Reflection without Rules offers a comprehensive, pointed exploration of the methodological tradition in economics and the breakdown of the received view within the philosophy of science. Professor Hands investigates economists' use of naturalistic and sociological paradigms to model economic phenomena and assesses the roles of pragmatism, discourse, and situatedness in discussions of economic practice before turning to a systematic exploration of more recent developments in economic methodology. The treatment emphasizes the changes taking place in science theory and its relationship to (...) the movement away from a rules-based view of economic methodology. The work will be of interest to all economists concerned with methodological issues as well as philosophers and others studying the relationships between economics and contemporary science theory. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.

Vaihinger... shows that thought is primarily a biological function turned into a conscious art. It is an art of adjustment, whose chief instrument is the construction of fictions by which men may manage to live. Thought is to be tested not by correspondence to an objective reality (that fiction is neatly disposed of) nor by its mirroring in consciousness an objective external world. Thought is to be tested by its fruits. The constructions of thought are not copies of or transcripts (...) of reality; they are programs, guess-work plans; possible programs for operation. Their validity is to be measured not by verisimilitude but by value. The fruits of thought are not "true," but especially where they are false, it may be important to act as if they were true... Vaihinger's chief originality consists in his defining of fictions and his distinction of fictions from hypotheses on the one hand, and from dogmatisms on the other. An hypothesis is a tentative discovery about the universe; a fiction is a deliberate, often clearly false and internally contradictory invention of thought... Evolution is the hypothesis that man is descended from the lower animals. We assume that we can indirectly turn to the remote facts which would justify that hypothesis. But the concept of infinity in the calculus, the atom and the ether in physics, the economic man in Adam Smith, are deliberate self-contradictory fictions, and fictions at variance with all experience. But though they are not only imaginary, false to the reality they allegedly represent and logically incoherent, they nevertheless facilitate thought and proper action. They are vital lies, human conveniences. They are the faiths, the palpably false faiths, the clearly useful falsities by which we live... The discovery that fictions were fictions has led, in the past, says Vaihinger, to an abandonment of them, and a turning to other fictions believed to be truer. Pathetic and foolish adventure! What the race needs is more faith in its own effective imaginations. The myths that it has told itself, the world pictures that it has made, are not to be dismissed because they are found to be creations of the imagination. They tally with no world and they carry the canker of logical inconsistency within them. The important thing is their utility; their human scope and mortal relevance. If we ceased making fictions, we should cease altogether to be. Let us beware to plunge from fruitful fictions to less fruitful ones that masquerade as truths and are really dogmatisms. (Review of As If by Irwin Edman, Saturday Review of Literature, 10 January, 1925) This is a well-formatted version of C.K. Ogden's translation of Philosophie des Als Ob, originally published in 1925 by Kegan Paul. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the structure, strategy and methods of assessment of orthodox theoretical economics. In Part I Professor Hausman explains how economists theorise, emphasising the essential underlying commitment of economists to a vision of economics as a separate science. In Part II he defends the view that the basic axioms of economics are 'inexact' since they deal only with the 'major' causes; unlike most writers on economic methodology, the author argues that it is the rules that (...) economists espouse rather than their practice that is at fault. Part III links the conception of economics as a separate science to the fact that economic theories offer reasons and justifications for human actions, not just their causes. With its lengthy appendix introducing relevant issues in philosophy of science, this book is a major addition to philosophy of economics and of social science. (shrink)