ABSTRACT
As an undergraduate student I vividly recall being told, by venerable academic economists, that economics is an empirical science. The whole ideology of ‘positive’ economics was based on the view that economists are a species of empiricist who have no commitment to their theories and who use them only in order to formulate testable hypotheses. Thus, the claim that economics is all about working out how the social world works, without any prejudice regarding how it ‘ought’ to function.
