ABSTRACT
Hirsch makes his strongest stand against my 1979 article in a book he wrote with Neil de Marchi [1990]. I reviewed this book for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought [Boland 1991a]. Despite what they say at the beginning, the book is really two books in one, with the first part being Hirsch’s view that Friedman is not an instrumentalist as defined by Karl Popper but is an instrumentalist as defined by John Dewey. Unfortunately, Hirsch makes too
much of Friedman’s personal reports that my 1979 article about the 1953 methodology essay is ‘entirely correct’. Such reports are troubling for Hirsch since what my article explained is that Friedman’s essay can be clearly understood as an instrumentalist argument in favor of instrumentalism-and nothing more! Perhaps Hirsch would have been more pleased had I been referring to Dewey’s notion of instrumentalism instead of Popper’s. It would seem that Hirsch feels that the record must be set straight.
