Scientific Metaphysics

Don Ross is Professor of Economics and Dean of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, and Research Fellow in the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy. His current research areas are economic methodology, the experimental economics of impulsive consumption (e.g. addiction), strategic aspects of the evolution of human sociality, the promotion of scientism in philosophy and elsewhere, and relationships between risk and development in Africa. He is the author or editor of 14 books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. James Ladyman studied pure mathematics and philosophy at the University of York, and then took a Masters in history and philosophy of science and mathematics at King's College London. He completed his PhD, on the semantic approach to scientific theories and structural realism, under the supervision of Steven French at the University of Leeds in 1997. He has been assistant, deputy and co-editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and honorary secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. Harold Kincaid is Professor, School of Economics, University of Cape Town. He has published multiple papers on reductionism, scientific realism, inference to the best explanation, scientific realism, and causation. Among his books are Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (Cambridge 1996) and Individualism and the Unity of Science (Rowman and Littlefield 1997), and the coedited volumes The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Economics (2009), What is Addiction? (MIT 2010), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Science (2012), and the forthcoming Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT).