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Roy Weintraub wrote: 
 
>A theory may be (or "mean" -- as "may be interpreted to suggest" -- (see  
>Hausman, or McCloskey, or  Morgan, or Cartwright...) many things, in the  
>various communities into which that theory (or the theorist who theorizes  
>it) injects its concerns, but epistemological criteria (meaning what? to  
>whom?) come and go in the analytic philosophers' range wars, and who  
>notices? Or cares? Not the economic theorist, I'd wager. Just as a Supreme 
>Court Justice once noted in an obscenity case that "no woman was ever  
>seduced by a book", certainly no economist I've ever heard of eschewed a  
>theory because it failed some knowledge/warranted belief test extrinsic to 
>subdisciplinary norms developed within the community over time to  
>facilitate the production of community-useful work. 
 
 
Economists have always used epistemological criteria to ignore whole 
classes of theories,  as it turns out. The positivist-inspired rejection of 
cardinal utility is a good example, or the wholesale rejection of macro 
theories without adequate "micro-foundations" that was all the rage in the 
70's and 80's. The "community" (the fashionable post-modern misnomor  for a 
discipline), that is, has always appealed to "external" criteria to  
differentiate its product. When people who see these criteria being 
mis-used point this out, the community conveniently pleads the irrelevance 
of Methodology and the inappropriateness of "extrinsic" criteria!  Living 
by the sword, they ought to be prepared, it seems to me, to die by it. 
 
Kevin Quinn 
 
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