ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is not a perfect correspondence between Lawson's claims about the nature of social reality and those held by the American pragmatists; still, there is a close match. Whilst he makes a passing reference to John Dewey he does not refer to the vast literature of the American pragmatists. Lawson is not alone amongst economists. American pragmatism does not feature in the literature of economics. Economics provides an analytical framework that enables clarification of socioeconomics issues and helps to identify problems more clearly. Those who engage in modelling economic behavior or who investigate the economy empirically using econometric techniques implicitly subscribe to some premodel conception of the reality' of the economy. The conversations in economics have for decades been highly distorted because of the peculiar ontological foundations of its dominant deductive models, which are more an exercise of mental gymnastics than a science of the economy.
