Expanding the role of methodology

Abstract

One way of inducing economists to pay more attention to methodology is for methodologists to take up problems that practicing economists will see as relevant to their work and discuss them in a non-technical manner. The paper provides some examples of how methodologists could aid practicing economists in this way. The examples used are the validity of the new classical's insistence on reductionism, the tension between those who want to ground economic theory rigorously, and those willing to work with informal theory, and the related tension between the claimed reliance on ‘scientific’ theory and the actual reliance on informal evidence, conflicting interpretations of what science and theories are, and some low-level but important problems in econometrics.