ABSTRACT
In the foregoing narrative economic rhetoric was introduced as a postmodern response to the deficiencies of the positivist and Popperian legacies in the domain of economic methodology. We also traced how contemporary realism, emerged in the latter half of this century to fill the lacuna left by twentiethcentury positivism, while simultaneously responding to the contemporary relativist tendencies identified in the work of Feyerabend and Kuhn. With this methodological background in place, the challenging manner in which Lawson and Mäki exploit their respective interpretations of realism in the philosophy of economics was outlined. The narrative then progressed onto the constructive empiricist critique of scientific realism and to the manner in which constructive empiricism could be deployed in contemporary philosophy of economics. However, we rejected each of these three approaches as inadequate philosophies of economics. Neither economic rhetoric nor scientific realism nor constructive empiricism gives an adequate account of such critical issues as the role of theory in economics or the epistemic/ ontological dimensions of economic model building, especially the epistemic issue of the descriptive adequacy of economic theory. In our opinion, an alternative novel methodological framework is required to remedy these deficiencies. This alternative framework we have termed causal holism. By reinterpreting Quine’s holism and by extending the ongoing debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists, causal holism emerged as a challenging methodological framework for economics.
