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23 - Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

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

Uskali Mäki (1951–) is currently an Academy Professor in the Academy of Finland. He holds a Ph.D. from Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and has published extensively in both economics and philosophy. The author of over one hundred essays and a past editor of The Journal of Economic Methodology, Mäki's interests span the entire domain of economic methodology. Realism has been a persistent interest, and a number of his publications explore the varieties of realism to be found in economics. Mäki has played a key role in establishing economic methodology as a discipline.

When an economist talks about the ‘realism of assumptions’, he is not using the term ‘realism’ in any of its standard philosophical senses. Another difficulty that plagues the term is that it has a variety of legitimate philosophical meanings that are interrelated but do not reduce to each other. ‘Realism’ is used as the name for a variety of doctrines about things such as science, sense perception, universals, other minds, the past, mathematical objects, truth, moral values, possibilities and so on. This is expressed in the fact that the opponents of realists on these issues are not called uniformly by a single label. Depending on the issue at hand, the non-realists are said to subscribe to positions such as idealism, phenomenalism, empiricism, nominalism, conventionalism, instrumentalism, operationism, fictionalism, relativism and constructivism.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Philosophy of Economics
An Anthology
 , pp. 431 - 438
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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References

Armstrong, David (1978), Universals and Scientific Realism, vols I–II, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Boylan, Tom and O'Gorman, Paschal (1995), Beyond Rhetoric and Realism, London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devitt, Michael (1984), Realism and Truth, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lawson, Tony (1997), Economics and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leplin, Jarrett (ed.) (1984), Scientific Realism, Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mäki, Uskali (1989), ‘On the problem of realism in economics’, Ricerche Economiche, 43, 176–98; reprinted in Bruce Caldwell (ed.), The Philosophy and Methodology of Economics, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993.Google Scholar
Uskali, Mäki (1992), ‘On the method of isolation in economics’, Idealization IV: Intelligibility in Science, ed. Craig Dilworth, special issue of Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 26, 319–54.Google Scholar
Mäki, Uskali (1993), ‘The market as an isolated causal process: A metaphysical ground for realism’, in Caldwell, Bruce and Boehm, Stephan (eds), Austrian Economics: Tensions and New Directions, Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Uskali, Mäki (1996), ‘Scientific realism and some peculiarities of economics’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 169, 425–45.Google Scholar
Putnam, Hilary (1981), Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John (1995), The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Sellars, Wilfrid (1963), Science, Perception and Reality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar

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  • Realism
  • Daniel M. Hausman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Philosophy of Economics
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819025.029
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  • Realism
  • Daniel M. Hausman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Philosophy of Economics
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819025.029
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Realism
  • Daniel M. Hausman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Philosophy of Economics
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819025.029
Available formats
×