ABSTRACT
Introduction Current debates in the methodology of economics can be characterized as lying on either side of a fault-line dividing the adherents of realism, or at least certain variants of it, from those who advocate anti-realist positions as being the most appropriate methodological basis for economics. The path by which the methodology of economics has arrived at this situation has been a tortured and indeed tortuous journey, embracing most, if not all, of the major developments in philosophy, and specifically in the philosophy of science during the course of the twentieth century. From the emergence of logical positivism in the early part of that century to its transmogrification into logical empiricism, the latter becoming essentially identified with the Received View (Suppes 1977), through the Popperian interlude of falsificationism, along with its associated Kuhnian and Lakatosian responses, all of which influenced and preoccupied methodological reflections in economics to various degrees. The breakdown of the putative Received View gave rise to what Caldwell (1982) termed the ‘post-positivist’ era. While it is difficult to assign precise dates to developments in the movement of ideas, the 1974 Nafplion Colloquium on Research Programmes in Physics and Economics and the publication of the proceedings in a seminal volume edited by Spiro Latsis could be canvassed as marking the beginning of a new and vibrant phase in economic methodology (Latsis 1976). While the shadow of Kuhnian paradigms and Lakatosian research programmes hung over the Latsis volume, the next 30 years witnessed the proverbial ‘explosion’ in the literature on economic methodology (Hands 2001a). By the 1990s it was clear that the main contending methodological frameworks in economic methodology gravitated around realism on the one hand and
rhetoric, which had been introduced by McCloskey (1983, 1986), on the other. In 1995 we attempted to negotiate a methodological via media between realism and rhetoric, arising from our dissatisfaction with aspects of both of these positions (Boylan and O’Gorman 1995). We termed our position ‘causal holism’ and it represented a fusion of Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism (Van Fraassen 1980) with Quine’s holism (1981). Causal holism was motivated by our concern with what we perceived to be the ‘epistemic cost’ to the empirical content of economics arising from the excessive preoccupation with a particular form of formalization in economics, something we shared with Tony Lawson’s critical realism. While we do not propose to rehearse the arguments of causal holism here, beyond emphasizing a central tenet which underlay our position: that while we took an extremely liberal view of the intellectual resources that could be permitted in the construction of theory, when it came to theory selection and evaluation, our criterion was informed by the concept of descriptive adequacy. This we argued had significant implications for economics. The malaise in economics remains, we believe, centrally concerned with this question and its related issues. Causal holism took issue with the epistemological fundamentals of realism, and found rhetoric either unwilling or unable to provide a satisfactory analysis of a number of issues. Arising from our work on causal holism, our research efforts developed in a number of different directions. One direction pursued was the exploration of a Wittgensteinian interpretation of rationality as a potential source of modification of the conceptual basis of rationality as used in mainstream (neoclassical) economics (Boylan and O’Gorman 2003a). Another direction, and one we considered to be as fundamental, if not more urgent, was the need to address the relationship between developments in the philosophy of mathematics and theoretical economics, in the context of major developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, in this case the ‘linguistic turn’ (Boylan and O’Gorman 2007). These were issues which received, in our view, seriously inadequate attention in the literature of economic methodology. Our methodological position was interpreted as being a sophisticated form of empiricism but anti-realist in orientation. Certainly our position as causal holists, when extended to the philosophy of mathematics, led us to the need to address the issue of realism and anti-realism in mathematics. It was clear to us that within the literature on economic methodology, neither the realists nor the anti-realists addressed the implications of the distinction between realism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mathematics and more significantly to the implication of this distinction for economic theorizing. In the summer of 1995, in the inspiring surroundings of the beautiful city of Florence, during the course of the Tenth International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, we articulated a book-length study of these developments and their implications for economics. However, circumstances conspired against us which prohibited our pursuit of this project, when one of us became involved in senior management within our University between 1997 and 2001. By 2000, however, Vela arrived in Galway, and after his term as a Fellow
of Peterhouse College in Cambridge during 2000-2001 was completed, he took up the John Elliot Cairnes Professorship of Economics, a part-time position that was especially created for him at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Vela’s arrival in Galway and the opportunity to speak to him of his innovative and challenging research agenda, with its implications for the fundamental reconsideration of theory construction and evaluation at the most sophisticated technical level of analysis, revitalized our interest in our earlier project, in what was a more philosophical approach to aspects of the same project as Vela was pursuing. This offering represents our modest contribution to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of a gifted theorist, and a unique human being, whom we have had the great privilege and pleasure of having as a colleague and friend for the last nine years. The structure of the remainder of the chapter is as follows: in the second section we outline the dominance of realism in economic methodological thinking, as represented in the work of Lawson and Mäki; this is followed in the third section, where we examine a number of aspects of realism in the philosophy of mathematics which have significance for economic methodology. In the fourth section we address anti-realism in the philosophy of mathematics, and the emergence of constructive mathematics and its methodological implications for economics. The final section addresses the issue of the kind of mathematics to be used in theory construction in economics, and re-engages with our opposition to current realist positions in economic methodology.
