ABSTRACT
Uskali Mäki has long defended a version of realism about the elements of economic theory that is supposed to explain how economic models can advance our knowledge of empirical reality despite apparently describing fictitious worlds in which agents are – in different ways in different models – ideally behaviorally rational, and often in addition ideally informed and ideally competent. Mäki's basic idea is that economic models use idealization, along with other bracketing and framing maneuvers such as omission, abstraction and simplified averaging, to isolate specifically economic aspects of individual and collective behavior. In the actual world, these aspects of course do not occur in isolation. Thus, the space of an economic model typically differs from any actual space, and predictions applied to models cannot be straightforwardly transferred to empirical reality. Mäki has labored hard over the years to detail the logical structure of isolation in model construction, and this technical spadework helps to provide an antidote to widespread complaints that standard economic theory and practice is built on ideologically motivated distortions of real human motivations and capabilities. In the present chapter I will take all of this useful analytical work by Mäki as read. I do not think its value is ultimately hostage to our confidence in a wider conception of what economics is about that Mäki (2010) has recently articulated with fresh directness, but which I believe to be confused. In particular, or so I will argue, Mäki's philosophy of economics leads to misidentification of the scope of the discipline, and therefore fails to shed an accurate light on the relationships between economics and other disciplines. My criticism will focus specifically on the border-land where economics meets psychology and neuroscience.
