Table Of Content

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS Edited by HAROLD KINCAID DON ROSS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2009 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright© 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford handbook of philosophy of economics/edited by Harold Kincaid and Don Ross. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-518925-4 1. Economics-Philosophy. I. Kincaid, Harold, 1952- 2. II. Ross, Don, 1962- III. Title: Handbook of philosophy of economics. HB72.095 2009 330.01-dc22 2008021771 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper PREFACE The selection of topics and authors for this volume is based a particular perspec tive and a specific aim, about both of which we should be clear up front. First, we take economics fully seriously as a science, and this leads us to treat the philosophy of economics as a branch of the philosophy of science. Second, we set out to add significant new material to the foundations of the philosophy of economics as so conceived. In light of this combination of our standpoint, we do not cover norma tive issues, except where they make direct contact with economists' ways of gath ering facts, building models, and testing generalizations. In light of our goal, we do not simply survey a fixed and familiar set of issues in philosophy of economic science, but instead seek to expand the set in a way that reflects recent expansion and changes in the range of activities engaged in by economists. There are many good volumes already available on the normative issues, and any attempt to cover both them and the philosophy of science issues would have meant either a prohibitively large volume or a superficial one. Our focus is on new material rather than surveys of old debates because we think-as we argue in our first chapter-that economics and philosophy of science have undergone significant revision since the received set of core concerns in philoso phy of economics stabilized in the 1970s. We take very seriously the naturalistic insistence that philosophy of science is continuous with science itself and that the actual practice of a scientific discipline, such as economics, must be the basic test against which the philosophy of the discipline in question is evaluated. Thus the essays in this volume consistently engage concrete issues in economics, and a number of our contributors are practicing economists. (One of the editors, Ross, spends about half of his working time writing strategic analyses of industries in South Africa.) This Handbook will be true to our intended conception if readers increasingly find themselves unsure about where to locate the boundary between economic science and its philosophy. Indeed, we suggest that the boundary met aphor is misleading; instead, there is only a gradual and continuous shift of emphasis as one moves from questions that are more empirical and less concep tual in emphasis, to questions framed under the opposite polarization. We would like to thank Nelleke Bak for her usual exacting editorial work, along with Mark Holcombe. Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press, and series editor Paul Moser initiated and supported the project through its unduly long ges tation; we thank them particularly for their patience. Vl PREFACE The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences funded a three-day conference at which rough drafts of the chapters were presented and discussed among the authors. We think that this approach signifi cantly strengthened the final product. Almost all of the chapters are entirely new work, with the following exceptions: Chapter 22 is a revised version of Dasgupta (2005), "What Do Economists Analyze and Why: Values or Facts?", Economics and Philosophy 21:221-278. We would like to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to include it here. Chapter 18 is an English-language, and other wise revised, version of an article currently slated for publication in Spanish in El Trimestre Economico. Finally, one section of Chapter 9 is directly adapted from D. Ross, C. Sharp, R. Vuchinich, and D. Spurrett (2oo8 ), Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling, MIT Press. We are grateful to the Press for allowing us to use this material. Finally, we thank Richard Charton for an excellent index. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Harold Kincaid would like to dedicate this volume to Scott Gordon, Geoffrey Hellman, and Frank Thompson, the mentors who started him on this intellectual project. Don Ross adds dedication to three people who did the most to allow him to expand his professional horizons in a new adopted homeland, Brian Kantor, Peter Collins, and Kerry Capstick-Dale. CoNTENTS Contributors, xiii 1. Introduction: The New Philosophy of Economics, 3 Don Ross and Harold Kincaid PART I: RECEIVED VIEWS IN PHILOSOPHY OF EcoNOMics 2. Laws, Causation, and Economic Methodology, 35 Daniel M. Hausman 3. If Economics Is a Science, What Kind of a Science Is It? 55 Alex Rosenberg 4· Realistic Realism about Unrealistic Models, 68 Uskali Miiki 5. Why There Is (as Yet) No Such Thing as an Economics of Knowledge, 99 Philip Mirowski PART II: MICROECONOMICS 6. Rationality and Indeterminacy, 159 Cristina Bicchieri 7· Experimental Investigations of Social Preferences, 189 Jim Woodward 8. Competing Conceptions of the Individual in Recent Economics, 223 John B. Davis 9· Integrating the Dynamics of Multiscale Economic Agency, 245 Don Ross

Description:

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics is a cutting-edge reference work to philosophical issues in the practice of economics. It is motivated by the view that there is more to economics than general equilibrium theory, and that the philosophy of economics should reflect the diversity of acti