The essay discusses the historiographical strategy of "following artifacts" in the history of contemporary economics. Following models as artifacts means (1) to follow the shifts and changes in their form and meaning; (2) to follow the ideas, theories, fictions, and imaginary worlds they provoke;...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

Best known as a monetary economist and prominent proponent of monetarism, Karl Brunner was deeply knowledgeable about the philosophy of science and attempted to explicitly integrate logical empiricist thinking, derived in some measure from his engagement with the work of the philosopher Hans...

Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance as for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek's epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek's own socalled "epistemic turn." The thesis defended here is that Hayek's dissatisfaction with his technical economics - in...

From the early-1950s on, F.A. Hayek was concerned with the development of a methodology of sciences that study systems of complex phenomena. Hayek argued that the knowledge that can be acquired about such systems is, in virtue of their complexity (and the comparatively narrow boundaries of human...

The following analysis is meant to contribute to a history of rational choice theory. More specifically, I provide a multi-layered account of rational choice theory in terms of its biography as a scientific object. I argue that its axiomatic version, choice theory traveled between different...