IV Winter Workshop (2003)

Psychological Foundations of Choice Theory in Economics

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, supported by the Spanish Ministry for Education and Research.
Madrid, November 20-22(2003)

Coordinator: Jesús Zamora Bonilla (UC3M)

Guest-coordinator: Juan Carrillo (USC)

As a result of recent research on the cognitive mechanisms at work in decision-making processes, a more realistic approach has recently come to supplement the "naive" assumptions concerning individual rationality typical of neoclassical economics. A number of models and techniques in economics are being reconsidered in the light of these results, boosting a debate on the foundations of the social sciences involving -among others- experimental economists, game theoreticians, evolutionary psychologists and philosophers of the social sciences. This workshop intends to summarise the state of the art through a number of presentations by outstanding international scholars, who will also extend the discussion on the consequences of their research for our views of economics and the social sciences. Young researchers are especially encouraged to take part in it.

 Speakers: Peter Ayton (City University, London), Félix Ovejero (Universidad de Barcelona), Carmen Herrero (Universidad de Alicante), Chris Starmer (U. Nottingham), Ralf Hertwig (U. Basel), Juan Carrillo (USC), J. Francisco Álvarez (UNED), Y. Hanoch (Max Planck).

 Winter Workshop on Economics and Philosophy (2005)

Science, democracy and economics

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, jointly with the CSIC and FECYT.
Madrid, April 11-13 (2005)

Coordinators: Steve Fuller (Warwick) & Jesús Zamora Bonilla (UNED)

We are seeing recently a radical transformation of the 'social contract of science'. According to the old contract, the State warranted a high and growing funding to scientific research, deciding its priorities, but minimising the political interferences on scientists' 'internal' practices. Public distrust to some research lines, and decreasing public financial capacity, make necessary a new 'social contract'. Although it is not clear what this new contract should contain, it must satisfy at the least two basic demands: a critical and rational agreement by part of the citizens, and economic sustainability.

 List of speakers: Steve Fuller (Warwick, UK), Salvador Barbera (UAB, Spain) Michele Boldrin (Minnesota, USA, and UC3M, Spain), Merle Jacob (Copenhagen, Denmark), Jos� Antonio L�pez Cerezo (Oviedo, Spain), Nils Roll-Hansen (Oslo, Norway), Esther Mirjam-Sent (Nijmegen, The Netherlands).

 Contributed papers by: Justin Biddle (Notre Dame), R. Feltrero (UNED), M. S. Labini (Pisa), A. Lopez & J. A. Diaz (UNED), J. V. Mayoral (UNED), R. Moayedfar (Izfahan), E. Prieto (UAH), J. Reiss (UCM), Alexander V. Romanishyn (KMA), Santos Pereira (Coimbra), D. Salpak (GSE, Kobe), B. Urevbu & D. Osaghae (DSU), Jesus Vega (UAM) & F. Javier Gil (Northwestern), Jakob Vestergaard (CBS, Copenhagen), R. Waddle (UC3M)

New Philosophy of the Social Sciences

A summer school organized by the University of the Basque Country and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation ~ San Sebastián, July 10th-13th (2006). Director: Jesús Zamora Bonilla (UNED). Coordinators: Alfonso Dubois (UPV/EHU) & David Teira (UNED)

Aims and scope

The goal of this Summer School is to present and discuss recent issues and approaches currently under discussion in the vast field of the philosophy of all social sciences -though, according to the tradition of this event, special attention will be paid to economics.

Speakers

• J. Francisco Alvarez (UNED, Madrid)
• Patrick Baert (Cambridge)
• Christina Bicchieri (UPenn)
• Alain Bouvier (Univ. de Provence, Marseille – Institute Jean Nicod, Paris)
• Nancy Cartwright (LSE & UCSD)
• Jeroen van Bouwel (Gent)
• Ian Jarvie (York Univ., Toronto)
• Francesco Guala (Exeter)
• A. Moreno Bergareche (UPV/EHU)
• Julian Reiss (Univ. Complutense de Madrid+LSE)
• Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca (Univ. Complutense de Madrid + F. Juan March)
• David Teira (UNED, Madrid)
• Petri Ylikoski (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)

