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PART TWO - POSITIVIST AND POPPERIAN VIEWS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Daniel M. Hausman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

The development of logical positivism and of Karl Popper's views (see the introduction to this volume) had a significant impact on the methodology of economics. Economists such as Terence Hutchison and Paul Samuelson noted that much of economic theory appeared not to satisfy logical positivist or Popperian standards of theory assessment, and the 1930s and 1940s saw naive tests of fundamental principles of the theory of the firm, which appeared to refute them. This serious challenge was met mainly by Milton Friedman, whose essay reprinted here is the most influential methodological tract of modern times. It has been subjected to a barrage of criticism, of which Herbert Simon's and my own brief comments are only a tiny sample.

Although Imre Lakatos's work on philosophy of science dates from much later and shows the influence of Thomas Kuhn's views, Lakatos's views on theory assessment are closely related to Popper's, and both were influential among economic methodologists in the 1970s and 1980s. The last essay in this part by D. Wade Hands compactly summarizes the issues that arise in applying Karl Popper's and Imre Lakatos's views to economics.

Type
Chapter
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The Philosophy of Economics
An Anthology
, pp. 143 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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