ABSTRACT

Even though one of the founding aspirations of our field was to foster mutually beneficial exchanges between economics and philosophy, economists never paid much attention to our work. Now that practicing economists are increasingly engaging in explicit methodological reflections, we can no longer comfort ourselves with the idea that economists are simply not interested in discussions of methodological issues. What is new on our side of the fence is that some of us commend economists not to be distracted by the sort of philosophical ideas we discuss in our work. While no one openly opposes this, it is clear that others in our field strongly disagree with this. I argue that what is ultimately at stake are different views on what philosophy of economics is all about, what it should be and what it should do. I also argue that these fundamental disagreements are better discussed openly than being kept under the carpet.

摘要

尽管我们这个领域的开创性愿望之一是促进经济学与哲学之间的互惠互利的交流，但经济学家从未对我们的工作给予太多关注。既然实践中的经济学家越来越多地参与明确的方法论反思，我们再也无法接受经济学家对方法论问题不感兴趣的想法。在我们这边的新事物是，我们中的一些人称赞经济学家不要被我们在工作中讨论的那种哲学思想所分散。尽管没有人公开反对这一点，但是很明显，我们领域的其他人强烈反对这一点。我认为，最终的问题是关于经济学哲学的全部内容，应该是什么以及应该做什么的不同观点。