Mark Blaug has taught at Yale and is now a professor of the economics of education at the University of London Institute of Education. He received his Doctorate at Columbia University. He is a philosopher of science whose main contribution to economics has been in the areas of history and methodology.
In the book, "The Philosophy of Economics: an Anthology" by Hausman, Mark Blaug wrote Chapter 21, "Paradigms versus research programmes in the history of economics". In this chapter, he voices his misgivings regarding the application of scientific philosophy that has as its foundation the physical sciences to a social science such as economics. The following are excerpts from this chapter:
According to Blaug, the "central weakness of modern economics is in fact the reluctance to produce theories which yield unambiguously refutable implications. when, in the long process of refining and extending the neoclassical research programme over the last hundred years, have we ever worried about 'excess empirical content', much less 'corroborated excess empirical content?"
"But surely economists engage massively in empirical research? Certainly they do, but much empirical work in economics is like playing 'tennis with the net down': instead of attempting to refute testable predictions, economists spend much of their time showing that the real world bears out their predictions, thus replacing falsification, which is difficult, with confirmation, which is easy."
In conclusion, "Lakato's metahistorical research programme has a 'hard core' of its own: scientists are rational and accept or reject ideas for good intellectual reasons, the only problem being to determine what they are. The programme also has a 'protective belt' which contains such propositions as: scientists attach importance to the ability of theories to survive tests but they do not discard theories after a single failure; scientists appraise programmes, not theories ; scientists appraise programmes historically as they evolve over time and continually revise their appraisals; lastly, scientists appraise programmes in competition with rivals and will retain a programme at any cost if no alternatives are available. The 'positive heuristic' of the metahistorical research programme is equally obvious: collect theories into research programmes; spell out the 'hard core', 'the protective belt' and the 'positive heuristic' of the respective programmes; examine the efforts that have been made to test theories and trace the manner in which falsifications are dealt with in the programme; set out the anomalies that are recognized by practitioners of a programme and, if possible, the anomalies that have come to be forgotten; trace the standards by which the adherents of a research programme judge their predecessors and by which they hope to be judged by their followers, that is, analyse their methodological pronouncements; and, finally, highlight the novel facts which are discovered in the course of a programme. The object of the exercise is to show that most scientists join research programmes that have 'excess empirical content' and desert 'research programmes' that lack this characteristic. This is 'internal history' and every other reason for joining one camp rather than another is 'external'. It was Lakato's claim that the 'rational reconstruction' of history of science conceived in these terms would in fact need few footnotes referring to 'external history'."
"Can the history of economics be written in this fashion? It is perfectly true that most externalist accounts of scientific progress are very persuasive--they are selected to be so. When certain theories become the ruling scientific idea of their times for 'good' internalist reasons, there are frequently also ideological reasons that make the theory palatable to vested interests and appealing to the man-in-the-street. These can be invoked subsequently to argue that the theory was in fact accepted for external reasons (consider Malthus's theory of populations, or Darwin's theory of natural selection). But such externalist explanations, while not wrong, are nevertheless redundant if we have regard to professional rather than popular opinion. To be convincing, the externalist thesis in the history of ideas must produce instances of the following:
Works by Mark Blaug :
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