Contributed papers

• Sabine A. Doering
• Till Grüne-Yanoff
• Tilman Hertz
• Floris Heukelom
• Frank Hindriks
• Caterina Marchionni
• Alessio Moneta
• Juan V. Mayoral
• Armando Menéndez Viso
• Michiru Nagatsu
• Menno Rol
• Hauke Riesch
• Ana Santos
• Paul Sheehy
• Obdulia Torres

VI Winter Workshop on Economics and Philosophy (2006)

Economics and Language

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Madrid, June 15-17 (2006)

Coordinators: Ariel Rubinstein (Tel Aviv University) & Jesús Zamora Bonilla (UNED)

Can economists contribute to the study of language? Very often philosophers have questioned that instrumental rationality could account for the rational structure underlying our natural languages. Most linguists have simply ignored the economic approach. After the publication of Ariel Rubinstein's Economics and Language (CUP, 2000) there seems to be an opportunity to bridge all these gaps.

 Speakers: Ariel Rubinstein (Tel Aviv), J. F. Álvarez (Madrid), Andreas Blume (Pittsburgh) Bruce Chapman (Toronto), Gerhard Jager (Bielefeld), Fabián Muniesa (Paris), Robert van Rooij (Amsterdam)

Contributed papers by: Asuncion Alvarez, David Austen-Smith +Timothy J. Feddersen, Manuel Bagues, Anton Benz, N. Goldschmidt + B. Szmrecsanyi, T. Honkela + V. Kononen + T. Lindh-Knuutila + M.S. Paukkeri, Kris De Jaegher, Maria Jimenez Buedo, Andrew Jorgensen, Raul Lopez-Perez, Ittay Nissan, Christina Pawlowitsch, Miguel Santa Olalla, Morgane Tanvé.

VII Winter Workshop on Economics and Philosophy (2007)

Do patents promote innovation? And copyright creativity?

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, in collaboration with FECYT
Madrid, 21-22 May 2007

Director: Michele Boldrin (WUStL)

Coordinators: Jesús Zamora & David Teira (UNED)

Speakers

M. Boldrin, E.Bustos & R. Feltrero, D.K. Levine, S. Liebowitz, R. Marimon, R. Stallman, E. Valauskas

Contributed papers by:

Francisco Alcala & Miguel Gonzalez-Maestre, Soma Dey, Erika Farnstrand Damsgaard,
G. Llanes & S. Trento, Giovanni B. Ramello, Susan A. Russell

Is copyright a good idea? How about patents? From an economic perspective, it is copies of works that matter, and not abstract ideas. Copies of works are property in the ordinary sense, and are protected by ordinary laws against theft. Patents and copyright, then, do not grant property rights, but rather a monopoly over all copies of the original work.

On the one hand, it is important to recognize that creating a new commodity or production process, a new book or a new medicine, requires producing a large indivisible unit, and because of this indivisibility, the ordinary functioning of the market may not provide adequate incentives. There is a large fixed cost, and a small marginal cost of making copies: if copies are sold at the marginal cost, the fixed cost will never be recouped. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that the creator has a "first mover" advantage in profiting from his creation, that capacity is limited and imitation is never costlessly. The creator is the only owner of the first copy: he/she has opportunities to profit before imitation takes place.

There is a conflict here, due to a profoundly different conceptualization of property, and of how the economic system works or should work with respect to innovation and creativity. But there is also a different assessment of the available data: do we obtain more useful medicines with a patent regime than without? How about books and software when copyright is available? What's the historical evidence? What's the cross-country and cross-regimes evidence? A consensus is far from being reached; in the meanwhile laws are passed, cases are brought to court, judges rule, international treaties are written, and the intellectual debate rages on.

Is this conflict resolvable by rational discourse and empirical evidence? Are there only mutually incompatible models, or is there a middle ground both sides can accept? Are we facing theft, when someone rejects patents or copyright, or is it instead just economic competition at work?

Philosophical, legal and economic traditions conflict with each other, asserting on the one extreme that "intellectual property" is a well defined concept and right, and on the other that "intellectual property" is a nonsense. By the same token, some see patents and copyright as an exercise in rent-seeking and monopoly power, while other deem either of them, or both, a necessary tool for economic progress. In the quadrangle so delimited new arguments are being advanced to face the challenges of a digital and globalized world. We are sailing new waters, and we need a new map.

