ABSTRACT
Almost all economic methodologists have been misled by the prevalence of invocations of falsifiability by model builders. They have been misled in two ways: they see the invocation of methodology as a matter of ‘big-M’ methodology rather than the less pretentious ‘small-m’ methodology of model building; and they think the invocation of falsifiability implies an application of a so-called Popperian methodology. No matter how much methodological discussion is smuggled into neoclassical articles, as long as the theories presented are put beyond question, the methodology provided is irrelevant. By the end of the 1960s, Popper’s theory of science disappeared from the stage and in its temporary place, Conventionalism became the order of the day. Specifically, the issue became not criticism, but theory-choice and acceptance criteria: the criterion of falsifiability rather than verifiability was now to be the watchword of science.
