Institutionalist economists have always been criticizing the neoclassical way of studying the economy, especially because of its obsession to a very strict and flawed formalism. This formalism receives critique also from advocates of agent-based computational economic (ACE) models. The criticism...

This is an essay on the philosophy of science and the methodology and historiography of political economy. It deals with theory appraisal and with the question of which rules, if any, should deal with the search for progress in economic knowledge. (Here is the portion of the essay written by...

This paper shows that the means-end rationality principle, as an ‘ultimate given’ of economics, delimits the faculty of economists to observe, describe and understand the manifold human behavior. Given such epistemological limitations, as a descriptive science, the main task of economics is...

The hypothesis in this paper is to defend the idea that the dichotomy between facts and theories, conceptual framework or paradigm uninterpreted experience and world, is a profound error (Davidson), born of an essentially incoherent image of the mind as a spectator passive but critical of an...

In this paper we have presented arguments for heuristics on economics research. In particular, have been important aspects that show how the tradition of the theory, to make principle simplicity to represent many empirical data of experience or information, was one of the goals set by the...