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In The Methodology of Economic Model Building, first published in 1989, Lawrence Boland presents the results of a research project that spanned more than twenty years. He examines how economists have applied the philosophy of Karl Popper, relating methodological debates about falsifiability to wider discussions about the truth status of models in natural and social sciences.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Preface; Prologue: Methodology vs Applied Methodology; Part I: Applications of the Popper-Samuelson Demarcation 1. Economic understanding and understanding economics 2. On the methodology of economic model building 3. Implementing the Popper-Samuelson demarcation in economics; Part II: Popper-Samuelson Demarcation vs the Truth Status of Models 4. Conventionalism and economic theory: methodological controversy in the 1960s 5. Methodology as an exercise in economic analysis; Part III: Exploring the Limits of the Popper-Samuelson Demarcation 6. Uninformative mathematical economic models 7. On the impossibility of testability in modern economics 8. Model specifications, stochasticism and convincing tests in economics; Epilogue: Methodology after Samuelson: Lessons for Methodologists; Bibliography; Names Index; Subject Index
About the author
Lawrence A. Boland
Summary
In The Methodology of Economic Model Building, first published in 1989, Lawrence Boland presents the results of a research project that spanned more than twenty years. He examines how economists have applied the philosophy of Karl Popper, relating methodological debates about falsifiability to wider discussions about the truth status of models in natural and social sciences.