The goal of the conference is to provide a forum for furthering our understanding of some of these issues.

1. Patents, how they work in theory and in practice
2. Copyright, how it works in theory and in practice
3. Intellectual Property: is this a useful concept, from a legal, philosophical and economic point of view?

VIII Winter Workshop on Economics and Philosophy (2008)

Ethics, Justice and Gender

A workshop organized by the the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Madrid, September 11-12 2008

Coordinator: Diana Strassmann (Rice University)

Convenors: David Teira & Jesús Zamora (UNED)

Conference pictures from Diana Strassman

Although economists have long treated social justice and ethics as beyond its disciplinary boundaries, standard theories provide inadequate explanations of human deprivations and inequalities. With gender inequality pervasive in societies around the world, better understandings of women's economic lives could lead to a more illuminating, useful and accountable economics. Scholarship on gender has been particularly hampered by theories that insufficiently acknowledge how power relations and social norms influence women's access to economic resources, health, education, and political agency. How can philosophical tools and theories inform the work of economists seeking to address gender inequality? More generally, how might greater sensitivity to concerns of ethics and justice enable more comprehensive economic analyses that better contribute to the struggle for a gender-just world? And how can advances in feminist economics inform philosophical theories of justice, ethics, and epistemology? Papers may draw from a wide range of philosophical and economic ideas and scholarship in addressing issues relating to gender, economics, human deprivations, capabilities, and justice.

 Speakers: Diana Strassmann (Rice University), Alison Jaggar (University of Colorado, Boulder), Fabienne Peter (University of Warwick), Ingrid Robeyns (Radbound Universiteit Nijmegen), and Stephanie Seguino (University of Vermont)

 Contributed papers by: Meryl Altman and Kerry Pannell (DePauw University, USA), Mohamed Behnassi (Ibn Zohr University, Morocco & North-South Social Sciences Research Centre), Günseli Berik (University of Utah, USA), David de la Croix and Marie Vander Donckt (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium), Shakuntala Das (University of Missouri – Kansas City), Zahra Karimi (Mazandaran University, Iran), Lynda Lange (University of Toronto, Canada), Yumiko Yamamoto (UNDP, Asia-Pacific Regional Centre in Colombo RCC)

Social norms

A summer school organized by the University of the Basque Country and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation ~ San Sebastián, July 14-17 (2008). Director: Cristina Bicchieri (UPenn). Coordinators: Alfonso Dubois (UPV/EHU), David Teira & Jesús Zamora(UNED)

Aims and scope

Since 1998 the Urrutia Elejalde has annually organized a Summer School on frontier topics between philosophy, economics and other social sciences, bringing together scholars from all these fields to explore them. The aim of this year Summer School is to introduce participants to the vast research that is taking place in the area of social norms. From philosophy and psychology to evolutionary game theory and experimental economics, recent work on social norms is shedding light on why and under what circumstances people engage in pro-social behavior, and how norms may emerge, stabilize or decay.

Speakers

• Jason Alexander (LSE)
• Daniel Andler (Paris IV-ENS)
• Cristina Bicchieri (UPenn)
• Jordi Brandts (UAB)
• Pablo Brañas (Ugr)
• Cristiano Castelfranchi (ISTC- CNR)
• Jason Dana (UPenn)
• Jon Elster (Columbia+College de France)
• Herbert Gintis (Santa Fe Institute)
• Francesco Guala (Exeter)
• Dan Sperber (CNRS)
• Edna Ullmann-Margalit (The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem)

Contributed papers

• Ilaria Castelli
• Julia Cordero Coma
• Brice Corgnet
• Giussepe Danese
• Benoît Dubreuil
• Marco Faillo
• Brian Gunia
• Donna Harris
• Rebekka A. Klein
• Erin Krupka
• Azi Lev-On
• Angela Milano
• Ryan Muldoon
• Stefania Ottone
• Giacomo Sillari
• Alessandra Smerili
• Christian Traxler
• Erte Xiao

NEW TRENDS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Madrid, Dec. 15 2010

9.30. Registration and opening.

9:45.   Stephan Hartmann (University of Tilburg). “Voting, Deliberation, and Truth”.

