Abstract
This chapter elaborates the concept of credibility as a yardstick for the assessment of model-based policies. We further distinguish between epistemic and strategic credibility and show how this distinction helps us to understand the relation between models and the assessment of public policies. For policy assessment purposes, credibility depends mostly on extrapolation. Such extrapolations have a better chance of success if we draw on a causal mechanism, as structural models do. The sort of empiricism about causal interventions promoted, among others, by field trialists in economics has a lower chance of being epistemically credible. Furthermore, the reductive relationship between strategic credibility to epistemic credibility would lack of stability.
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Notes
- 1.
House of Commons: Treasury Committee (2006), p. EV53.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
See Chao and Huang (2011) for the history of Liu’s and Sims’ econometric approaches.
- 5.
In this sense, Hendry subscribes to the position of pessimistic induction in the philosophy of science. See Chao (2009) for Hendry’s empirical methodology of econometrics.
- 6.
- 7.
Manski and Garfinkel’s notion of extrapolation originates from its usage in the econometric literature, which understands extrapolation to be an ex-post test on how the model fits the observed data.
- 8.
For this view, see Imbens (2010, p. 417).
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- 10.
A more serious problem for Steel’s account is whether comparative process tracing can really solve the extrapolator’s circle. Comparative process tracing requires sufficient knowledge of the mechanism of the target, but how much information is sufficient for the researchers to decide what works for the model works for the target is perhaps non-consensusal. Furthermore, the model’s external validity depends on its resemblance to the target. As the example of the carcinogenic effect of aflatoxin B1 shows, to decide rats are better models than mice, researchers need to study humans, but once there are such studies on humans, the rodent study seems unnecessary, except for the ethical reason that we cannot conduct experiments on humans (Howick et al. 2013). The task is indeed to find satisfactory models rather than to find out the nature of the target. In that case, given that extrapolation is hindered by various threats and structure-altering changes, social scientists may just go ahead to uncover the mechanism of the target to ensure that the policy works.
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- 12.
However, the question for social science is whether capacities are easy to come by. See Reiss (2008).
- 13.
See also Hoover (2015) for the genesis of the version of the price-inflation Phillips curve.
- 14.
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Acknowledgements
Chao’s research is sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under grant NSC 102-2628-H-007 -003 -MY3. Teira’s research was funded by the research grants FFI2011-28835 and FFI2014-57258-P.
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Chao, HK., Teira, D. (2017). Model-Based Knowledge and Credible Policy Analysis. In: Chao, HK., Reiss, J. (eds) Philosophy of Science in Practice. Synthese Library, vol 379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45532-7_10
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