Realism, Instrumentalism and the Time Aspect of Theory Building

Miroslav Svoboda

Prague Economic Papers, 2015, vol. 2015, issue 4, 473-481

Abstract: This paper contributes to the debate about the role of realism and instrumentalism in social science. It asserts that the debate should distinguish between ex-ante and ex-post perspectives. Ex-post, i.e. once the research is done, instrumentalism might be given priority because in this situation, significant predictive power is the key. On the other hand, ex-ante, i.e. before any model revealed its predictive power, only realism may give a hint of which direction is promising to pay off the effort. Thus both realism and instrumentalism play their role in the scientific activity, depending on the stage of the research. In this paper I argue that in order to develop economic realism, we should have recourse to phenomenology. Phenomenology analyses the thought constructs of ordinary people, classifies them and seeks the underlying invariant structure. Realistic social science should build on these invariant structures; only then the link to social reality is not lost.

Keywords: realism; phenomenology; instrumentalism; ex-post; ex-ante; economic methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.525.html (text/html)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.525.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prg:jnlpep:v:2015:y:2015:i:4:id:525:p:473-481

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Editorial office Prague Economic Papers, University of Economics, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3, Czech Republic
http://pep.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.525

Access Statistics for this article

Prague Economic Papers is currently edited by Klára Pavlová

More articles in Prague Economic Papers from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().