ABSTRACT
One of the questions methodologists have been considering recently is whether methodology matters for economics [e.g. Caldwell 1990; Hoover 1995]. It is increasingly difficult to find evidence of or comprehend how ordinary methodology questions-for example, those concerning testability, instrumentalism, realism, tautology vs metaphysics, appraisal vs criticism, etc.— in any way constrain the decisions made by ordinary theorists. Few theorists would bother to do any flag-waving concerning their methodological decisions except when they incorrectly confuse methodology decisions with technical modeling decisions. Today, game theory is the current fad in modeling techniques that prompts a little bit of flag-waving. In the 1950s it was activity or vector analysis, followed by set theory which was heavily promoted in the 1960s; and in the 1980s there was much to do about chaos and fuzzy set theory. And so on. Even in the context of modeling techniques we see very little that resembles the issues that ordinary methodologists want to talk about.
