Later this month (August 2019) I’ll be presenting a paper at the 14th conference of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM). The paper is titled, “From ‘data mining’ to ‘machine learning’: the role of randomised trials and the credibility revolution”. An apparent puzzle is that there’s a session on external validity – which was the subject of my economics PhD, a working paper and short publication – in which I’m not presenting. Surely if I am going to be presenting at conferences on the method or philosophy of economics I should be presenting my work on external validity? The short answer is: I already did in 2012. But I think the longer explanation is also worth giving.
First, the paper I will be presenting at INEM (and ENPOSS) builds explicitly on work I’ve done on external validity (henceforth ‘EV’).
Second, and more importantly, my contribution to the philosophy literature on EV was not just presented at the Evidence and Causality in the Sciences (ECitS) 2012 conference but subsequently finalised as a paper in 2012, revised in 2013. Unfortunately that paper was not published at the time, for reasons that were at best flimsy. Preoccupied with finishing my economics PhD and changing jobs, I delayed resubmitting the manuscript. When I returned to academia in 2016 I discovered that a paper on the subject had been published in Philosophy of Science. More surprising was that, apart from some differences in verbiage and references, the core arguments of the paper seem to be the same as about 30-40% of my own paper but with no reference to that or my work in economics. Then, earlier this year, another paper appeared in the Journal of Economic Methodology. The core arguments of this paper, too, are very similar to the other 30-40% of my paper (dealing with issues like causal process tracing and related matters). In the second instance, my economics work is cited by misunderstood or misrepresented: suggesting that my views are different to the author’s when in fact, as is clear from the 2012/13 paper, they are almost entirely the same.
Needless to say, this creates a rather awkward situation. Not least because I believe, for reasons I will not ventilate in detail at this point, that it is implausible that the two authors were unaware of, or uninfluenced by, my 2012/13 work. But it is now simply impossible to publish my own work, despite clearly having a claim to intellectual priority. These concerns have been taken-up in the relevant fora, but the wheels turn slowly. And it will be informative to test the extent to which academic philosophy is committed to principles of intellectual priority. In the interim it makes for an ‘interesting’ context for intellectual engagement…