attempts to include the moral dimension of behaviour either as a preference for moral behaviour or as an external constraint on self-interested choice, have been criticized for relying on tautologies or lacking a realistic picture of motivation. Homo Oeconomicus, even when conceptually enriched by all kinds of motivations, is ultimately still characterized as caring only for what lies in his interest. Amartya Sen has drawn the economists’ attention to a specific blind spot in rational choice theory (henceforth RCT), i.e. the idea of commitment. By starting from the premise that the human capacity to commit is a necessary precondition for moral behaviour, our aim in this paper is twofold: first, we argue that taking the idea of commitment seriously in economics requires an enriched concept of rationality. Second, we reject a Kantian interpretation of Sen’s concept of commitment and argue that Harry Frankfurt’s views about caring can be used to develop the concept of commitment in a direction that is compatible with Rational Choice Theory.