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The Microeconomic Interpretation of Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Chantale LaCasse  and
Don Ross
Chantale LaCasse
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
Don Ross
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

It is clear that many philosophers of science are inclined to be sceptical about the scientific ambitions of economics. Sometimes this scepticism amounts to a forthright denial of economists’ entitlement to be granted the epistemic authority normally claimed by scientists (for example, Dupré 1993). A more modest ambivalence may be signalled by a philosopher's refusal to treat the intuitions of economists as data for the philosophy of science, in the way that (e.g.) physicists’ ontological and epistemological judgements are now routinely treated. The following paper is part of a much larger project that criticizes the basis for this scepticism, at least where microeconomics is concerned. This general project is partly motivated by our belief that philosophers have often viewed microeconomics from a highly distorting set of perspectives. One source of these distortions is a sociological accident: the philosophy of economics, as a part of the philosophy of science, has been largely owned since its outset by Popperians and their intellectual descendants.

Type
Part X. Games, Explanations, Authority, and Justification
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 378 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Thanks to Paul Dumouchel, Maurice Lagueux, Paisley Livingstone, Robert Nadeau, and the other members of the Groupe de Recherche en Epistémologie Comparée at l'Université du Québec à Montréal, for their helpful criticism.

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