Patrick Suppes, Economics, and Economic Methodology

Patrick Suppes (1922–2014) was an extraordinarily wide-ranging scholar. Although best known as a philosopher of science, Suppes made substantial contributions to a remarkably wide range of different fields of research including many relevant to economics: decision theory, philosophy of economics, modeling theory, foundations of measurement, philosophy of psychology (and thus what is now behavioral economics), and many other fields. This collection recognizes Suppes’s contributions to economics and economic methodology with a symposium of papers that examine, build on, and/or assess Suppes’s research in these areas. The authors include philosophers, economists, game theorists, historians of economics, and many whose research combine these fields. This book honors Patrick Suppes, while at the same time, exhibiting the richness of contemporary philosophy of economics.

It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.

John B. Davis is Professor of Economics at Marquette University, USA, and Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the author of Keynes’s Philosophical Development (1994), The Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value (2003), and Individuals and Identity in Economics (2011), and co-author of Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science (2011, with Marcel Boumans). He is co-editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology and The Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology (2011, with D. Wade Hands).

D. Wade Hands is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Puget Sound, USA. He is the author of Testing, Rationality, and Progress: Essays on the Popperian Tradition in Economic Methodology (1993), Reflection Without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory (2001), Introductory Mathematical Economics, 2nd edition (2004), and co-author of Agreement on Demand: Consumer Theory in the Twentieth Century (2006, with Philip Mirowski). He is co-editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology and The Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology (2011, with John B. Davis).