I’ve argued in the past (it was even occasionally an advertising slogan for this ‘stack) that management science is a branch of analytic philosophy and that it is a shame and a problem that neither philosophers nor management scientists have any interest in progressing this way. In general, philosophy ought to pay a lot more attention to accountancy (which is the major field of human activity where people spend a lot of time on conceptual definitions, the categorisation of events and the nature of control) and to tax (which, along with theology, is the major field in which large amounts of effort are put into technical compliance with a complicated body of arbitrary rules while undermining their intention).
Here's an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about – a couple of years ago in 2021, my local university lost a couple of blocks of student flats due to the discovery of an (at that time) unexploded German bomb, which had to be detonated to make it safe. The insurance claim was rejected, because the policy did not cover “acts of war”.
It went to court, with the two sides making respective cases of “well it didn’t explode in a war did it” and “well it was dropped in a war wasn’t it”. Exeter University ended up £10m poorer because the judge decided that, indeed, the controlled explosion at the building site on Glenthorne Road in 2021 was an event which had begun during the “Baedeker Raids” in 1942.
Or at least, it was partly. Looking at the judgement, the actual decision was that there were two proximate causes of the student flats being blown up – the dropping of the bomb in 1942, and its explosion in 2021. Neither cause could have destroyed the flats without the other (if the bomb had exploded in 2021 in a museum in Dresden or whatever, it wouldn’t have triggered this insurance policy). And the rule for insurance cases is that when there are two causes, one of which is excluded and one which isn’t, the exclusion prevails.
Exeter University tried to claim that because the bomb had been sat there for 80 years without exploding, the “agent of change” was the attempt to remove it, which didn’t happen during a war. The judge rejected this:
“On the facts here, I consider that the problem with this argument is that it treats the bomb buried in the ground close to the appellant’s buildings as part of the status quo. In my view, one could equally consider that the status quo was that, immediately before the bomb was dropped, this was farmland on the outskirts of Exeter. The bomb that fell in 1942 was the first change to the status quo, because it introduced a mass of high explosive into the ground where previously it had not been. The potency of that explosive did not dissipate over the years. The second change to the status quo was the construction of the appellant’s halls of residence close to where the bomb lay undiscovered. The third change to the status quo, following the subsequent discovery of the bomb, was the perceived need to attempt a [removal of the bomb]. All events might fairly be described as “agents of change”.
Which just goes to show, in my view, that when you’re asking for “explainability” in a complex system, you’re asking quite a lot. If the question “did this building blow up because of something that happened in 2021, or something that happened in 1942” requires seventeen pages of analysis by the Court of Appeal, then I’m not sure it’s reasonable to require that any output of a machine learning model should be traceable in a couple of sentences to be understood by a layperson.
another little piece of local colour is that the city councillor for my ward has an ongoing battle against "magnet fishing" in the Exe, because troops who were training here for D-Day tended to be quite careless with their ammo and grenades, and the quayside residents are getting sick of having to evacuate their houses when somebody who was hoping to find a shopping trolley or bike frame picks up something dangerous - https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/frightened-exeter-residents-say-unusual-8459579
Well, one philosopher here who reads your substack (and recent book) as philosophy. I think the problem is that analytic philosophy, much like orthodox economics, is too influenced by models based on individuals in ideal situations. Your views, and really any social philosophy of organizations, fall much more into the category of institutionalist approaches. These recognize that in reality organizational forms sharply constrain rationality and information, and indeed institutions can be conceptualized as the bearers of knowledge and ratioanales. Rather notoriously, social and political philosophy was a backwater in analytic philosophy in the post-war period. Even Rawls is hardly a departure from idealizing individualist modelling (and directly borrows from game theory). The result is that post-war analytic philosophy has always had interaction with psychology and (neoclassical) economics, but very little with sociology, anthropology, or history. Ernest Gellner's career is instructive here.