We deal with the main points of Fleetwood's response to our earlier paper and argue that our main contentions remain intact. Critical Realism (CR) remains epistemologically weak; its claims for the usefulness of explanatory power are unconvincing; and, in particular, it provides little help in...

This paper considers the claim that critical realism provides a convincing critique of mainstream economics and offers a sound methodological basis for an alternative approach. It argues that critical realism presents a tendentious definition of positivism and a characterisation of mainstream...