James Tabery Helen Longino’s Studying Human Behavior is an overdue effort at a nonpartisan evaluation of the many scientific disciplines that study the nature and nurture of human behavior, arguing for the acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of all approaches. After years of conflict, Longino makes the pluralist case for peaceful coexistence. Her analysis of the approaches raises the following question: how are we to understand the pluralistic relationship among the peacefully coexisting approaches? Longino is ironically rather unpluralistic about (...) her pluralism, forcing a choice between integrative pluralism and her preferred ineliminative pluralism. I hope to show that the analysis of approaches she offers actually accommodates a pluralism that is both integrative and ineliminative.Approaches to studying human behaviorPhilosophy of biology took shape as a discipline in the 1970s. This disciplinary formation over. (shrink)

Several approaches from the social and natural sciences take finance, and especially financial markets, as a domain of systematic inquiry. Historians of economic thought have discussed extensively the emergence and evolution of some major, competing paradigms within finance, focusing on differences in their methodological and theoretical assumptions, as well as on the ways in which they have achieved dominant positions in the academia. However, how do these paradigms see the problem of their own value, in relationship to the value of (...) their field of study? In other words, how do they present finance as a set of phenomena worth studying, and what is valuable about studying them from a particular angle? I examine here in this respect five significant scientific approaches to finance: financial economics, market microstructure, behavioral finance, social studies of science, and econophysics. I show how they represent the study of financial markets as a valuable, systematic endeavor, and how they represent their own value in providing a distinctive approach to the study of finance. I distinguish between internalistic and externalistic claims to value among these approaches. Internalistic value claims make reference to data accuracy and to methodological adequacy, while externalistic claims make reference to investigating links between finance and other forms of social organization and institutions. (shrink)