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What Economics is Not: An Economist's Response to Rosenberg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Douglas W. Hands
Douglas W. Hands*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Puget Sound
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Abstract

Alexander Rosenberg (1983) has argued, contrary to his previous work in the philosophy of economics, that economics is not science, and it is merely mathematics. The following paper argues that Rosenberg fails to demonstrate either of these two claims. The questions of the predictive weakness of modern economics and the cognitive standing of abstract economic theory are discussed in detail.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 495 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Bruce Caldwell, H. Scott Gordon, Leon Grunberg, Daniel Hausman, and Michael Veseth for useful suggestions on earlier drafts of this comment, as well as Alfred MacKay for making his unpublished and forthcoming work available to me. Errors and omissions are of course solely the responsibility of the author. Partial support was provided by the University of Puget Sound Faculty Research Grant R-77–2210.008.

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