Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART ONE CLASSIC DISCUSSIONS
- PART TWO POSITIVIST AND POPPERIAN VIEWS
- PART THREE IDEOLOGY AND NORMATIVE ECONOMICS
- PART FOUR BRANCHES AND SCHOOLS OF ECONOMICS AND THEIR METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
- PART FIVE NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY
- 22 The Rhetoric of This Economics
- 23 Realism
- 24 What Has Realism Got to Do with It?
- 25 Feminism and Economics
- 26 Credible Worlds: The Status of Theoretical Models in Economics
- Selected Bibliography of Books on Economic Methodology
- Index
- References
23 - Realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART ONE CLASSIC DISCUSSIONS
- PART TWO POSITIVIST AND POPPERIAN VIEWS
- PART THREE IDEOLOGY AND NORMATIVE ECONOMICS
- PART FOUR BRANCHES AND SCHOOLS OF ECONOMICS AND THEIR METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
- PART FIVE NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY
- 22 The Rhetoric of This Economics
- 23 Realism
- 24 What Has Realism Got to Do with It?
- 25 Feminism and Economics
- 26 Credible Worlds: The Status of Theoretical Models in Economics
- Selected Bibliography of Books on Economic Methodology
- Index
- References
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.
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- Information
- The Philosophy of EconomicsAn Anthology, pp. 431 - 438Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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