Constructive Empiricism: a Reconstruction of Economic Methodology

Abstract

The principal aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of applying van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism to the contemporary debate on the methodology of economics. The authors argue that constructive empiricism supplies a novel and challenging framework which takes this debate beyond relativism and rhetoric on the one hand and beyond instrumentalism and realism on the other. In particular, by developing the distinction between pure and applied economics and by locating economic explanation in the latter, constructive empiricism offers a challenging solution to the perennial question of the realism of assumptions debate, changes the methodological focal point of pure economics onto the issue of empirical adequacy.