Understanding the Popperian legacy in economics

Abstract

Warren Samuels asked me to review a book which was a collection of papers presented to a 1985 symposium of methodologists held in Amsterdam. The symposium was about what is claimed to be Popper’s philosophy of science applied to economics and whether there is a possibility of a Popperian legacy in economics. The main results of this symposium are presented in The Popperian Legacy in Economics, edited by Neil de Marchi [1988b]. Despite my being the most published Popperian methodologist in economics, I was not invited to this conference. In retrospect, this is not surprising given that there was little in common between what I think are important methodological questions (such as those discussed in Chapters 13 to 18 above) and the stylized methodology that was so common even among those who thought they were talking about Popper. In this chapter I present an expanded version of my review of that book. Some of the papers in this book may be good illustrations of how methodology can be made uninteresting to mainstream economists.1

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