Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Critical Realism and the Ontological Turn. A Re...
View graph of relations

Critical Realism and the Ontological Turn. A Rejoinder to Lewis

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2011
<mark>Journal</mark>Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society
Issue number1-2
Volume23
Number of pages5
Pages (from-to)231-235
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

I agree with Paul Lewis that mathematics has a valuable but not all-encompassing role in economics, that event regularities must be supplemented with a persuasive narrative, and that inferences can inform our understanding of economic behavior. However, Lewis's full-throated defense of critical realism does little to allay my original concerns. It is absurd to maintain, as critical realists do, that mainstream economics has nothing valuable to offer heterodox economists, as their critique of the quantity theory of money tries to demonstrate. More crucially, critical realists—unlike Austrian economists—neglect to provide an epistemological explanation of economic actors’ perceptions, which is necessary if we are to bridge critical realism's own division of the social world into the “actual,” “empirical,” and “non-actual real.”