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Mill's Unrevised Philosophy of Economics: A Comment on Hausman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Neil de Marchi
Neil de Marchi*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Duke University
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Abstract

Hausman has argued that Mill in the Logic demands verification of qualified, inexact statements if they are to be considered lawlike. This puts Mill in line with a reasonable interpretation of what modern microeconomists are about, but requires the additional hypothesis that Mill abandoned his earlier stress on modal truth in his 1836 essay on the method of economics. The paper maintains that neither textual nor contextual evidence supports this hypothesis. Moreover, it is superfluous if one attends carefully to how Mill conceived economic science, which occupied a peculiar, somewhat isolated place in his own views on the deductive method and on verification.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 89 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1986

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Footnotes

†

I have benefited greatly from correspondence with Dan Hausman. Uskali Maki, Margaret Schabas, Wade Hands, and Roy Weintraub have made useful comments and corrections for which I am grateful. I am indebted also to an anonymous referee for suggestions towards improving the presentation.

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