The purpose of the paper is to explore the potential for applying fuzzy logic to economic decision-making under Keynesian uncertainty, and in particular to circumstances where variety of opinion is important. Fuzzy logic is shown to apply where expectations may differ because the nature of the...

The title of this paper may suggest a specific focus on the possibilities and problems of matching closed models and open systems; however, although the relationships between systems and the models that we seek to apply to them are indeed the primary topics, there is no assumption that all...

There is evidence of growing plurality in economic theory, alongside an increasing degree of homogenisation at the level of methodology. The purpose of this paper is to explore these developments in the light of the methodological literature on pluralism, regarding meaning of plurality, and the...

This paper explores the relations between the Kuhnian concept of 'paradigm' and the Foucauldian notion of 'episteme' and how they may help us to think about economic discourse. In the fields of philosophy and history of ideas, such relations, though not deeply investigated, have been noticed...

At first sight one might be tempted to regard Mirowski’s latest book primarily as a move away from the conceptual and metaphorical history of economics that one finds in More Heat than Light (Mirowski 1989, 'MHTL'), towards a historiography inspired by recent studies in the sociology of...

Robert Skidelsky, author of a key biography of Keynes, notes in this biography that Keynes’s relationship to modernism is crucial to the understanding of his work, yet difficult to grasp historiographically. This may be true if one seeks to uncover influences from modernism as as a...

This paper reflects on the contributions of Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter on our understanding of economic development, routines and cognition. It distinguishes between two conceptions of economic analysis, one Cartesian in nature, the other following an developmental perspective that resists...

The experience of monetary policy making in an uncertain environment has encouraged increased attention to the concept of model uncertainty, that is, uncertainty as to which is the best model. A particular difficulty has been the need to operationalise the concept in order to yield definitive...

The concept of bounded rationality has been at the forefront of a recent empiricist program in economics which under the heading of ‘behavioral economics ‘ seeks to broaden the rational choice paradigm in the direction of psychology, to the neglect of a similar broadening in the direction of...

Evolutionary economics is an increasingly influential but vaguely defined field of economic research. This article discusses different ways of defining evolutionary economics: at its object level, at the level of core concepts and, distinguishing between meaning determinist and meaning finitist...