Francesco Guala
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 219670 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Francesco Guala |
| NOMBRES | Francesco |
| APELLIDO | Guala |
| FIRMA | GUALA F |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6252-2264 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 205 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Rational expectations and kinematic information in coordination games
Money on my Mind
Natural Kinds as Homeorhetic Dynamic Systems
Philosophers have become increasingly aware of the difficulties that plague accounts of kinds with objectively determined boundaries, and generally recognise that scientific taxonomies are shaped by human pragmatic interests and non-epistemic values. Against this trend, we propose an account of kinds conceived as dynamic entities, characterised by qualitatively distinct and robust trajectories originating from bifurcation events in the developmen…
On the transparency of nudges
Rational Coordination Without Beliefs
The nature and significance of social ontology
We propose a bridge-builder perspective on social ontology. Our point of departure is that an important task of philosophy is to provide the bigger picture. To this end, it should investigate folk views and determine whether and how they can be preserved once scrutinized from the perspective of the sciences. However, the sciences typically present us with a fragmented picture of reality. Thus, an important intermediate step is to integrate the mo…
Coordination without meta-representation
Meta-representation does not always facilitate social interaction. We illustrate this claim focusing on the case of coordination, and conjecture that people coordinate using a mode of reasoning that does not require the representation of others’ beliefs. We compare this sort of belief-less reasoning with theories that appeal to limited meta-representation, and present evidence indicating that people employ both – with meta-representation being us…
Rescuing Ontological Individualism
Standard defenses of ontological individualism are challenged by arguments that exploit the dependence of social facts on material facts—that is, facts that are not about human individuals. In this article, I discuss Brian Epstein’s “materialism” in The Ant Trap : granting Epstein’s strict definition of individualism, I show that his arguments depend crucially on a generous conception of social properties and social facts. Individualists, however…
The functions of institutions
Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote socia…
Money as an Institution and Money as an Object
The folk conception of money as an object is not a promising starting point to develop general, explanatory metaphysical accounts of the social world. A theory of institutions as rules in equilibrium is more consistent with scientific theories of money, is able to shed light on the folk view, and side-steps some unnecessary puzzles
Social Norms, Expectations and Sanctions
Hindriks’ paper raises two issues: one is formal and concerns the notion of ‘cost’ in rational choice accounts of norms; the other is substantial and concerns the role of expectations in the modification of payoffs. In this commentary I express some doubts and worries especially about the latter: What’s so special with shared expectations? Why do they induce compliance with norms, if transgression is not associated with sanctions
Précis of Understanding Institutions
Understanding Institutions offers a theory that is able to unify the two dominant approaches in the scientific and philosophical literature on institutions. Moreover, using the ‘rules-in-equilibrium’ theory, it tackles several ancient puzzles in the philosophy of social science
Replies to Critics
I answer the questions raised by commentators, and clarify what Understanding Institutions tried to achieve
The Effect of Group Identity On Distributive Choice
Group identity can influence significantly people’s attitudes towards monetary allocations. In this article, we reassess the representation of group identity using social preference models. First, we show that the influence of group identity varies unsystematically across different types of mini‐dictator games and cannot be described using a well‐behaved preference function. Second, we demonstrate that the effect is not robust to slightly increas…
Understanding Institutions
Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules.Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and de…
Artificiality, Reactivity, and Demand Effects in Experimental Economics
A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which “artificiality” has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality (und…
Epstein on Anchors and Grounds
The distinction between anchors and grounds is one of the most innovative contributions of The Ant Trap. In this commentary I will argue that the distinction suffers from an ambiguity between tokens and types. This leads Epstein to endorse pluralism about anchors and grounds, a position that is not justified in the book and to which there are plausible alternatives
Understanding institutions
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
The normativity of Lewis Conventions
The Evolutionary Program in Social Philosophy
This article deals mainly with disagreements that are internal to the evolutionary program. It introduces some theoretical concepts from the theory of games and evolutionary biology, focusing in particular on dilemmas of cooperation. The coordination and bargaining games are covered. The evolutionary approaches based on evolutionarily stable strategies, kin selection, assortativity, and reciprocity have dominated the theoretical literature for th…
Reciprocity
Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-sh…
Cooperation in and out of the lab
Reciprocity
How history and convention create norms
The Development of Capability Indicators
This paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities constitutive of a good life, argued to be comprehensive at a high level of abstraction, and uses it to operationalize the capabilities approach by developing a surv…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Building economic machines
Extrapolation, Analogy, and Comparative Process Tracing
Comparative process tracing is the best analysis of extrapolation inferences in the philosophical and scientific literature so far. In this essay I examine some similarities and differences between comparative process tracing and former attempts to capture the logic of extrapolation, such as the analogical approach. I show that these accounts are not different in spirit, although comparative process tracing supersedes previous proposals in terms …
