My objective in this book is to bring into focus the interrelations between three elements or areas of investigation involved in economic explanation as well as the connections between those areas and economic explanation itself: first, the building of models as part of one possible approach to explaining economic phenomena; second, certain critical aspects of the mathematization that model construction frequently employs; and third, some features of the relevant methodological foundations upon which the model building explanatory program is based. I have commented on those aspects more expansively in the introduction and subsequent chapters that follow, and I have made some suggestions regarding the need to take a new view, not only of the status of economics as an explanatory discipline, but of the process of model building and in some respects the conceptual traps that arise in moving to real-world explanation.

In all that, of course, considerable and highly valuable contributions have been made by scholars whose efforts have preceded mine, and it is part of my intention to give full acknowledgment to the objectives that work has commanded. My present concern, however, is in the more practical and operational aspects of economic model building in a how-to-do-it sense, and while the more abstract issues of methodology that scholars have examined elsewhere inform my present argument, they do not engage my primary interest.

I should state that for the most part, I am an economic theorist who addresses methodological and philosophical issues that relate to my work through the lens of a practicing model builder. I believe that what I do and should be doing as an economist is to attempt to explain economic reality and thereby indirectly contribute to the making of economic policy and to matters that relate to the improvement of the human lot. The methodological and philosophical issues that I confront are those that bear upon the pursuit of this goal, namely, those that are concerned with the real-economic-world meaning and significance of the analytical approaches and techniques that I use. Over the years, many of my methodological and philosophical ruminations have found their way in bits and pieces, some considerably more extensive than others, into various parts of my published work.