Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large number of price index number formulae have been developed, mostly named after their inventors, such as the Paasche and Layspeyres indexes. Parallel with the invention of new index formulae, criteria were developed for distinguishing between...

The assessment of models in an experiment depends on their material nature and their function in the experiment. Models that are used to make the phenomenon under investigation visible - sensors - are assessed by calibration. However, calibration strategies assume material intervention. The...

Development economics in the 1950s and 1960s, as Tinbergen and Adelman saw it, was a “groping in the dark.” Besides the limited knowledge of dynamic mechanisms, the lack of data was a severe problem for any attempt at modeling, whether macroeconomic, input-output or in the tradition of...

The first two chapters of Haavelmo's ‘Probability Approach' provide a very rich epistemological framework for understanding what it entails to finds laws outside the laboratory. Even though these laws will be inexact, a framework was developed to specify for which conditions laws could be...

The first edition of Mark's Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) includes a chapter on methodology, ‘A Methodological Postscript,' which starts with four big epistemological and methodological questions: ‘What do economists know? How much does economics explain? What are the principles upon...

Methodology should reflect on and assess real practices of research, not ideal ones. A practice consists of people working with ideas, tools and techniques to tackle a specific set of problems. This means that beside the more traditional focus on ideas we also must reflect on these tools and...