Philosophy of Econometrics

1. Introduction 2. What philosophical/methodological issues? 3. Philsophy of science and empirical modeling: Logical positivism/empiricism The downfall of logical positivism/empiricism The new experimentalism Learning from error 4. The Error-Statistical perspective: Statistical inference and its philosophical foundations Statistical Induction and its underlying reasoning Severe testing reasoning A statistical model has 'a life of its own' Bridging the gap between theory and data 5. Philosophical/methodological issues pertaining to econometrics: The Bayesian approach to inductive inference Statistical model specification vs. model selection Reliability/precision of inference and robustness Weak assumptions and the reliability/precision of inference 'Error-fixing' strategies and data mining Substantive 'fixing' strategies and theory fishing Pre-test bias and all that! 6. Conclusions