Comment: Adaptive Models in Sociology and the Problem of Empirical Content

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, it offers a general analysis of stigmas (a person has one when, in virtue of its belonging to a certain group, such as that of women, homosexuals, etc., he or she is subjugated or persecuted). On the other hand, I argue that stigmas are “invented”. More precisely, I claim that they are not descriptive of real inequalities. Rather, they are socially created, or invented in a lax sense, in so far as the real differences to which they refer are socially valued or construed as negative, and used to justify social inequalities (that is, the placing of a person in the lower positions within an economic, cultural, etc., hierarchy), or persecutions. Finally, I argue that in some cases, such as that of the witch persecution of the early modern times, we find the extreme situation in which a stigma was invented in the strict sense of the word, that is, it does not have any empirical content.

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The Inner Rational Agent

10.1093/oso/9780198825142.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Robert Sugden

Keyword(s):

Human Agency ◽

Welfare Economics ◽

Rational Agent ◽

Empirical Content ◽

Normative Economics ◽

Normative Analysis ◽

True Preference ◽

Implicit Model ◽

The World ◽

Psychological Foundation

Chapter 4 reviews ‘behavioural welfare economics’—the approach to normative analysis that is favoured by most behavioural economists. This approach assumes that people have context-independent ‘true’ or ‘latent’ preferences which, because of psychologically-induced errors, are not always revealed in actual choices. Behavioural welfare economics aims to reconstruct latent preferences by identifying and removing the effects of error on decisions, and to design policies to satisfy those preferences. Its implicit model of human agency is of an ‘inner rational agent’ that interacts with the world through an imperfect psychological ‘shell’. I argue that there is no satisfactory evidence to support this model, and no credible psychological foundation for it. Since the concept of true preference has no empirical content, the idea that such preferences can be reconstructed is a mirage. Normative economics needs to be more radical in giving up rationality assumptions.

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Mathematical Structure and Empirical Content

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science ◽

10.1086/714814 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Michael E Miller

Keyword(s):

Mathematical Structure ◽

Empirical Content

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Sensorimotor priors in nonstationary environments

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00605.2012 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 109 (5) ◽

pp. 1259-1267 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Devika Narain ◽

Robert J. van Beers ◽

Jeroen B. J. Smeets ◽

Eli Brenner

Keyword(s):

Environmental Variables ◽

A Priori ◽

Past Research ◽

Systematic Change ◽

Recent Experience ◽

Environmental Variance ◽

Adaptive Models ◽

Priori Information ◽

Human Nervous System ◽

Better Than

In the course of its interaction with the world, the human nervous system must constantly estimate various variables in the surrounding environment. Past research indicates that environmental variables may be represented as probabilistic distributions of a priori information (priors). Priors for environmental variables that do not change much over time have been widely studied. Little is known, however, about how priors develop in environments with nonstationary statistics. We examine whether humans change their reliance on the prior based on recent changes in environmental variance. Through experimentation, we obtain an online estimate of the human sensorimotor prior (prediction) and then compare it to similar online predictions made by various nonadaptive and adaptive models. Simulations show that models that rapidly adapt to nonstationary components in the environments predict the stimuli better than models that do not take the changing statistics of the environment into consideration. We found that adaptive models best predict participants' responses in most cases. However, we find no support for the idea that this is a consequence of increased reliance on recent experience just after the occurrence of a systematic change in the environment.

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