Who Cares What Philosophers of Science Say About Science?
Chris House tries to set out "the scientific method": The scientific method goes something like this: Observation Formation of hypotheses Testing/evaluation Repeat If you can follow these steps then anything (even economics! even macroeconomics!) can be studied scientifically. When economics is at its best it truly is a science. A purely empirical study is a necessary step in the scientific method (it’s step 1). Here is the funny thing about this sort of view, which is way too common among economists: philosophers of science abandoned this simple model beginning 50 or 60 years ago, and today you would be hard pressed to find any philosopher of science who would take it seriously. In particular, the idea that a "purely empirical study" is step one of this method came to be understood as fantastical: no one could possibly do an empirical study without a theoretical apparatus and an hypothesis to test already in mind. (To see the absurdity of this idea...