On Two Modes of Appraisal of Economic Models
On Two Modes of Appraisal of Economic Models

Summary/Abstract: Economics became a model-based science. As economic modeling, namely model-building and model-appraisal, involves both informal craft and formal procedures, the aim of the article is twofold. Firstly, to enter into the discussion about the practice of economic modeling by drawing attention to the possibility of two implicit modes of model appraisal in economic science. We will start with a thought-provoking recent proposal by philosophically and methodologically sensitive economist Dani Rodrik, whose insights into the art of model selection has already triggered a number of in-depth philosophical commentaries, and has been the subject of a few successful formal reconstructions by philosophers of economics. Secondly, the aim is to supplement this philosophical view of model selection with an account that aims at underlabouring for the reconstruction of a distinct implicit mode of model criticism, which for various reasons has been pretty much absent in recent philosophical and economic discussions.

• Details
• Contents