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Three themes dominate Hunting Causes. The first is that cause is a plural concept. The methods and metaphysics of causation, Cartwright believes, are context dependent. Different causal accounts seem to be at odds with one another only because the same word means different things in different contexts. Every formal approach to causality uses a conceptual framework that is “thinner” than causal reality. She lists a bewildering variety of approaches to causation: probabilistic and Bayes-net accounts (of, for example, Patrick Suppes, Clive Granger, Wolfgang Spohn, Judea Pearl, and Clark Glymour), modularity accounts (Pearl, James Woodward, and Stephen LeRoy), invariance accounts (Woodward, David Hendry, and Kevin Hoover), natural experiments (Herbert Simon, James Hamilton, and Cartwright), causal process accounts (Wesley Salmon and Philip Dowe), efficacy accounts (Hoover), counterfactual accounts (David Lewis, Hendry, Paul Holland, and Donald Rubin), manipulationist accounts (Peter Menzies and Huw Price), and others. The lists of advocates of various accounts overlap. Nevertheless, she sometimes treats these accounts as if they were so different that it is not clear why they should be the subject of a single book. And she fails to explain what they have in common. If, as she apparently believes, they do not have a common essence, do they have a Wittgensteinian family resemblance? She fails to explore in any systematic way the complementarities among the different approaches – for example, between invariance accounts, Bayes-nets, and natural experiments – that frequently make their advocates allies rather than opponents.

The received wisdom on classical accounting thought is that its early stages were methodologically vacuous, while, in its “golden” age, it espoused the methods and philosophical commitments of received-view hypothetico-deductivism but actually remained methodologically incoherent. The purpose of this paper is to argue, to the contrary, that classical accounting thought possesses a coherent constitutional structure that qualifies as a methodology and unifies it as a body of argument.

The paper draws on Cartwright’s metaphysical nomological pluralism, which holds that we should attend to the actual practices of successful inquiry and the methodologies and metaphysical presuppositions that support it.

The paper argues that accounting does achieve disciplinary success and that classical accounting thought, using the methodology of defeasible postulationism, provides the theoretical infrastructure that supports that success. The accounting domain is a world of “dappled realism”, in which theories are useful in the construction of reporting schemes and inform our understanding of the nature of the domain.

Applying metaphysical nomological pluralism rescues classical accounting thought from the charge of methodological incoherence and metaphysical naivety.

The paper justifies a place for classical accounting theorising in the endeavours of modern accounting scholarship and moves the analysis of classical accounting thought within a philosophy of science framework towards an approach with a contemporary resonance.

This essay is a review of the recent literature on the methodology of economics, with a focus on three broad trends that have defined the core lines of research within the discipline during the last two decades. These trends are: (a) the philosophical analysis of economic modelling and economic explanation; (b) the epistemology of causal inference, evidence diversity and evidence-based policy and (c) the investigation of the methodological underpinnings and public policy implications of behavioural economics. The final output is inevitably not exhaustive, yet it aims at offering a fair taste of some of the most representative questions in the field on which many philosophers, methodologists and social scientists have recently been placing a great deal of intellectual effort. The topics and references compiled in this review should serve at least as safe introductions to some of the central research questions in the philosophy and methodology of economics.

This article critically analyses the concept of evidence in evidence‐based policy, arguing that there is a key problem: there is no existing practicable theory of evidence, one which is philosophically‐grounded and yet applicable for evidence‐based policy. The article critically considers both philosophical accounts of evidence and practical treatments of evidence in evidence‐based policy. It argues that both fail in different ways to provide a theory of evidence that is adequate for evidence‐based policy. The article contributes to the debate about how evidence can and should be used to reduce contingency in science and in policy based on science.

Science discovering a divinely designed world is fundamentally different from science investigating a “dappled world” (Cartwright, 1999). The first world is written in elegant mathematics which describes the simple laws that rule them, the other world is too complex and messy – a “patchwork of laws” – for any unified treatment. While the first world is lighted by itself and principally transparent, the second world is much darker, so we need lanterns to have a look at it:The effort of the economist is to see, to picture the interplay of economic elements. The more clearly cut these elements appear in vision, the better; the more elements he can grasp and hold in mind at once, the better. The economic world is a misty region. The first explorers used unaided vision. Mathematics is the lantern by which what before was dimply visible now looms up in firm, bold outlines. The old phantasmagoria disappear. We see better. We see also further. (Fisher, 1925, p. 119)Today, these mathematical pictures are called models.

The long delay between the publication of Bernt Stigum's magnum opus and this review owes not only in part to personal reasons of no interest to anyone but the reviewer, but also to the sheer heft and density of the book itself. It is a long (768 pages) and difficult book. In fact, it is really two books: the first is Stigum's treatise on the philosophy of econometrics and the second is an anthology of contributions, constituting 8 of its 27 chapters, from a distinguished group of 16 econometricians, including two Nobel Prize winners (Granger and McFadden). The anthology sits somewhat uneasily alongside the treatise. The inclusion criteria seem to be either that the topic is one that Stigum thought ought to be covered or one that illustrates his larger points. Yet, it is unclear that the contributors fully subscribe to Stigum's analysis or that their contributions do not rather obscure than clarify his own position. The work would have been stronger and more readable had Stigum chosen to publish the treatise and the anthology separately. Even broken up in this way, Stigum's own 329 page contribution would be a formidable and erudite work. Although it is rare enough to find a scholar who is comfortable in mixing such disparate thinkers as Aristotle, Carol Gilligan, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard in the same work, it is, I am sure, unprecedented when that work is principally concerned with econometrics.