10:30. Gabriella Pigozzi (Université Paris-Dauphine) "Consensus in judgment aggregation".

11.15. Coffee Break.

11.45. Carlo Martini (University of Tilburg). "Using Expert Judgment for the Formation of Economic Consensus".

12.30. María Jiménez Buedo (UNED). "Reflexivity and Experiments in the Social Sciences"

13.15. Lunch.

16.00. Miranda del Corral (UNED). "Collective commitments and collective responsibility"

16.45. Luca Tummolini (Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologia della Cognizione – CNR, Rome): “Truth and success in social reality: on the semantics of beliefs about institutional entities”.

17.30. Byron Kaldis (Hellenic Open University, Athens): "Mirror Neurons in Social Cognition: How is the Philosophy of Social Sciences Affected?"

Venue: Facultad de Ciencias Económicas (UNED, Paseo de Senda del rey 11) | Room 1B

Experiments in economics, experiments in philosophy

A summer school organized by the University of the Basque Country and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation with the colaboration CREO-CM ~ San Sebastián, July 27-29 (2011). Directors: Cristina Bicchieri (UPenn), Jason Dana (UPenn), María Jiménez-Buedo (UNED). Convenor: Alfonso Dubois (UPV/EHU)

Since 1998 the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation has annually organized a Summer School on frontier topics between philosophy and economics and other social sciences, bringing together scholars from all these fields to explore them. The aim of this year Summer School is to explore the potential avenues for collaboration between the growing disciplines of experimental economics and experimental philosophy. Experimental economics has evolved into a thriving subfield, as attested by the number of experimental papers published in leading general economics journals. This growing enthusiasm for experiments in economics has coincided with the revival of philosophical and methodological analyses of causality, which view the controlled experiment as the privileged gate to causal inference. But more importantly, in the last years, a new field known as experimental philosophy has set out to complement or even substitute for pre-theoretical intuitions regarding philosophical themes such as moral dilemmas or rationality. At a moment in which experimental economics is already well-established and experimental philosophy is emerging, this meeting compares their main themes and results.

Plenary lectures

• Nicholas BARDSLEY (University of Reading), Experimental economics, models and the world
• Cristina BICCHIERI (UPenn), Experimental philosophy meets experimental economics
• Giorgio CORICELLI (CNRS, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon), Emotion, cognition and the brain: the neural correlates of counterfactual emotions
• Jason DANA (UPenn), Nosy preferences
• Francesco GUALA (Univ. di Milano), Experimental versus conceptual analysis in economics and philosophy
• Nagore IRIBERRI (U. Pompeu Fabra) Elicited beliefs and social information in modified dictator games: what do dictators believe other dictators do?
• Joshua KNOBE (Yale University), Intention, cause, blame
• Shaun Nichols (U. Arizona), Brute retributivism
• Daniel ZIZZO (University of East Anglia), Objectives and confounds in economic experiments

Contributed papers

• Andrighetto, Giulia (European University Institute), The Normative Power of Punishment
• Brañas-Garza, Pablo (Universidad de Granada), Solidarity and information
• Fernandez-Dols, Jose. (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), Self-Interest and Normative Conflict: A New Look at Moral Hypocrisy
• Cettolin, Elena (Maastricht University), Fairness and Uncertainty
• Civai, Claudia (International School for Advanced Studies – Trieste), Self involvement and fairness concerns in the Ultimatum Game
• Gallotti, Mattia (University of Exeter), Collective Intentionality in the Lab
• Grieco, Daniela (Bocconi University), Ethnic heterogeneity, cooperation, and anti-social punishment
• Gold, Natalie (University of Edinburgh), Judgments in Trolley Problems
• Kurschilgen, Michael (Max Planck Institute), The Jurisdiction Of The Man Within: Intrinsic Norms in a Public Goods Experiment
• Lopez, Raul (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), Why do People Tell the Truth? Experimental Evidence for Pure Lie-Aversion
• Miller, Luis (Oxford University), Inequality, distributive justice and the individual
• Nagatsu, Michiru (University of Tartu), Experimental Philosophy of Economics
• Olivola, Christopher (University College London), The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) Dilemma: Medical Martyrdom Appeals To Moral Intuitions More Than Normative Cost- Benefit Analyses
• Vallois, N. (Université Paris 1- Pantheon Sorbonne), Neuroeconomics Beyond Reductionism: Vernon Smith and the Social Brain topos
• Zhou, Yan. (Kyoto Sangyo University), The Knobe Effect in Experimental Economics

NEW TRENDS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES II

UNED, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Sala “Ángel Sáez Torrecilla”

Senda del Rey, 11. Madrid

September 28th-29th, 2011

PROGRAMME

September 28th, wednesday.

