ABSTRACT
Economic theory is a perplexing subject. Though I have spent the better part of my academic career thinking about its aims and methods, I have never been confident that I or anyone else for that matter really understand its cognitive status. Partly, no doubt, this is because everyone's understanding of the cognitive status of most intellectual disciplines has been subject to great disturbances over the last two decades or more. Even at the time I first began thinking and writing about the problems which economics presents for the philosophy of science, in the late 1960s, the conceptual framework within which scientific disciplines were assessed was coming under serious question. Since then matters have moved so far in the philosophy, history, sociology and psychology of science, that the very notion of 'cognitive status' has gone into eclipse.
