Epistemic virtues and theory choice in economics

Ivan Moscati ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: When economists have to choose between competing theories, they evaluate not only the theories’ empirical relevance, but also qualities like their simplicity, tractability, parsimony and unifying power. These are called the epistemic virtues of a theory. The present paper proposes a formal definition for some epistemic virtues and investigates their role for theory choice in economics.

Keywords: epistemic virtues; syntactic properties; unifying power; exactness of implications; systematicity; semantic virtuosity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B13 B41 D00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:58429

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