Experimental Localism and External Validity
Experimental “localism” stresses the importance of context-specific knowledge, and the limitations of universal theories in science. I illustrate Latour's radical approach to localism and show that it has some unpalatable consequences, in particular the suggestion that problems of external validity (or how to generalize experimental results to nonlaboratory circumstances) cannot be solved. In the last part of the paper I try to sketch a solution …
Vilfredo Pareto and the Epistemological Foundations of Choice Theory
Research Article| March 01 2001 Vilfredo Pareto and the Epistemological Foundations of Choice Theory Luigino Bruni; Luigino Bruni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francesco Guala Francesco Guala Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2001) 33 (1): 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-33-1-21 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions S…
The functions of institutions
Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote socia…
Infallibilism and Human Kinds
Infallibilism and apriorism are still influential in the philosophy of social science. Infallibilists about human kinds claim that there are features of institutional entities about which we cannot possibly be wrong. But infallibilism is not implied by the theory of collective intentionality that supposedly grounds it. Moreover, it fails to account for the mode of existence of important institutional kinds, including the paradigmatic example of m…
The Philosophy of Social Science
Ontological debates have always been prominent in the philosophy of social science. Philosophers have typically conceived of such debates as pre-scientific attempts to reform social scientific practice, rather than as post-scientific reflections on a firm body of scientific knowledge. Two celebrated contemporary research programs in social ontology - collective intentionality and evolutionary game theory - also follow this approach. In this paper…
How history and convention create norms
Money as an Institution and Money as an Object
The folk conception of money as an object is not a promising starting point to develop general, explanatory metaphysical accounts of the social world. A theory of institutions as rules in equilibrium is more consistent with scientific theories of money, is able to shed light on the folk view, and side-steps some unnecessary puzzles
Autonomy-Freedom and Deliberation
Recent attempts to model and measure freedom in the Freedom of Choice Literature (FCL) have focused on the range of opportunities enjoyed by individuals. In this article we focus instead on the range of autonomous choices available to individuals. We illustrate how this approach differs from traditional proposals in FCL and discuss a metric that captures the autonomy aspect of freedom of choice
Rescuing Ontological Individualism
Standard defenses of ontological individualism are challenged by arguments that exploit the dependence of social facts on material facts—that is, facts that are not about human individuals. In this article, I discuss Brian Epstein’s “materialism” in The Ant Trap : granting Epstein’s strict definition of individualism, I show that his arguments depend crucially on a generous conception of social properties and social facts. Individualists, however…
Artificiality, Reactivity, and Demand Effects in Experimental Economics
A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which “artificiality” has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality (und…
On the transparency of nudges
The Effect of Group Identity On Distributive Choice
Group identity can influence significantly people’s attitudes towards monetary allocations. In this article, we reassess the representation of group identity using social preference models. First, we show that the influence of group identity varies unsystematically across different types of mini‐dictator games and cannot be described using a well‐behaved preference function. Second, we demonstrate that the effect is not robust to slightly increas…
Epstein on Anchors and Grounds
The distinction between anchors and grounds is one of the most innovative contributions of The Ant Trap. In this commentary I will argue that the distinction suffers from an ambiguity between tokens and types. This leads Epstein to endorse pluralism about anchors and grounds, a position that is not justified in the book and to which there are plausible alternatives
Understanding institutions
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
The normativity of Lewis Conventions
Reciprocity
Paradigmatic Experiments
The Ultimatum Game is one of the most successful experimental designs in the history of the social sciences. In this article I try to explain this success—what makes it a “paradigmatic experiment”—stressing in particular its versatility. Despite the intentions of its inventors, the Ultimatum Game was never a good design to test economic theory, and it is now mostly used as a heuristic tool for the observation of nonstandard preferences or as a “s…
Précis of Understanding Institutions
Understanding Institutions offers a theory that is able to unify the two dominant approaches in the scientific and philosophical literature on institutions. Moreover, using the ‘rules-in-equilibrium’ theory, it tackles several ancient puzzles in the philosophy of social science
Replies to Critics
I answer the questions raised by commentators, and clarify what Understanding Institutions tried to achieve
The problem of external validity (or "parallelism") in experimental economics
This article is in three parts: in the first section, a real case of laboratory experimentation in economics illustrates what experimentalists do in order to test the external validity of their results. Then, it is shown that such a practice presupposes a specific conception of the causal relations economists are seeking. Some general remarks about the notions of external validity and parallelism are provided in conclusion
Pareto on idealization and the method of analysis-synthesis
Philosophers of science and philosophers of economics have recently "rediscovered" the problem of idealization. In this paper a taxonomy of different kinds of idealizing procedures is applied to Pareto's views on the status of economics among the social sciences. The paper aims to show that the evolution of Pareto's career as a social scientist can be seen in a new perspective, as a long and in the end unresolved struggle with the problem of anal…
