1A Concept of Causal Realisticness

Uskali Mäki, a philosopher of economic methodology, has investigated many cases of economists’methodological discussions. Mäki shows that theories have certain attributes or properties that characterize the gap between theory and its empirical imports—i.e., the gap of abstractness. These attributes or properties include their referentiality, observability, truth, partiality, success in empirical tests, plausibility, practical usefulness, and so on. According to Mäki, these theoretical properties are instances of many perspectives of the concept of what he calls “realisticness. ” As a result, the concept of realisticness can be interpreted in terms of these various attributes or properties. This paper uses Bert Hamminga’s research of the concept of “plausibility”as a case to illustrate that simply giving the concept of plausibility a formal analysis doesn’t provide a complete explanation of the idea of realisticness. This paper tries to show that, by further incorporating material and practical dimensions into the original formal account—i.e., by investigating economists’actual practice of economic theorizing—Mäki’s concept of realisticness should be interpreted as the concept of causal realisticness. The reason is that the degree of realisticness of a theory depends, in fact, on the concreteness of the causal structure specified in the model of the theory. The more concrete the specified causal structure of the model, the more complete the explanation of the targeted phenomenon provided by the model; the model conforms more closely to the fact, and therefore the theory—from which the model is derived—possesses a higher degree of causal realisticness