ABSTRACT
Uskali Mäki (1994, p. 236] Discussing ‘realism’ has been a growth industry lately. Where once we might have heard philosophers argue over realism vs. idealism or vs. instrumentalism, over the last decade or so the discussion has been concerned with various types of realism. According to methodologists such as Uskali Mäki [1992] and Tony Lawson [1994], there are many types: critical, commonsense, empirical, ontological, scientific, scholastic, social, structural, transcendental, transfactual, etc. It is not clear that everyone understands the need for all these distinctions. Those readers with a Popperian background have always taken ‘critical realism’ for granted. One would think any concern for critical realism is either an obvious necessity or it is mere rhetoric. For the purposes of ‘small-m’ methodologists, the question of critical realism concerns only the methodology of model building in economics. Basically, the main question is: do the model’s assumptions truly represent reality, that is, represent the real, objective world?
