The aim of this article is to review some central ideas on economic methodology. Many people doubt whether economics can be considered as science. This sort of doubts does not exist, for instance, with respect to physics or chemistry. The main conclusion is that economics is a science inasmuch...

In recent years, the economic approach to human behavior has been challenged by contributions of cognitive science. Thus two methodological strands in economics disagree with each other: the objectivistic approach favors the methods of natural science; the subjectivistic approach takes the...

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, published in 1871, is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz...

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,...

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...

My purpose is to appraise the recent critique of theoretical economics by applying the methodological perspective. Therefore, I start by identifying the main lines of criticism raised against theoretical economics in the aftermath of the post-2008 global economic crisis: namely, the voices...

CGEMs are one of the most potentially powerful tools for simulating policies. However, a major restriction they face is them needing a huge number of parameters that are not always available, and even at times impossible to obtain. When CGEMs are applied to trade, Armington elasticities of...

That the rationality of individual people is ‘bounded’ – that is, finite in scope and representational reach, and constrained by the opportunity cost of time – cannot reasonably be controversial as an empirical matter. In this context, the paper addresses the question as to why, if...