Imagine asking a typical, well informed, contemporary philosopher whether or not she considered biology to be a science. Our informant, being a philosopher, would not necessarily respond with the straightforward “of course” that would be expected from anyone else. She might first reason through a complicated and heavily qualified definition of science, or she might distinguish certain parts of biology that she held to be more clearly scientific than others. If she were partial to a certain sort of critical stance, (...) she might question the political basis for wishing to dignify certain parts of our inquisitive practice with the honorific ‘scientific’ in the first place. But there is at least one thing that she would almost certainly not do. She would not simultaneously embrace a version of the conventional philosophical view of science and deny that biology is a science. This is despite the fact that, as she will acknowledge, biology exploits a range of methodologies and explanatory strategies that have not yet admitted of systematic, consensual philosophical explication. (shrink)

This paper is part of a larger project defending of the foundations of microeconomics against recent criticisms by philosophers. Here, we undermine one source of these criticisms, arising from philosophers' disappointment with the performance of microeconomic tools, in particular game theory, when these are applied to normative decision theory. Hollis and Sugden have recently articulated such disappointment in a sophisticated way, and have argued on the basis of it that the economic conception of rationality is inadequate. We argue, however, that (...) their claim rests upon a misunderstanding of the concept of a game as it is used in microeconomics. (shrink)