Idealization and Abstract Objects in Economics: A Commentary on the Structuralist Theory of Adolfo García de la Sienra

Abstract

In this paper, some issues related to idealization in science are discussed in the light of García de la Sienra’s approach to the topic in his new book, A Structuralist Theory of Economics (Routledge, London, 2019). The paper focuses on topics related to the notions of abstraction, idealization/concretization, and scientific models. After discussing the fictionalist proposal of Frigg and other authors, according to which models are fictions, I present and argue in favor of an alternative, the artefactualist one, according to which models are better understood as abstract artifacts, which are the product of a process of abstraction and idealization. In their turn, abstraction and idealization are understood in terms of a network of conditionalizations and counterfactual deformations of various degrees.