"The final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction." - Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

Marcel Boumans is professor of history of economics at Utrecht University. His main research focus is on understanding empirical research practices in the social sciences from a combined historical and philosophical perspective. He is particularly interested in the practices of measurement and modelling and the role of mathematics, on which he published two monographs, How Economists Model the World into Number and Science Outside the Laboratory. His research project on how to make sense of the available data is nearing completion with a book manuscript ‘Shaping the Phenomena.’ His current project is a situational approach to understanding misinformation.

Inaugural adress: Historicism and its Monsters