Economics and Philosophy

Table of Contents - 1994 - Volume 10, Issue 02  

Essays

Restabilizing Dynamics: Construction and Constraint in the History of Walrasian Stability Theory

D. Wade Handsa1

a1 University of Puget Sound

In Stabilizing Dynamics (1991) Roy Weintraub provides a history of stability theory from the work of Hicks and Samuelson in the late 1930s to the Gale and Scarf counterexamples in the 1960s. Unlike his earlier work in the history of general equilibrium theory (1979, 1985, 1988) this recent contribution is not an attempt to fit the Walrasian program into the narrow framework of some particular philosophy of natural science (such as Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs). Rather, the theme in Stabilizing Dynamics is broadly social constructivist. Simply put, the constructivist view of science is “that scientific knowledge itself is constructed socially, in communities of scientists: Knowledge is constructed, not found” (p. 9).

Professor of Economics at the University of Puget Sound. One of his current research interests is the history of Walrasian General Equilibrium Theory. He is the author of Testing, Rationality, and the Progress: Essays on the Popperian Tradition in Economic Methodology (1993). He is also one of the editors, along with John Davis and Uskali Makï, of the forthcoming volume The Handbook of Economic Methodology.