To what extent is the work of philosophers such as Popper, Kuhn, Essay

To what extent is the work of philosophers such as Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend useful in forming a critical judgement o - Essay Example This is expected to happen due to the circumstances when the principles that were initially used to form the foundations of economics were built, and that many changes have already happened during the course of modernisation in the next two hundred years or so (Smelser & Swedberg, 2010). Also, the major rearrangement of economic ideas in the late 1930’s which was considered to be a â€Å"revolution† was not at all one in its entirety, and that it was only due to the proliferation of numerous competing schools of thought that eventually created the need to cull and select only those which are easily synthesized and revamped and can be used into the succeeding years, essentially recycling some ideas to suit the needs of modernity (Laidler, 1999). This kind of treatment to the field of economics created some unforeseen problems such as the difficulty of handling the rapidly-changing market trends, shifts and fluctuations between expected and actual economic growth, and the mismanagement of policies that were supposed to control fast price inflations, among others (England, 2000). The previously predictable thought patterns of most people have been replaced by the notion that due to the vast influx of ideas, various people might be thinking of different things and interests at any given time, which in turn counts for a greater variability in terms of anything that is beyond the basic necessities of everyday life (Roberts, Finnegan, & Gallie, 1985). As a result, market analyses today are much harder to handle not only due to the failure of the traditional rational choices that were initially able to predict consumer patterns, but also the changes that happen in the market trends that do not seem to repeat itself even after several decades (Smelser & Swedberg, 2010). These kinds of unpredictable results rose from the idea that economics can be treated in the same way as how most sciences are handled, and as a result forced economists to think like scien tists in a field that is more often than not as predictable as simple scientific inquiry, which in turn entails the need to change the way how economics must be tackled in the modern era (Keita, 1992). Many thinkers and philosophers were able to introduce new methods of thinking, as well as stating their own ideas and criticisms with regards to the validity and credibility of most scientific inquiry methods. However, some techniques of teaching and studying economics may not coincide with the scientific method, such as from deductive to inductive reasoning or the inverse of it, and problems could definitely arise if a field that mostly uses deductive reasoning such as economics is being dealt with in an inductive way, and this would not make any sense of the results, thus the standards of reliability become endlessly challenged, bringing about even more unexpected results (Blaug, 1980; Pheby, 1988). For example, if market trends were looked at in the same way as how the scientific m ethods work, then it is expected that consumers are highly predictable in terms of what they would prefer to do with their money, and even after ten years of observation things would still remain the same. While in the early days of the industrial revolution it may seem as though it is indeed easy to predict as to what items would be sellable within the season since there are only a few mass-produced items that the population could buy, nowadays due to various trends that seemingly change from a day to a month, this kind