A Review of Kuhnian and Lakatosian “Explanations” in Economics



Lakatosian ideas appeal more to economists because they are “softer” than Popperian
falsification and also because they can be employed to defend the existing theories and
practices of economics. In the same spirit, Mirowski (1987, p.296) asserts that Lakatosian
methods serve basically as a justification of the current scientific status quo. Support for
the same argument is also provided by de Marchi (1991). Closer to this view is
Backhouse’s idea that economists found Lakatos attractive because the appraisal criterion
he used was already, perhaps for very good reasons, well established (Backhouse, 1994,
p.181)13.

Although Lakatos’ approach seems to have been the most popular among
economists, there are signs that a growing number start to have serious reservations. For
instance, there have been specific criticisms of the Lakatosian approach in a volume edited
by de Marchi and Blaug (1991) in which a number of theorists expressed doubts concerning
its application to specific subfields. Some of the criticisms of this volume are the following:
Bianchi and Moulin (1991) argue that the Lakatosian approach has failed to capture the
insights from game theory; Morgan (1991) believes that it has failed to account for the decline
of process analysis of econometrics; Kim (1991) argues that it has failed to solve the Duhem-
Quine dilemma. In more general terms, Steedman (1991) argues that Lakatosian
methodology is not very useful in trying to understand the relationships between different
economic theories. In the same spirit, Salanti (1994) maintains that economic methodologists
are increasingly dissatisfied with the Lakatosian criteria of theory appraisal. Although as he
observes, historians of economic thought continue to employ Lakatosian categories.

The recapitulation of all the above criticism exercised upon the Lakatosian
explanation is shown in table 6.

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