ABSTRACT
Tony Lawson is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Cambridge University, where he has worked his entire career. He holds a degree in Mathematics from Queen Mary University, London, a Master's from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Cambridge. He has published extensively, predominantly in the philosophy and methodology of economics, mainly elaborating on realism. More broadly he has influenced critical realism with his work on abstraction, contrastive explanation, and retroduction. A remarkable aspect of all this is that although the last 60 years is a history of failure of mathematical modelling to provide any insight, the modellers continue with their practices regardless. Nuclear physicists talk easily of quarks, and neutrinos, et cetera, categories required to make sense of the world in which people live.