Pareto on idealization and the method of analysis-synthesis
Philosophers of science and philosophers of economics have recently "rediscovered" the problem of idealization. In this paper a taxonomy of different kinds of idealizing procedures is applied to Pareto's views on the status of economics among the social sciences. The paper aims to show that the evolution of Pareto's career as a social scientist can be seen in a new perspective, as a long and in the end unresolved struggle with the problem of anal…
The problem of external validity (or "parallelism") in experimental economics
This article is in three parts: in the first section, a real case of laboratory experimentation in economics illustrates what experimentalists do in order to test the external validity of their results. Then, it is shown that such a practice presupposes a specific conception of the causal relations economists are seeking. Some general remarks about the notions of external validity and parallelism are provided in conclusion
Building economic machines
Vilfredo Pareto and the Epistemological Foundations of Choice Theory
Research Article| March 01 2001 Vilfredo Pareto and the Epistemological Foundations of Choice Theory Luigino Bruni; Luigino Bruni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francesco Guala Francesco Guala Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2001) 33 (1): 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-33-1-21 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions S…
Autonomy-freedom and deliberation
Experimental Localism and External Validity
Experimental “localism” stresses the importance of context-specific knowledge, and the limitations of universal theories in science. I illustrate Latour's radical approach to localism and show that it has some unpalatable consequences, in particular the suggestion that problems of external validity (or how to generalize experimental results to nonlaboratory circumstances) cannot be solved. In the last part of the paper I try to sketch a solution …
Autonomy-Freedom and Deliberation
Recent attempts to model and measure freedom in the Freedom of Choice Literature (FCL) have focused on the range of opportunities enjoyed by individuals. In this article we focus instead on the range of autonomous choices available to individuals. We illustrate how this approach differs from traditional proposals in FCL and discuss a metric that captures the autonomy aspect of freedom of choice
The Methodology of Experimental Economics
The experimental approach in economics is a driving force behind some of the most exciting developments in the field. The 'experimental revolution' was based on a series of bold philosophical premises which have remained until now mostly unexplored. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis and critical discussion of the methodology of experimental economics, written by a philosopher of science with expertise in the field. It outlines t…
Where Economics and Philosophy Meet
Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere fifty years ago, it was possible for the intelligent reader to move with relative ease between economics on the one hand and political economy, sociology and soc…
CRISTINA BICCHIERI The Grammar of Society
The Philosophy of Social Science
Ontological debates have always been prominent in the philosophy of social science. Philosophers have typically conceived of such debates as pre-scientific attempts to reform social scientific practice, rather than as post-scientific reflections on a firm body of scientific knowledge. Two celebrated contemporary research programs in social ontology - collective intentionality and evolutionary game theory - also follow this approach. In this paper…
Paradigmatic Experiments
The Ultimatum Game is one of the most successful experimental designs in the history of the social sciences. In this article I try to explain this success—what makes it a “paradigmatic experiment”—stressing in particular its versatility. Despite the intentions of its inventors, the Ultimatum Game was never a good design to test economic theory, and it is now mostly used as a heuristic tool for the observation of nonstandard preferences or as a “s…
Emphasising Extrapolation
The Development of Capability Indicators
This paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities constitutive of a good life, argued to be comprehensive at a high level of abstraction, and uses it to operationalize the capabilities approach by developing a surv…
Cooperation in and out of the lab
Reciprocity
How history and convention create norms
Infallibilism and Human Kinds
Infallibilism and apriorism are still influential in the philosophy of social science. Infallibilists about human kinds claim that there are features of institutional entities about which we cannot possibly be wrong. But infallibilism is not implied by the theory of collective intentionality that supposedly grounds it. Moreover, it fails to account for the mode of existence of important institutional kinds, including the paradigmatic example of m…
Extrapolation, Analogy, and Comparative Process Tracing
Comparative process tracing is the best analysis of extrapolation inferences in the philosophical and scientific literature so far. In this essay I examine some similarities and differences between comparative process tracing and former attempts to capture the logic of extrapolation, such as the analogical approach. I show that these accounts are not different in spirit, although comparative process tracing supersedes previous proposals in terms …
The Evolutionary Program in Social Philosophy
This article deals mainly with disagreements that are internal to the evolutionary program. It introduces some theoretical concepts from the theory of games and evolutionary biology, focusing in particular on dilemmas of cooperation. The coordination and bargaining games are covered. The evolutionary approaches based on evolutionarily stable strategies, kin selection, assortativity, and reciprocity have dominated the theoretical literature for th…
Reciprocity
Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-sh…
The normativity of Lewis Conventions
Understanding institutions
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Understanding Institutions
Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules.Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and de…
Epistemology (27 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Economics (22 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Positive economics (15 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (12 obras) · Philosophy and History of Science (12 obras)