Realism, Instrumentalism and the Role of Phenomenology

Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate about the role of realism and instrumentalism in social science. It asserts that the debate should distinguish between ex ante and ex post perspectives. Ex post, i. e. once the research is done, instrumentalism is to be given priority because in this situation, significant predictive power is the key. On the other hand, ex ante, i. e. before any model revealed its predictive power, only realism may give a hint of which direction is promising to pay off the effort. In this paper I argue that in order to develop economic realism, we should have recourse to phenomenology. Phenomenology analyzes the thought constructs of everyday people, classifies them and seeks the underlying invariant structure. Realistic social science should build on these invariant structures, abiding by three postulates: the postulate of logical consistency, the postulate of subjective interpretation and the postulate of adequacy. Only then is the link to social reality not lost.