ABSTRACT
Looking back over methodology literature that began with John Neville Keynes, it is difficult to find anything that has any direct bearing on economic literature in general. From the perspective of a practicing economist or economic theorist, until quite recently methodology has been completely useless. The only possible exception is the very limited role methodology plays in our understanding of the history of economic thought. The primary reason for such a bleak picture is that economics, like every other intellectual enterprise during the last sixty years, has been dominated by the positivism that I discussed in Chapter 9. In particular, economics has been dominated by positivism’s philosophical prejudice which considers only
scientific activity to be ‘meaningful’ and all else (including methodology and philosophy itself) to be ‘meaningless’. Against this background it has always been difficult for anyone to justify spending time studying methodology.
