Unrealistic Assumptions and Unnecessary Confusions: Rereading and Rewriting F53?

Uskali Mäki ()
Additional contact information
Uskali Mäki: Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Erasmus University of Rotterdam

No 15, CAE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille Université, CERGAM

Abstract: It is argued that rather than a well defined F-Twist, Milton Friedman’s “Methodology of positive economics” offers an F-Mix: a pool of ambiguous and inconsistent ingredients that can be used for putting together a number of different methodological positions. This concerns issues such as the very concept of being unrealistic, the goal of predictive tests, the as-if formulation of theories, explanatory unification, social construction, and more. Both friends and foes of Friedman’s essay have ignored its open-ended unclarities. Their removal may help create new common ground for more focused debate in economics.

Keywords: Unrealistic assumptions; predictive tests; truth; as-if; unification; underdetermination; social construction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://junon.u-3mrs.fr/afa10w21/RePEc/cgm/wpaper/DR_15_0304_maki.pdf First version, 2004 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to junon.u-3mrs.fr:80 (No such host is known. )

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:cgm:wpaper:15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille Université, CERGAM Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mathieu Bédard ().