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How to Do Philosophy of Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Daniel M. Hausman*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland/College Park

Extract

Although philosophers of science have always been interested in the actual work of scientists, there has been a strong turn in the last generation away from prescribing how science ought ideally to proceed and toward studying more carefully how science has proceeded. In part this turn has been a reaction to previous work in philosophy of science, which to many seemed misguided and largely irrelevant to the sciences. In part this change reflects a general scepticism about the possibility of doing traditional foundationalist epistemology. Such scepticism is itself a reaction to the failure of the foundationalist program of the logical empiricists. The contemporary turn toward careful empirical study of the sciences constitutes a new program for the philosophy of science, which I shall call ‘empirical philosophy of science’ or ‘the empirical approach to the philosophy of science’.

Type
Part XII. Economics and Sociobiology
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted to Philip Ehrlich, Michael Gardner, Jonathan Lieberson, Stephen Stich and Paul Thagard for criticism of earlier versions and to unpublished work of Dudley Shapere.

References

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Marx, Karl. (1867). Das Kapital, Vol. 1. Hamburg: O. Meissner. (Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling as Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967.)Google Scholar
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