The suggestions outlined here include the following. Money is a bundle of institutionally sustained causal powers. Money is an institutional universal instantiated in generic currencies and particular money tokens. John Searle’s account of institutional facts is not helpful for understanding the nature of money as an institution. The money universal is not a social convention in David Lewis’s sense. The existence of the money universal is dependent on a larger institutional structure and cannot be understood in terms of collective belief (...) or acceptance or agreement separately focusing on money. These claims have important implications for realism about money. (shrink)

In a series of insightful publications, Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson have argued for an explanatory ecumenism that is designed to justify a variety of types of social scientific explanation of different , including structural and rational choice explanations. Their arguments are put in terms of different kinds of explanatory information; the distinction between causal efficacy, causal relevance and explanatory relevance within their program model of explanation; and virtual reality and resilience explanation. The arguments are here assessed from the point (...) of view of the illumination they are able to cast on the issue of economics imperialism, the project of privileging rational choice as a unifying basis for explanations. While the Jackson–Pettit arguments turn out to be helpful in specifying some of the ontological and pragmatic constraints on economics imperialism, they are also shown to conflate distinct dimensions in the purported explanantia (such as small grain and particular grain, and the macro and the existentially quantified) and thereby to miss an important class of individualist causal process explanations of social phenomena. (shrink)

Carl Menger's methodology describes reality as neatly organized, being constructed additively from strictly regular simple elements called pure types. Such a conception of the world's structure seems to invite mathematical treatment. Yet, his economics is not a mathematical one, and he even explicitly rejected mathematical approach to economics. This apparent puzzle is explained by Menger's failure to deliver in his methodological writings a realistic portrayal of what he was actually doing in his economics. His implicit ambition to retain the full (...) meaning of the natural language concepts while using them simultaneously as theoretical concepts makes his economics dependent on the general human knowledge. Because the latter is mostly non-mathematical, so has to remain the former. This makes his economics both richer as well as fuzzier as compared with mathematical economics. This seems to be the result of a deliberate decision to keep his economic theory more realistic. (shrink)

Explanatory unification—the urge to “explain much by little”—serves as an ideal of theorizing not only in natural sciences but also in the social sciences, most notably in economics. The ideal is occasionally challenged by appealing to the complexity and diversity of social systems and processes in space and time. This article proposes to accommodate such doubts by making a distinction between two kinds of unification and suggesting that while such doubts may be justified in regard to mere derivational unification (which (...) serves as a formal constraint on theories), it is less justified in the case of ontological unification (which is a result of factual discovery of the actual degree of underlying unity in the world). (shrink)