We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Uskali Mäki (1951–) is currently an Academy Professor in the Academy of Finland. He holds a Ph.D. from Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and has published extensively in both economics and philosophy. The author of over one hundred essays and a past editor of The Journal of Economic Methodology, Mäki's interests span the entire domain of economic methodology. Realism has been a persistent interest, and a number of his publications explore the varieties of realism to be found in economics. Mäki has played a key role in establishing economic methodology as a discipline.
When an economist talks about the ‘realism of assumptions’, he is not using the term ‘realism’ in any of its standard philosophical senses. Another difficulty that plagues the term is that it has a variety of legitimate philosophical meanings that are interrelated but do not reduce to each other. ‘Realism’ is used as the name for a variety of doctrines about things such as science, sense perception, universals, other minds, the past, mathematical objects, truth, moral values, possibilities and so on. This is expressed in the fact that the opponents of realists on these issues are not called uniformly by a single label. Depending on the issue at hand, the non-realists are said to subscribe to positions such as idealism, phenomenalism, empiricism, nominalism, conventionalism, instrumentalism, operationism, fictionalism, relativism and constructivism.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
