Kate Vredenburgh (LSE): “Causal explanation and revealed preferences”

This event will take place online via Zoom. 

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Abstract: Revealed preference approaches to modeling choice in the social sciences face seemingly devastating predictive, explanatory, and normative objections. In this talk, I will focus on predictive and explanatory objections, and offer two defenses. First, I argue that when revealed preferences are multiple realizable, revealed preferences can causally explain behavior well. But, considerations of multiple realizability open the revealed preference theorist to an equally plausible interpretation of these models, that they pick out a coarse grained psychological disposition. Second, I argue that when agential preferences cannot be easily analytically separated from the environment that produces the relevant behavior, revealed preferences also causally explain, if one adopts a counterfactual dependence account of causal explanation. An upshot of these two arguments is an explanatory dilemma for dispositional interpretations of “preference.” 

Kate Vredenburgh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE.