Fact or fiction? Is economics a respectable and useful reality-oriented discipline or just an intellectual game that economists play in their sandbox filled with imaginary toy models? Opinions diverge radically on this issue, which is quite embarrassing from both the scientific and the political point of view. The chapters in this volume, taken together, approach the issue in a manner that is more balanced and sophisticated than what one ordinarily encounters in popular – sometimes populist – statements about economics. Conceptual and argumentative sophistication in meta-analysis is needed to get to the facts of this matter, but few economists – regardless of how skillful they are in analyzing the economy – are trained to provide such analyses, and few philosophers are interested in looking at economics sufficiently closely. As soon as one looks more closely, what one starts seeing is fact and fiction, in a variety of combinatory incarnations. One also begins to appreciate both of them as necessary elements in a scientific study of the social world.

The chapters of the volume deal with the issue from three interrelated perspectives: those of economic models, the nature of the economy, and the social structure of the discipline itself. The three key questions are, respectively: How do economic models work in relation to reality? How does the world work in regard to its economically relevant aspects? How do the institutions of the discipline of economics work concerning its orientation toward facts and fictions?