The state of contemporary economics had been a subject of discussion even before the most recent global financial crisis. The one-sidedness of the discipline has frequently been lamented and calls are often made for its pluralisation. Nevertheless, there is neither a consensus over the form of...

While Newton's influence on Adam Smith has been widely acknowledged, there is scant research on the actual nature of this influence. This paper sums up a line of investigation delving into this issue. After a short introduction, it is argued that Newton's methodology is more complex than a...

If we take it that, at least in the social sciences, "realistic" implies "finite", then countless economic models involving infinitary assumptions must obviously be classified as unrealistic - for example, models with infinitely divisible goods, a continuum of traders, consumers optimizing over...

The aim of this paper is to present data to verify the process of mathematization in economic theory. For this we used two representative samples from three of the most in fluential academic journals in the years 1955-56-57 and the years 2015-16-17. Thus, a contingency table was drawn up,...

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,...

On December 5th and 6th 2014, the Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted the Causality in the Social Sciences Conference. The conference brought together several distinguished speakers from philosophy, economics, finance, accounting and marketing with the bold mission of debating scientific...

This paper investigates the relationship between methodological individualism (MI) and Agent-Based Simulation (ABS). We discuss and analyze a thesis defended by philosophers Caterina Marchionni and Petri Ylikoski (2013). The thesis maintains that, since MI is often considered to be a...

Caldwell's Beyond Positivism was a key publication that helped to precipitate the consolidation of the methodology of economics into a distinct subfield within economics. Reconsidering it after thirty-five years, it is striking for its anti-naturalism (i.e., its lack of deference to the actual...

In this essay it is argued 1) that Ludwig von Mises's conception of thymology refers to the content of mental actions, and 2) that by Mises's own theory, standard economic propositions are not a priori propositions