The Economic World View

These substantial volumes, containing 23 and 19 essays respectively, offer contrasting ways of exploring and criticising the foundations of economics as it currently exists. In the opening chapter of The Economic World View (EWV) Uskali Mäki makes a case for what he terms ‘economic ontology’. This involves exploring the nature of the economic realm: What are the components of the economy? What principles govern the way it works? This encompasses a broad range of questions, from the nature of utility and the mental capacities of agents, the existence of aggregates and the existence of social institutions to whether causal principles exist and what is their nature. However, this is not all that Mäki includes within the ontology of economics, for the notion of ‘the economic realm’ and its relation to other realms is open to question. To define the economic realm, therefore, it may be necessary to inquire more broadly into economists’ ontological and methodological commitments. Though it does not require a commitment to realism, this is a perspective that grows naturally out of Mäki's long‐standing research program into scientific realism

Critical realism (philosophy of perception · Economic methodology · Economics · Epistemology · Neoclassical economics · Ontology · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Positive economics · Postmodernism · Realism · Realm · Relation (database · Sociology · Computer Science · Economic Theory and Institutions · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism