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The Past Recaptured: Mongin on the Problem of Realism in Economics

Philippe Mongin’s ’Le r6alisme des hypotheses et la Partial Interpretation View’1 is a learned recapitulation of the successive strategies philosophers have employed in order to understand the character of scientific theorizing. As he notes, economists have exploited these strategies in order to deal with the apparent problem that their theory shows little of what we would ordinarily expect by way of explanatory and predictive improvement. Though he begins with Friedman’s famous approach to this problem,’ he notes (pp. 282-83) that Friedman’s question about the realism of hypotheses is a broader one, which touches on theorizing in all the sciences. Thus, his discussion does not consist in another examination of the detailed argumentation of this paper. Rather, he approaches the general question of the role of theoretical idealizations through an examination of standard ’moves’ in the philosophy of science over the last sixty years or so. Mongin’s solution to the problem of idealization in scientific theorizing is a pretty sensible one. But it has the vices of its virtue. Because his conclusions do not address the special problems of economic theorizing, they only recapitulate the traditional discussion of this problem, without advancing on it. Mongin notes that on the most natural reading of the ’assumptions of economic theory’, claims like ’consumers maximize utility’, ’producers maximize profit’, such statements are false. In order to make any use of them in explaining and predicting economic phenomenon, they must be interpreted in such a way as to restrict their domains. But these restrictions must satisfy reasonable constraints on empirical content and testability. One proposed constraint is that the domains to which they are applied must be independently identified; in Mongin’s s