Aspects of Realism about Economics

Abstract

A few aspects of the issue of realism are addressed in the context of a social science. The paper looks for adjustments needed in our conceptions of scientific real ism to accommodate some peculiarities of economics. Ontologically speaking, eco nomics appears to be closely linked to commonsense conceptions of the world, thus the problem of theoretical concepts does not emerge in the same form it is often taken to exist in physics. Theory formation is largely a matter of idealization and isolation among observables rather than postulation of unobservables. Given that isolative theo ries violate the truth in many ways, truth is more of a problem than existence in a real ism pertaining to economics. The idea of significant truth -which is able to tolerate varieties of untruths in theoriesis suggested to be based on the notion of the way the world works; this is a matter of the causal structure and functioning of the world. None of this is undermined by the acknowledgement that economist' attittudes and de cisions are shapped by rhetorical persuasion.

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