Professor (Directeur de Recherche)
Paris School of Economics & CNRS/CES
PhD in Mathematics (Oxford)
fd (at) franzdietrich (dot) net

In a nutshell

My research lies between philosophy and economics and is as interdisciplinary as my background. It addresses human or collective agents, from various perspectives: philosophical or formal, normative or positive, psychological or behavioural, foundational or applied, classical or exotic. I publish in different areas:

• Individual agents: reason-based choice, decision under uncertainty, unawareness, preference change, rationality, reasoning, normative uncertainty
• Collective decisions: judgment aggregation, probability aggregation, preference aggregation
• Individual Epistemology: belief revision, binary vs. probabilistic beliefs
• Social Epistemology: jury theorems, Bayesian groups
• Ethics: (non-)consequentialism, relativism vs. universalism, normative reasons, moral uncertainty
• Philosophy of Science and Economic Methodology: realism vs. instrumentalism, mentalism vs. behaviourism
• Political Economy: mathematical models of terrorism prevention.

On a personal note

I feel that orthodox models often betray or simplify away the philosophical motivation behind them. This lets me take new avenues. Meanwhile I confess often falling back myself into established paradigms or techniques, be it because of their sheer beauty or my own laziness. It is hard to decide whether a model or framework brings the truth to light or hides it from us. Let us be critical with our models and keep confronting them with the concepts and ideas from which they were born!