• DOI:10.1080/00213624.2004.11506751
• Corpus ID: 141997867

On Operationalisms and Economics

@article{Hands2004OnOA,
  title={On Operationalisms and Economics},
  author={D. Wade Hands},
  journal={Journal of Economic Issues},
  year={2004},
  volume={38},
  pages={953 - 968}
}

• D. W. Hands
• Published 1 December 2004
• Economics
• Journal of Economic Issues

Most writers on economic methodology tell essentially the same story about "operationalism." Operationalism was the philosophy of science popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Percy Bridgman; the main text was his Logic of Modern Physics, originally published in 1927, but a number of different variants of the program appeared in the literature during the period 1930-1950. There was never a definitive rejection of the program, but because of technical difficulties and also because of its general identification with positivist philosophy of science, discussion of operationalism has effectively disappeared from the philosophical literature. Operationalism was most stridently promoted in economics by Paul Samuelson, who offered it as the methodological backdrop for many of his early theoretical contributions, particularly Foundations (1947) and revealed preference theory (1938a). Although operationalism continues to receive a certain amount of ritual endorsement from practicing economists, few, if any, actually abide by (or even attempt to abide by) its methodological maxims. The purpose of this paper is not to replace this standard story about operationalism with an alternative, equally condensed, view. The standard story is fine as far as it goes; it just does not go very far, and there is a much more complex, and much more interesting, story to be told about operationalism in general and its relationship to economics in particular. Although the following discussion constitutes little more than a few first steps in an ongoing and much larger project concerning the reception of positivist ideas-and the corresponding demise of pragmatist ideas-within American economics during the interwar period, it does provide a very different reading of the intellectual history of