If the philosophy of economics fails to persuade empirically, is it at least persuasive as modern philosophy? I can only judge from the outside in a rough and statistical way, since I am able to judge the arguments themselves only in the rare cases in which I as a non-philosopher have thought about them. But the data suggest that philosophy of economics ignores the conversation of philosophers, too, in favor of a tiny group of specialists in a safely narrow field, the school descended from Popper (though of course amending the master in this or that detail). The philosophers of economics favor a particular school in the philosophy of science; and the particular school in philosophy of science does not keep up with epistemology generally. It would be as though rhetoricians of economics did not read Wayne Booth or Stanley Fish, not to speak of Aristotle on rhetoric. Or as if historical economists did not read economics or history, but merely their fellow historical economists.

The data is again bibliographical, though a reading of the texts of the philosophers of science gives the same impression, if in a less (I am embarrassed to use the word) objective form. Daniel Hausman, for example, wrote a long “Introduction” to his anthology, The Philosophy of Economics (1984) and a long “Appendix: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science” for his The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992), about a hundred pages altogether.