The turn in economics and the turn in economic methodology

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks without implication go to Marcel Boumans, Wade Hands, Maurice Lagueux and Philip Mirowski for helpful comments. Notes 1. This revolution also produced the founding of economic methodology as an identifiable sub‐field of economics largely as a result of Mark Blaug's systematic delineation of its problems and history (Blaug 1992, 1980). Also instrumental to this development was Bruce Caldwell's discussion of the revolution (Caldwell 1994, 1980). 2. Wade Hands' careful and exhaustive discussion of this revolution (Caldwell, 1980, 1994) and Larry Bolands' examination of the foundations of economic methodology (Boland 1982) and the naturalistic turn in economics is the definitive account (Hands 2001). 3. Thus reflecting Hausman's (1992 Hausman, D. 1992. The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) understanding of economics as a separate science. 4. I put aside here whether the import process might lead to a breakdown in economics' organization of itself in terms of an orthodox–heterodox divide, but argue in Davis (2006a Davis, J. 2006a. “‘The turn in and the return of orthodoxy in recent economics’”. Paper presented at the History of Economics Society annual meeting, Grinnell, Iowa, 22 June [Google Scholar]) that economics is unlikely to adopt the weaker distinction between conventional and unconventional approaches found in many other sciences. 5. The distinction here is that between weakly interactive and strongly interactive systems (cf. Batten 2000 Batten, D. 2000. Discovering Artificial Economics, Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]). 6. As evidence of the competition between the two approaches, consider Leigh Tesfatsion's comment. Tesfatsion recalls that at a 1996 UCLA workshop she, Rob Axtell, Charlotte Bruun, Axel Leijonhufvud, and others in attendance ‘discussed naming the field “agent‐based economics.” Consequently, this is why I called the website that I developed in late 1996 the “agent‐based economics website.” However, I soon discovered that many analytical microeconomists felt they were already doing “agent‐based economics” simply by means of having a utility maximizing consumer agent! So I changed the name of the website to the “agent‐based computational economics” (ACE) website to try to indicate that we were referring to something quite distinct from current mainstream economics. This is the name I still use for the website [<http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm>http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm] today’ (Tesfatsion, personal communication, 5 May 2006). 7. Thomas Kuhn's influence and science studies approaches are the exception. 8. The reductio form is, ‘if there were such criteria, we could make such‐and‐such an argument; but we can't make this argument; therefore there cannot be such criteria’. 9. John Dupré (2001 Dupré, J. 2001. Human Nature and the Limits of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) makes much the same type of argument in connection with his rejection of a unity‐of‐science conception for the philosophy of science. 10. Within economics, the most investigated identity problem concerns the nature of the firm. Because firms are made up of many agents, it is not obvious why they should be seen as single entities. However, multiple selves analysis makes the identity of individuals themselves an equally important issue, requiring that we ask why they should be seen as single entities. 11. I have offered a partial account of identity conditions for discourses in terms of their boundaries with one another in Davis (1999 Davis, J. 1999. “‘Postmodernism and identity conditions for discourses’”. In What Do Economists Know? New Economics of Knowledge, Edited by: Garnett, R. 155–68. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).