Conclusion
There seems a much stronger philosophical streak in economics than in many other fields of social theory. This may in part be due to the fact that economics is still in the process of preparing fields of inquiry to treatment by specialized disciplines (see on this, Schlick 1986).
This philosophical process within economics may lead to yet unforeseeable results. However, it seems clear that empirical psychology and experimental science - including experimental economics in particular - are incompatible with a priori conceptions of how rational individual behaviour must be modelled and understood. Yet it seems almost inconceivable that the neo-classical insistence on “explaining” human behaviour in terms of (“as if”) maximizing some objective function under constraints will survive. Even though it is nowadays still a prevalent selection criterion of leading economic journals that papers submitted to them do endorse this aspect of the Hobbesian rational choice framework, it is empirically bordering on the absurd.The foundational controversy concerning the maximization framework needs no further comment here since what may be called the “experiential turn” of modern economics will take care of it anyway. This turn is exactly what David Hume would have required had he ever been specifically asked about economics as a specialized domain of enquiry.
Economists who accept basic insights of empiricist philosophy of science should at least most of their time go on with empirical work relying on “everything from experiments to econometrics”. At the same time economists should also be aware that the practice of economics as a discipline contains many aspects that are, properly speaking, economic and moral philosophy rather than empirical fact finding.
The writings that come out of the, strictly speaking, non-science activities of economists are legitimate as long as they do not blur the distinction between what has and what has not the backing of empirical or analytical scientific argument. To accomplish this, economists should be much clearer about what they are doing. They should indicate when they are acting as philosophers, when as analytical scientists, when as empiricists. They also might want to stop spreading confusion about the status of basic concepts like that of a utility function, maximization and Pareto efficiency. This being said, for the philosophical enterprise of exploring the limits and powers of means to given ends rationality, economic and in particular game and decision-theoretic insights remain invaluable. In this regard economists have been the leading practical philosophers ever since economics split off from philosophy in the nineteenth century.
Hartmut Kliemt