Searle's notion of the Background, a set of non-intentional mental states which makes intentionality possible, is receiving increasing interest from social theorists. This paper points out two commitments that the notion entails of which social theorists should be wary. The first is Searle's...

It is generally agreed that mainstream economics follows John Stuart Mill's economic methodology. Since Mill's deductivist methodology was explicitly anti-empirical, this raises the question of to what degree economics is an empirical science. To help answer this question, Gerald Holton's notion...

While economics distinguishes itself from the other social sciences by its treatment of human action as rational, its notion of rationality is actually based on a profound skepticism about people's ability to reason. This notion goes back to Hume, according to whom 'Reason is the slave of the...