univie: summer school – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC)
Lecturers:
Kevin Hoover | Jennifer Jhun
Guest Lecturer:
Marcel Boumans
July 7-11, 2025
Lecture Hall 3D, New Institute Building, University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien
https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/
Since 2001, the University of Vienna and the Institute Vienna Circle hold an annual summer program dedicated to major current issues in the natural and the social sciences, their history and philosophy: univie: summer school – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC). The title of the program reflects the heritage of the Vienna Circle which promoted interdisciplinary and philosophical investigations based on solid disciplinary knowledge.
As an international interdisciplinary program, USS-SWC brings graduate students in close contact with world-renowned scholars. It operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. The program is directed primarily to graduate students and junior researchers in fields related to the annual topic, but the organizers also encourage applications from people in all stages of their career who wish to broaden their horizon through cross-disciplinary studies of methodological and foundational issues in science.
The History and Epistemology of Econometrics
Models and their econometric estimation play an increasingly important role in modern economic and political life. From macroeconomic policy and financial regulation to public health and climate policy, models contribute to shaping policies. The generation of ever more data is likely to support the proliferation of models and econometrics. Research resources in academia focus on the theoretical foundations of the underlying model and on the statistical methods of econometrics; much less attention is devoted to the epistemological challenges of the underlying concepts, the normative challenges of the everyday work with econometrics, and the application of its results in policy decisions and evaluation.
The objective of this program is to increase attention amongst philosophers of science, academic economists, and empirical economists in policy institutions (eg, central banks) to these issues.
The course is also structured around a particular point of view – namely, that economics is a science of models and that most of the main features of econometrics relate generally to the role of models in science.
Topics
- History of econometrics to frame the philosophical issues to be discussed in the course
- The Vienna Circle and econometrics
- Values and Ethical Pitfalls in econometric research
- Key philosophical issues of how models relate to the world and how they relate to each other
- Data: observation, classification, and measurement of economic variables from a modeling point of view
- Conceptual issues related to modeling randomness
- The identification problem: how possibly, if at all possible, to map descriptive relations onto theoretical variables?
- Issues related to optional stopping, search methodologies, and the proper interpretation of results obtained through search
- Different approaches to the nature of causation and different strategies of causal inference
- The conceptual basis of graphical causal modeling and controlled, natural, and field experiments
- The conceptual issues surrounding the problem of model uncertainty, as well as some of the strategies economists use to address it