Economic methodologists and historians of economics have begun to find common ground in studying the actual practices of economists. Ironically, this has come about partly because both have sought and found inspiration in the philosophy of science. Ironic because, in its early days, philosophy of science was the captive of the philosophy of Logical Positivism, whose overriding concern with meaning, rather than with knowledge, made it remote from the activity of scientists. Thus the alleged connection between philosophy of science and the methodology and history of economics may seem unlikely, and a brief history of the interaction seems called for. Sir Karl Popper's views and reactions to them are central to the story.

In the heyday of Positivism the authority undoubtedly due to science was thought of as being intimately linked with the properties of statements. So-called elementary statements were deemed to capture in a quite direct way elements of reality. Hence the logical relation of such statements to nonelementary statements, and the verifiability of a statement (by observation), became the central concerns of philosophy of science. Apart from analytic propositions, only empirically verifiable statements were judged meaningful (cf. Ayer 1946). But after all, it is statements not about particular instances or observations but about general classes of experience that interest scientists. Thus, as Popper noted in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959, ch. 1, sect. 4), the philosophy of logical empiricism inevitably led to a search for a modified logic of induction.