Marcel Boumans, Science Outside the Laboratory: Measurement in Field Science and Economics

Marcel Boumans’ Science outside the Laboratory revolves around the distinction between laboratory and field science, and the challenges that the latter faces in the measurement of scientific phenomena. Boumans raises a methodological puzzle, the possibility of reliable measurement in the field, and he gradually resolves it throughout an excursus in the history of science that brings to light episodes of methodological significance. The book starts with Oskar Morgenstern’s warning about the peril of scientific observation in economics; touches upon Gaussian’s theory of error and its uses in meteorology; discusses Haavelmo’s intuition about the problem of passive observation; and concludes with a survey of contemporary methods for aggregating experts’ judgments. Ultimately, Science outside the Laboratory is a call for expert knowledge as a complementary source of evidence that, if carefully integrated with the traditional tools of field sciences, can eventually lead us to more reliable, and in this sense more objective, measurement. In what follows, I will first outline what I take to be the main theses of the book and discuss some of its main tenets. I will then illustrate some of the crucial steps in Boumans’ argument in detail. I will finally conclude with some general comments about the book.