ABSTRACT
The questions in philosophy of science that immediately occur to most people concern the assessment of the accomplishments of science. Though these are indeed central questions, there are many others that are of great importance. If one wants to understand the enterprise of economics, it is not enough to be able to state explicitly the fundamental principles of economics such as diminishing returns and to cite evidence that bears on them. As philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos have emphasized, to understand science one also needs to understand the structure and strategy implicit in the interrelated work within scientific communities. Economists belonging to some particular tradition do not face phenomena armed only with some set of explicit generalizations. What makes a neoclassical or a Marxian or an institutional economist is not just learning the generalizations accepted by members of the particular tradition. Economists within a single school agree implicity on the answers to queries such as: what questions are the right ones for economists to ask? How should one simplify these questions to make them answerable? How should economists distinguish their questions and answers from those of other social theorists? What sorts of techniques should one employ in seeking answers? What sorts of causal factors should economists emphasize and what sorts should they ignore? How should one respond to apparent disconflrmations? How should one present hypotheses to colleagues? How should one defend hypotheses from criticism? Learning economics, like learning any science, is not just learning some set of generalizations, such as the law of demand. It is a socialization process in which one learns facts, generalizations and techniques at the same time as one comes to share values, language and perspective.
