María Caamaño: Confronting underdetermination in social science

Tuesday October 21 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Underdetermination of theory by evidence has typically not been directly addressed in debates about social science experimentation. A remarkable exception to this comes from some methodological analyses of experimental economics (see Hands 2001, Søberg 2005, Guala 2005, 2012, Bardsley et al. 2010, Jones 2008, 2012). A common denominator of these approaches is the proposal of anti-holistic strategies to get around the Duhem-Quine issue. The revision of auxiliary hypotheses hence emerges as a major task in social science experimentation. Although a significant progress has been made in fields like experimental game theory, the picture remains unclear with regard to what the most plausible approach might be, among the two main ones proposed: (1) models of social preferences, (2) models of bounded rationality (Hirokazu 2019, 28-33).

Bio
María Caamaño-Alegre is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Valladolid (Spain). She specializes in philosophy of science, with her research interests lying at the intersection of general philosophy of science, the methodology of science, the philosophy of language and epistemology.