Economic Methodology

Economic methodology is the philosophy of science for economics. Philosophy of science investigates the nature of the assumptions, types of reasoning, and forms of explanation used in the sciences, and economic methodology investigates the nature of the assumptions, types of reasoning, and forms of explanation used in economic science. Yet not only do the issues and concerns that dominate today’s discussions of economic methodology in many ways mirror those in contemporary philosophy of science, but economic methodology’s emergence as a recognized field of economics in the 1980s was strongly influenced by reactions that were occurring at that time in the philosophy of science against logical positivism (see Chapter 1), particularly in connection with the ideas of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos.

This book uses this historical development in philosophy of science to frame its introduction to the field of economic methodology. Though there have been important contributions to economic methodology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relatively late emergence of economic methodology as a distinct field of specialization within economics was very much associated with the philosophy of science’s response to logical positivism – and then by its further response to Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos. We believe that it is important to refer back to these historical origins to understand how many of the current concerns and issues in economic methodology came about. We also believe that it is important to understand the questions that face economics as a science in light of the questions that are faced by science in general.

Table of Contents

1 The Received View of Science

2 Methodologies of Positive Economics

3 Popper’s Logic of Discovery

4 Kuhn and Lakatos

5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

6 Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and Pluralism

7 Value Judgments in Economics

About the Authors

Marcel Boumans is Associate Professor History and Methodology of Economics at the Utrecht School of Economics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

John B. Davis is Professor Emeritus of Economics: Marquette University, University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Keynes’s Philosophical Development, The Theory of the Individual in Economics, and Individuals and Identity in Economics, and a former co-author of the Journal of Economic Methodology.