Abstract
This reassessment of the long debate about Friedman's thesis on the pointlessness of testing assumptions in economics shows that Friedman's three famous examples, on which a large part of the credit given to this thesis is based, far from substantiating it, can be used to establish radically opposite conclusions. Furthermore, it is shown that this so-called “instrumentalist” thesis, when applied by Friedman to economics, is of a quite different nature and raises much more serious problems than the standard instrumentalist thesis devised by some methodologists of physics. To disentangle these ambiguities concerning realism and instrumentalism applied to physics or to economics, this paper refers to Van Fraassen's “constructive empiricism”, which is helpful in reformulating, in a more satisfactory way, the essentials of Friedman's considerations about empiricism and anti-realism.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archibald, G.C.: 1959, ‘The state of economic science’,British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10(37), 58–69.
Boland, Lawrence, A.: 1979, ‘A critique of Friedman's critiques’,Journal of Economic Literature 17(2), 503–522.
Caldwell, Bruce: 1982,Beyond Positivism, Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century, London: Allen & Unwin.
Churchland, Paul M. and Hooker, Clifford A. (Ed.): 1985,Images of Science, Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Coddington, Alan: 1979, ‘Friedman's contribution to methodological controversy’,British Review of Economic Issues 2(4), 1–13.
Friedman, Milton: 1953, ‘The methodology of positive economics’, pp. 3–43, in Friedman, Milton: 1953,Essays in Positive Economics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hirsch, Abraham and de Marchi, Neil: 1990,Milton Friedman Economics in Theory and Practice, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Koopmans, Tjalling C.: 1957,Three Essays on the State of Economic Science, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lester, Richard A.: 1946, ‘Shortcomings of marginal analysis for wage-employment problems’,American Economic Review 36(1), 63–82.
Melitz, Jack: 1965, ‘Friedman and Machlup on the significance of testing economic assumptions’,Journal of Political Economy 73(1), 37–60.
Mingat, Alain, Salmon, Pierre and Wolfelsperger, Alain: 1985,Méthodologie économique, Paris: P.U.F.
Mongin, Philippe: 1986, ‘La controverse sur l'entreprise (1940–1950) et la formation de l'“irréalisme méthodologique”,’Économies et sociétés (série ‘Oeconomia’, PE, no. 5)20(3), 95–151.
Mongin, Philippe: 1988, ‘Le réalisme des hypothèses et la Partial Interpretation View’,Philosophy of the Social Sciences — Philosophie des sciences sociales 18(3), 281–325.
Mongin, Philippe: 1992, ‘The “Full-Cost” controversy of the 1940s and 1950s: A methodological assessment’,History of Political Economy 24(2), 311–356.
Musgrave, Alan: 1981, ‘“Unreal Assumptions” in Economic Theory: The F-Twist Untwisted’,Kyklos 34(3), 377–387.
Nadeau Robert: 1992, ‘Un nouveau discours de la méthode’ in Lavoie Marc and Secareccia Mario (Eds.): 1993,Milton Friedman et son oeuvre, Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal. Forthcoming.
Nagel, Ernest: 1963, ‘Assumptions in economic theory’,American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 53(2), 211–219.
Popper, Karl R.: 1968,The Logic of Scientific Discovery (second edition), New York: Harper & Row (first English edition, 1959).
Popper, Karl R.: 1963, ‘Three views concerning human understanding’, pp. 97–119, in Popper, Karl: 1963,Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Rosenberg, Alexander: 1976,Microeconomic Laws, A Philosophical Analysis, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Rosenberg, Alexander: 1988a,Philosophy of Social Science, Boulder: Westview Press.
Rosenberg, Alexander: 1988b, ‘The past recaptured: Mongin on the problem of realism in economics’,Philosophy of the Social Sciences — Philosophie des sciences sociales 18(3), 379–381.
Simon, Herbert: 1963, ‘Problems of methodology, discussion’,American Economic Association, Papers and Proceedings 53(2), 229–231.
Stigler, George J. and Becker, Gary S.: 1977, ‘De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum’,American Economic Review 67(2), 76–90.
Van Fraassen, Bas C.: 1980,The Scientific Image, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Winter Sidney G.: 1964, ‘Economic “Natural Selection” and the Theory of the Firm’,Yale Economic Essays 4(1), 224–272.
Wong, Stanley: 1973, ‘The “F-Twist” and the methodology of Paul Samuelson’,American Economic Review 63(3), 312–325.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lagueux, M. Friedman's ‘instrumentalism’ and constructive empiricism in economics. Theor Decis 37, 147–174 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01079264
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01079264