Review of Economics for real : Uskali Mäki and the place of truth in economics , edited by Aki Lehtinen , Jaakko Kuorikoski , and Petri Ylikoski . Routledge

Uskali Mäki has been one of the major thinkers in economic methodology during the last decades and devoting a book to his philosophy of economics is a natural and appropriate step. Let me already at this stage admit that I am not really neutral about Mäki's work. On several occasions I have myself applied it to contemporary issues in economics. From my own experience I know that Mäki's ideas about realism, realisticness, isolation, commonsensibles, ontology, and so forth, have the potential to be successfully communicated to practicing economists, other social scientists and even politicians. This kind of potential is noteworthy and not common in economic methodology. The editors have managed to put together a very interesting book (and, according to the preface, within a short time frame). The book is organized around the following four parts intended to cover Mäki's extensive philosophy of economics: isolating truth in economic models; the commonsensical basis of economics; the proper domain of economics; and rethinking realism(s). I will briefly discuss each of these parts and then conclude with some reflections on the contents and scope of the book. Since no contribution by Mäki is included in the book, the introductory chapter plays a vital role. Aki Lehtinen provides a great overview of Mäki's work that succeeds in capturing and analyzing its dynamics and is worth reading on its own. He goes back to the early writings of Mäki in the beginning of the 1980s; covers the well-known work on isolation, commonsensibles, realisticness, and so on; and also addresses recent work such as MISS (Models as Isolations and Surrogate Systems). Lehtinen also claims that the book " should be of interest not only to philosophers of economics but also to social scientists and economists reflecting on the nature of their science " (p. 3). Obviously I agree that Mäki's work has this kind of potential. However to what