ABSTRACT
We are now in a position both to explain the recurrent problems of contemporary economics, including theory/practice inconsistencies of the sort discussed earlier, and also to assess how the various difficulties of the discipline can be resolved. In fact it is easy enough to see that the problems reviewed in Chapter 1 all turn upon an uncritical acceptance of certain results of positivism, and in particular the constant-conjunction conception of scientific laws upon which the deductivist account of explanation rests. Given a social world that is fundamentally open, this orientation was always going to cause problems.