9:25. Presentation.

9:30. Julian Reiss: Idealisation and the Aims of Economics: Three Cheers for Instrumentalism.

10:30. Ruggero Rangoni: The origins of Money. Realism, Thought Experiments and Computer Simulations

11:00. Coffee-break

11:30. Dieter Bögenhold: Mapping out Real Life: Why Social Network Analysis Bridges Micro and Macro Perspectives

12:00. Marcel Boumans: A methodology for inexact sciences.

13:00. Lunch

16:00. Alexandre Marcellesi: Invariance is not suficient for causal explanation

16:30. Gregor Betz. Policy-relevant possibilities and the economics of the energy sector

17:30. Break.

18:00. Emanuele Bottazzi, Roberta Ferrario: Critical situations from spontaneous to sophisticated social interactions.

18:30. Martin Palecek: Incommensurability and Cultural Relativism within Social Sciences

19:00. End of session.

 September 29th, thursday

9:00. Richard David-Rus: Implementing a contextual approach to explanation

9:30. Thomas Robert: Philosophy and the Origin of Language : Darwinian Linguistics as an Example of the Independence of Social Sciences

10:00. Eleonora Montuschi. Pluralism: a curse or a blessing for social science?

11:00 Coffee break

11:30. Mark Risjord: Improvisation and Joint Action

12.00. Rogier de Langhe: The dynamics of methodological standards

12:30. Laurence Kaufmann: Doing «We». From Experience to Deference.

13.30. End of workshop and lunch.

 9:50. Welcome and registration.

10:00 Sven Rosenkranz. “Inferentialism and metasemantics”

11:00. Andreas Fjellstad. “What is semantic content?”

11:35 Coffee break.

12:00 Bernd Prien. “Holistic inferentialism and the problem of communication”

12:35 Nicholas Tebben. “Inferentialism and communication”

13:10 Leonardo Marchettoni. “Inferentialism, culture and public deliberation”

13:45 Lunch

16:00 Mathew Chrisman. "Should the Metalanguage of Metaethics be Nonnormative?"

17:00 Cristina Corredor. “On the pragmatics of pejoratives”

17:35 Ulf Hlobil. “Meaning Is a Normative Concept”

18:10 End of session

Thursday, October 4th

9:25 Owen Griffiths. “Inferentialism and identity”

10:00 Lilian Bermejo. “On material inferences: Brandom's false dilemma”

11:00 Coffee break

11:25 Ole Hjortland. “Thrice denied”

12:00 Daniel Whiting. “What’s so bad about bad concepts?”

13:00 Éva Kocsis. “Brandom on indexicals”

13:35 Lunch

16:00 Mª José Frápolli and Neftalí Villanueva. “Do sciences (natural and human) search for truth?”

17:00 Giacomo Turbanti. “A paradox of inferentialism”

17:35 Javier González de Prado and Jesús Zamora Bonilla. “Inferentialism and collective intentionality”

18:10 End of session

Friday, October 5^th

9:25: Elia Zardini. “The underdetermination of the meaning of logical words”

10:00 Anthony Booth. "What do we aim at when we suspend judgement?"

11:00 Coffee break

11:25 Nuria Miras. “Reasons and actions on a slippery ground”

12:00 Beatrice Sasha Kobow. “Making it the case by taking it to be the case?

Some critical remarks on the notion of declarations and an alternative proposal”

13:00 Thomas Jussuf Spiegel. “Inferentialism and Semantic Contextualism in Brandom and Travis”

13:35 Lunch

16:00 Preston Stovall. “Toward a First-Order Comprehensional Semantics”

16:35 Daniele Santoro. “Causes and Blame: A Pragmatic Analysis”

17:10 Lionel Shapiro. "Relativism and Inferentialism."

18:10 End of workshop