ABSTRACT
In this final part, I wish to move forward in light of the concerns that I have raised throughout the book. Let me recall the thread of these concerns. To begin with, there was the question of how what we think counts as knowledge in a social science is not simply a matter of how can we best be scientific about the social realm, but rather a question of excavating how the very basis of what it means to be scientific is itself intimately tied to the larger tensions in the picture of enlightenment epistemology. In the context of what it means to know, an important part is played by the ability to explain, so that, it seems as if explanation remains an unchanging anchor of a social science like economics. However, the changing nature of what we mean by an explanation as demonstrated in the first part of the book, has itself been an important trajectory in economics. Further, the mutations of enlightenment epistemology in the nineteenth century which coincided with the turn to neoclassical economics, also marked the moralisation of objectivity, the mechanisation of science, and the aspiration in social sciences like economics to achieve a form of representation which was ‘pure’ because it supposedly did not involve any interpretation, for instance the mathematisation of the economic discourse.
