Measuring Utility without ‘externalist fallacies’: a response to Alexandrova and Beck, Boumans, and Gilboa

This is a response to the critical points made by Alexandrova, Beck, Boumans, and Gilboa in their reviews of my book Measuring Utility. A common thread in the reviewers' comments is that my history of utility measurement is too internalist, that is, I failed to account for some external factors that they contend influenced the history of utility measurement. In response, I make two main points: (1) at the general level of historiographical methodology, I argue against what I call the 'externalist fallacy' in the historiography of science and contend that, in principle, internalist narratives can provide good explanations of the development of a science; (2) with respect to the history of utility measurement reconstructed in the book, I argue that the available historical evidence indicates that the history of utility measurement was mostly determined by internal factors.