Abstract
Until the late 1970s, it was difficult publishing economic methodology research in any mainstream economics journal. Today there are at least two journals devoted to articles about economic methodology. However, it is important to keep in mind that there are two types of economic methodology. There is what has been called small-m methodology which is about the assumptions made by economic model builders, and there is big-M methodology which is about matters of interest to philosophers but not to economists. The recent history of economic methodology literature and conferences has displayed the hijacking of economic methodology research by philosophers with the result that those of us who wish to do research on small-m methodology are back where we were in the 1960s and 1970s.
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- 1.
It may not be limited to North America if Don Ross (2014, Chap. 1) is right.
- 2.
The session was published in the 1963 Papers and Proceedings, where there are papers by Fritz Machlup, Ernest Nagel, Andreas Papandreou, and Sherman Krupp, followed by discussions by Chris Archibald, Herbert Simon, and Paul Samuelson.
- 3.
Apart from being a good methodology article, I suspect it was also published because at the time Wong was a student of Joan Robinson at Cambridge and she had been constantly criticizing George Borts (the editor of The American Economic Review) for never considering publishing any nonmainstream articles like Wong’s.
- 4.
Imre did not really understand Popper and created this to promote his own role in the philosophy of science.
- 5.
See Popper’s 1982 introduction to his 1983 publication of his previously unpublished Postscript where he says “Am I really the man who had naive falsificationism as the linchpin of his thoughts? Is the Kuhnian paradigm true? May I ‘legitimately be treated as’ a ‘naive falsificationist,’ even though Kuhn admits, after looking at The Logic of Scientific Discovery, that, as early as 1934, I was not one? …. Tests are attempted refutations. All knowledge remains fallible, conjectural. There is no justification, including, of course, no final justification of a refutation. Nevertheless, we learn by refutations, i.e., by the elimination of errors, by feedback. In this account there is no room at all for ‘naive falsification’” [pp. xxxiv–xxxv] (emphasis in original).
- 6.
The conference was held to honor the retirement of Joop Klant who was considered in Europe a prominent proponent of Popper’s philosophy of science in economics. The papers were published in de Marchi (1988). My review of the conference volume appeared in the Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, vol. 7, 1990–1992.
- 7.
In the first case, I was chairing a HES session at its conference held in Vancouver and scolded that behavior. In the second case, I was again the victim at a session of a HES conference held at George Mason University to discuss Friedman’s essay and criticisms such as mine; even though I was attending those meetings, I was not invited to respond. And similarly, at the 2003 conference I mentioned above, I was criticized by Blaug even though I was not invited to attend or respond.
- 8.
Friedman actually met Popper and presumably discussed methodology with him; if he did, he apparently did not understand Popper’s view of testing and falsifying. Friedman came away thinking that all that matters was the refutation of predictions of a theory, and hence his rejection of the need to be concerned with using false assumptions in one’s explanation.
- 9.
Eventually, I published my thesis as Chaps. 2 and 3 in my 1989 book about the methodology of economic model building.
- 10.
This Act financed very generous fellowships. They were so generous that I took a pay cut for my first teaching job.
- 11.
While I think a major reason for my 55 rejects is that I was a beginning writer and not a very good one, the primary reason was, of course, the implicit ban on any major economics journal publishing articles about economic methodology that I have discussed above. As I said, I was an ignorant beginner.
- 12.
This paper was later republished as Chap. 1 of my 1989 book.
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Boland, L. (2019). On Economic Methodology Literature from 1963 to Today. In: Sassower, R., Laor, N. (eds) The Impact of Critical Rationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90826-7_3
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