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Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011602798
This article examines George Christopher Archibald's contributions to monopolistic competition theory, which he approached from multiple perspectives throughout his career. In the 1950s, he critiqued this theory for its vague definitions and for prompting several economists to abandon profit...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015205303
This article examines the role of the nomenclature assumption in demand theory, defined as the assumption that the choice set available to economic agents is considered as given, without requiring an explanation of its origin. After reviewing existing definitions of this assumption, this...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015135525
A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011950334
Samuelson kept optimization-based problems separated from macroeconomic dynamics in his Foundations, where dynamics were defined in terms of difference and differential equations. Despite some criticism of his "correspondence principle" of stability analysis by D.F. Gordon, D. Patinkin and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012003226
Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance as for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011695235
Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011695287
In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011695498
The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek's epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek's own socalled "epistemic turn." The thesis defended here is that Hayek's dissatisfaction with his technical economics - in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011706625
In many sciences - physical, but also biology, neuroscience, and other life sciences - one object of reductionism is to purge intentionality from the fundamental basis of both explanations and the explanatory target. The scientifically relevant level - ontologically and epistemologically - is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011706671