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PART FIVE - NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Daniel M. Hausman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

As explained in the introduction to this volume, there has been a flood of recent and valuable work on economic methodology. Part V provides a tiny selection of this work. In choosing these five articles from hundreds of possibilities, I have attempted both to provide some sense of the range of contemporary works and to sample from some of the most influential methodological approaches and authors.

A brilliant writer, a distinguished economic historian, and a bold innovator, Deirdre N. McCloskey in Chapter 22 challenges the pretense of methodologists to guide practice in economics and argues that rhetoric (the study of persuasion) is a more fruitful and enlightening guide.

Although committed to methodology, Uskali Mäki's and Tony Lawson's realist programs as sketched in Chapters 23 and 24 call for drastic shifts in the way that methodology is done. Both argue that methodologists should be concerned with the ontological commitments of economists – that is with an exploration of what economists take to be real. However Mäki's and Lawson's explorations take very different directions, with Lawson arguing that ontological inquiry leads to serious criticisms of mainstream economics.

In Chapter 25, Julie A. Nelson explores gendered presuppositions within mainstream economics and ways in which sensitivity both to those presuppositions and to the specific economic circumstances of women could improve the discipline. In the last chapter in the volume, Robert Sugden offers a novel account of theoretical models and clues concerning why theoretical models occupy such a dominating role within economics.

Type
Chapter
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The Philosophy of Economics
An Anthology
, pp. 413 - 414
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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