Papers produced for a conference of economists, economic methodologists and historians of economics, convened to reflect on the question of whether MSRP - the methodology of scientific research programmes - has proved useful in the light of 20 years' experience.

Milton Friedman's famous methodological essay contains, along with much else, some strands that look as though they were taken from the “empirical-scientific” fabric described by Karl Popper. Think, for example, of Friedman's conviction that the way to test a hypothesis is to compare its implications with experience. Or of his more or less explicit espousal of the view that while no amount of facts can ever prove a hypothesis true, a single “fact” may refute it. Or of his assertion that (...) hypotheses are to be accepted only as provisionally true, and then only after repeated efforts to refute them have failed. The appearance of these Popperian ideas is not surprising. (shrink)

Hausman has argued that Mill in the Logic demands verification of qualified, inexact statements if they are to be considered lawlike. This puts Mill in line with a reasonable interpretation of what modern microeconomists are about, but requires the additional hypothesis that Mill abandoned his earlier stress on modal truth in his 1836 essay on the method of economics. The paper maintains that neither textual nor contextual evidence supports this hypothesis. Moreover, it is superfluous if one attends carefully to how (...) Mill conceived economic science, which occupied a peculiar, somewhat isolated place in his own views on the deductive method and on verification. (shrink)

This volume examines why Sir Karl Popper's view of empirical falsifiability as the distinguishing characteristic of science has found appeal among economists.

We interpret ceteris paribus conditions as the conditions necessary to conducting an experiment. "Ceteris paribus" is thus not a hold-all for whatever we do not know, but a listing of the various decisions taken in moving from a theoretical hypothesis to a testable proposition. The decisions range from modeling in a certain way to selecting a particular functional form or estimation technique. They embody best knowledge/best practice. Debate about the meaning and importance of any test result must center on these (...) decisions; hence they should be laid bare. We give a detailed example from recent macroeconomics, Lucas' test of the natural rate hypothesis. (shrink)