15 - Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
This book has focused on the epistemological peculiarities of a very special human cognitive enterprise – neoclassical microeconomics. It has not broached the central problems of epistemology or of philosophy of science in their full generality. Its conclusions concern economics and not all are relevant to other disciplines, even other social disciplines. But some of its conclusions are of general significance. For example, although Richard Miller in his recent Fact and Method eloquently insists upon the importance of the particular problems and standards that characterize different disciplines, he endorses the philosophical platitude that scientific theories postulate the existence of unobservable things to explain generalizations at the level of observations (1987, p. 135). To make sense of economic theory, one must reject this view. Similarly the extent to which the view of models and theories defended in section 5.3 helps to illuminate economics provides an argument for the cogency of that general view. The discussion of Milton Friedman's methodology helps one to disentangle different positions that might be called instrumentalist (A.2) and shows what concern for truth instrumentalists need to have. The discussion in chapters 12 and 13 of how evidence bears on utility theory illuminates the tenuous general relations between theory and data.
It would be tedious to compile a long list of examples such as these, and, in any event, my main concern is economics, not general philosophy of science.
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- Information
- The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics , pp. 270 - 280Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992