Reorienting Economics: Some epistemological issues

Some Methodological Issues in Experimental Economics

The growing acceptance and success of experimental economics has increased the interest of researchers in tackling philosophical and methodological challenges to which their work increasingly gives rise. I sketch some general issues that call for the combined expertise of experimental economists and philosophers of science, of experiment, and of inductive-statistical inference and modeling. 1. ...

A Review Essay on Tony Lawson, Reorienting Economics

Translation and Cultural Comparison: Some Epistemological Reflections

In its traditional guise, cross-cultural psychology is a science of comparative measurement. Its chief method is the regulated observation or recording of behaviour in different cultural milieux and its quantitative conversion into a common metric. This method allows for the estimation of differences across cultures on the strength or magnitude of the behaviour. We can therefore speak of one cu...

On Some Epistemological Problems of Software Engineering

The paper addresses some misconceptions of Software Engineering, requirements analysis and modelling in particular, due to underlying epistemological flaws., e.g. the believe that the system analyst's task be simlar to that of a natural scientist's. The fundamental issues, constitution of objects and signs, conceptualization and definability, are discussed. It comes out that the paradoxical sit...

Pluralism in Economics: Epistemological Rationales and Pedagogical Implementation

This paper first presents a series of epistemological rationales for pluralism as a guiding concept in economic research. In doing so, it highlights the inherent uncertainty of (scientific) knowledge as well as the complex and dynamic nature of socio-economic relationships to indicate how the discussion of theoretical and applied problems in economics might benefit from a pluralist approach. Ev...