Philosophy of Economics (Handbook of the Philosophy of Science)
Language: English
Pages: 929
ISBN: B007ZC91U6
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Part of the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series edited by:
Dov M. Gabbay King's College, London, UK; Paul Thagard University of Waterloo, Canada; and John Woods University of British Columbia, Canada.
Philosophy of Economics investigates the foundational concepts and methods of economics, the social science that analyzes the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. This groundbreaking collection, the most thorough treatment of the philosophy of economics ever published, brings together philosophers, scientists and historians to map out the central topics in the field. The articles are divided into two groups. Chapters in the first group deal with various philosophical issues characteristic of economics in general, including realism and Lakatos, explanation and testing, modeling and mathematics, political ideology and feminist epistemology. Chapters in the second group discuss particular methods, theories and branches of economics, including forecasting and measurement, econometrics and experimentation, rational choice and agency issues, game theory and social choice, behavioral economics and public choice, geographical economics and evolutionary economics, and finally the economics of scientific knowledge. This volume serves as a detailed introduction for those new to the field as well as a rich source of new insights and potential research agendas for those already engaged with the philosophy of economics.
Hooker. Philosophy of Ecology, edited by Bryson Brown, Kent Peacock and Kevin de Laplante. Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, edited by Paul Thagard. Philosophy of Economics, edited by Uskali M¨aki. Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by Ruth Kempson, Tim Fernando and Nicholas Asher. Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord. Philosophy of Medicine, edited by Fred Gifford. Details about the contents and publishing schedule of the volumes can be
claims made by Koopmans and Debreu can be easily refuted by counterexamples; (b) when divested of their misleading auxiliary hypotheses, their equation of mathematics with language runs the risk of emptiness; and (c), these and other economists have shown themselves uninterested in investing the comparison with real substance. Let us take each objection in turn. When economists compare mathematics to a language, they do not generally mean that it is one among many languages in terms of strengths
model may not be compatible with each other and this may become particularly evident if and when deidealizations are made. Hoover [2008a] unpicks the idealizations of recent macroeconomic models to show how the reductionist idealizations embedded in their Models and Modelling in Economics 57 micro-foundations are not only individually problematic as separate idealizations (see [Kirman, 1992]), but problematic in that the various idealizations are either incompatible, or make seemingly
two philosophers of economics who specialise in econometrics — Kevin Hoover and Marcel Boumans. For them, models can function as instruments of observation and measurement in the process of identifying invariant economic phenomena. For Hoover [1994; 2000], this follows from recognising that economics is largely (and particularly at the macroeconomic or market level, rather than the individual level) a science of observation rather than one of experiment, so that he regards the many models
Box had a very long history in which economists from 1881 to the 1950s used it to derive solutions to various theoretical problems in several different domains of economics (see [Humphrey, 1996]). But not only was it used in the development of theory results, it was also critical in the development of new theoretical concepts — Edgeworth’s contract curve and Pareto’s optimal position were both framed within the Edgeworth Box (see also [Morgan, 2004a]). More broadly, Daniel Hausman, suggests that