Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges (Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology)

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This new book, under the impressive editorship of Thomas Boylan and Paschal O'Gorman, explores a number of major themes central to the work of Karl Popper.

The tensions that have resulted from Popperian thought are well documented. How can mainstream orthodox economics be falsifiable while privileging its core of rationality as unquestionable? This book �includes expert contributions from thinkers such as Tony Lawson, K. Vela Velupillai and John McCall, who discuss this issue with renewed academic rigour.

Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges (Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology) Review

In recent decades the philosophy and methodology of economics has become a thriving academic industry. Popper's name is often invoked but there is some concern about the interpretation of his ideas. In particular, there is some doubt that Lakatos can really be called a Popperian.

This book is a product of an International Symposium at the University of Galway, convened in 2002 to mark the centenary of Popper's birth. It can be placed alongside the proceedings from Centenary Conferences that were held in Vienna and in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Popper wrote The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism during World War 2. Another volume for the set is the published papers from the 2007 Prague conference on the theme Rethinking Popper.

"Among the principal themes addressed in this volume are a number of major tensions in Popper's contribution to economic methodology. More specifically these tensions result from two divergent trends in Popper's thought. One trend emerges from his demarcation criterion as contained in his doctrine of falsifiability. The alternative trend is contained in Popper's situational analysis [and] his rationality principle." (xi)

"The second major issue explored is based on a critical reading of Popper's later work [where] the universe is perceived as an open system, untainted by determinism. Under the shadow of this Popperian thesis, orthodox economics is the only social science to have attained the maturity of Newtonian physics. The implications of Popperian open systems for economic methodology have been ignored to-date in the literature on economic methodology. This challenge is addressed..." (xii)

Almost half of the book (only 170 plus xiii pages in total) is written by the editors. They have a special interest in what they call the "realism/anti-realism debate" and the way this plays out in evaluating equilibrium theories in economics, especially the mathematical core of the general equilibrium theory. They look at three aspects of Popper's realism, first the way his thinking changed after he encountered Tarski's theory of truth, second, his realist reading of logic and finally, they extract some of the implications of Popper's "Three-World" thesis which finds ontological space for (1) physical objects, (2) subjective thoughts and (3) abstract ideas.

The introductory section of the first chapter on Popper and economic methodology sketches the history of the field from Hutchison's confrontational introduction of positivism and Popperism in 1938. Despite the reference to "an extraordinarily insightful paper" by Klappholz and Agassi (1959) and the description of Lawrence Boland as "the most influential advocate of critical rationalism in economic methodology" they do not explain just how little influence those authors influenced the other players in the game. The final section on Popper's three worlds is a handy introduction to a little-discussed part of Popper's work but no connection is made to economics.

The most helpful chapter is provided by Tony Lawson although the paper is exasperating because he gives a fair description of some important ideas by Popper but does not see to see how they answer the primary question that concerns him.

The main question which he poses at the start of the paper is "How can social explanatory work proceed in an open system context that lacks the possibility of experimental intervention?"

He sketches Popper's framework for situational analysis, using models of an idealised situation to locate the causal factors. He notes the development in Popper's thought (dating from about 1950) when Popper put forth his theory of indeterminism and Lawson notes how this approach evolved into Popper's theory of propensities, in objective probability theory and in cosmology - the "world of propensities".

Lawson seems to think that testing theories in the natural sciences depends on stable models, like the relatively isolated solar system and the models constructed for controlled experiments in the laboratory. "Given the fundamental openness of the social system and the recognition that the method of logic or situational analysis requires local closure, it is difficult to discern how to proceed".

But why does he assume that situational analysis requires local closure? Scientists in agriculture and biology at large are dealing all the time with open systems: sometimes it is possible to use models with "local closure" and sometimes it is not, hence the use of many techniques to handle the situation, like measuring uncontrolled variables and making adjustments to take account of them. Hayek addressed this situation a long time ago when he addressed the methodological problems of investigating spontaneous orders and complex system. He opted for "explanations in principle" using "pattern prediction", looking for tendencies without demanding precise predictions and strict relationships between cause and effects. This is much the same as the quest for Popperian propensities. It is possible to work with the idea of exact laws (like the laws of physics) while accepting that real (complex) systems do not permit the laws to be expressed precisely (and that applies as much in physics as in economics).

In the middle of writing these notes another book turned up from Amazon, Wade Hands Reflection Without Rules (2001). This is handy (sorry) because it plays into the questions posed above. What have working economists gained from this academic growth area? What progress has been made since, say, 1980 when Blaug's landmark work in the field was published? And the question posed by Lawson - whether the current orientation to social explanation in modern economics warrants the label Popperian?"

Taking the questions in order. It appears that workers in the field have gained next to nothing from the philosophy and methodology literature because the work has been mostly driven by the interests and the theories of the philosophers and very little attention has been paid to the problems and the theories that economists work on every day. Some exceptions that test (and refute) the rule are Lawrence Boland and his student Stanley Wong, but then they were working in a different philosophical tradition that was out of step with the mainstream.

So the answer to Lawson's question is that there was practically no real Popperism in all the mass of literature that purported to be talking about his ideas. If this is even half true then it is a very interesting phenomenon and worthy of further investigation by the sociology of knowledge and the historians as well.

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