Theory Roulette: Choosing that Climate Change is not a Tragedy of the Commons (forthcoming)

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case for both externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative such that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behaviour to fit our model, rather than the other way around. But while this problem of the performativity of ToC has been noted in a recent paper in this journal by Matthew Kopec, we find his proposed strategies for dealing with their self-fulfilling nature lacking. Instead of relying on the idea that modelling assumptions are always strictly speaking false, we illustrate that the problem may be better framed as a problem of underdetermination between competing explanations. Our goal here is to provide a framework for choosing between this set of competing models that allows us to avoid a ‘Russian Roulette’-like situation in which we gamble with existential risk