Model Transfer and its challenges in science: The case of economics

How can a single model be used to study predator-prey interactions in biology, the growth of cancer in medicine, and the business cycle in economics? And how does this practice contribute to scientific progress? To answer those questions, we need to understand how models are transferred across domains. Model transfer is one of the most pertinent phenomena in modern science. Yet, despite an increasing interest among philosophers of science in model transfer, this phenomenon has not yet received its due attention. This project will provide a comprehensive philosophical investigation of model transfer, its challenges, and its implications for scientific progress by combining approaches from philosophy and history of science with computational methods, particularly network analysis, blockmodeling and topic modeling. To do so, research in this project will focus on economics as an exemplary case that provides insights for the social and natural sciences alike.

Those cases will be studied in three interrelated subprojects. The first subproject will center on developing methodological and conceptual tools to analyze model transfer. We will use computational methods to generate empirical mappings of the model transfer processes that characterize our cases, and identify those models’ trajectory and characteristic stages of their transfer process. We will use a historical approach to provide an in-depth analysis of the transfer process for each case, and analyze the challenges to model transfer in the process. The second subproject provides the philosophical investigation of model transfer and its challenges in science. We will focus on systematically and conceptually study two issues in particular, namely the object of transfer, and the transfer process. The third subproject focuses on the relationship between model transfer and scientific progress. We will study whether and, if so, in which sense science progresses because of model transfer. We will focus not only on the relationship between model transfer and scientific progress but also on the kinds of progress that economics experiences due to model transfer.