In the history of economics, a few (but famous) analogue systems were built with the purpose of gaining a better understanding of an economics mechanism by creating a visualisation of it. One of the first was Irving Fisher's mechanism, constructed in 1893, consisting of a tank with floating...

Understanding the history of econometrics as a modern science also asks for understanding of the development of the image of science, which includes the history of philosophy of science and the history of economic methodology. Beside that philosophers of science need to be historically informed,...

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 rational expectations revolution was not only based on the introduction of Muth's idea of rational expectations to macroeconomics; the introduction of Muth's hypothesis cannot explain the more drastic change of the mathematical toolbox and concepts, research strategies, vocabulary, and...

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...

According to Suppes, measurement theory, like any scientific theory, should consist of two parts, an abstract set-theoretical defined structure and the empirical interpretation of that structure. An empirical interpretation means the specification – “coordinating definitions” – of a...

A modelling strategy that accounts for measurement outside the laboratory, where one cannot base measurements on a single simple law, will have to drop the requirement that the model is a homomorphic mapping of the empirical relational structure. The model used for measurement will be a...

Mathematical models are instruments of investigation, epistemological equivalent to the microscope and the telescope. In comparing the epistemological difference between models and experiments, Morgan (2005) argues that experiments offer greater epistemic power than models as a means to...

Mathematical molding disappeared in the changeover from methods to specify causal mechanisms of business cycles to methods to identify economic structures, that is, invariant relationships underlying the workings of an economy. Mathematical molding could fulfill its role in modeling business...

The controversy between Keynes and Tinbergen was about the applicability of regression analysis to economic material. According to Keynes, a necessary requirement was that the economic material is homogeneous, in time and place, and that therefore Tinbergen should test his material for this...