Introduction: Current Issues in the Philosophy of Economics

Abstract

This volume represents a contribution to the philosophy of economics with a distinctive point of view. The contributors to the volume have not by and large taken up the general and abstract issues that have usually occupied philosophers in their discussions of the philosophy of economics in the past. Instead, they have selected particular areas of economics and have probed these areas for the philosophical and methodological issues that they raise: for example, the mean­ing of causal ascriptions in econometrics, the reliability of large economic models, the status of the assumptions of rationality that go into the public goods argu­ment, the explanatory import of equilibrium analysis, and the role of experiment in economics. The primary essays are written by philosophers, who were invited to concentrate on philosophical issues that arise at the level of the everyday theoretical practice of working economists. Commentary essays have been pro­vided by working economists, who were asked to respond to the philosophical arguments from the standpoint of their own disciplines. The volume thus repre­sents something of an “experiment” in the philosophy of science, striving as it does to explore methodological issues across two research communities. The fruits of the experiment are available for the reader’s own assessment; but it is the editor’s judgment that these exchanges between philosopher and economist have been fruitful indeed.