Change and Continuity in Economic Methodology and Philosophy of Economics

Abstract

This paper provides my reflections on the state of economic methodology and philosophy of economics as of the beginning of 2020 following the end a fifteen year co-editorship of the Journal of Economic Methodology with Wade Hands. It looks at how economic methodology and philosophy of economics, as a meta-field type of research, has changed since it emerged as a distinct subfield in economics in the 1980s. Using an evolution of technology analysis, it distinguishes two different possible scenarios for the field’s future according to environmental factors operating upon it and how specialization in research may affect both it and economics, and then makes a crossdisciplinarity argument for its further development as a diverse, pluralistic domain of research.