The last decade witnessed an unprecedented annual growth of the literature dealing with the philosophy of economics, as well as the first signs of an institutionalization (conferences, an international journal) of the philosophy of economics as a scientific subject in itself - in particular in the U.S. In 1981 a meeting took place with participants mainly of European "continental" origin. In July 1987, we organized a second conference "Philosophy of Economics II" at Tilburg Uni versity, The Netherlands, mainly aiming at the establishment of first contacts between the middle-European group and researchers from the U.S. The present volume contains the papers presented at this conference. Philosophical thought on economics in recent years split up in many different streams, two of which are represented in the larger part of this volume. The first of these streams was formed by a group of researchers mainly from middle-Europe, who make empirical studies of the logical structures of the different theories as they find them presented in economic literature. Two methods prevail here. First, the structuralist method, as exemplified in the writings of Sneed, Stegmiiller and others, of describing the object of a theory as a set of ("partial potential") models. Such models consist of sets and relationships between these sets, which represent the concepts used in the theory."

The papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium "Reduktion in der Wissenschaft: Struktur, Beispiele, philos- ophische PrObleme", held in Bielefeld, West Germany, July 18- 21, 1983. Altogether eighteen talks were delivered at the symposium, and all appear here with the exception of Professor Ehlers' address. In addition, we are pleased to be able to include three papers by invited participants (Kamiah, Ludwig, Scheibe) who were unable to attend the meeting. The meeting itself brought together a sizeable group of logicians, philosophers and working scientists to discuss and debate the theme of reduction, one that occupies a central place in contemporary philosophy of science. The participants and contributors succeeded in opening up new directions in reduction studies and presenting fresh case studies of re- duction from many different areas of scientific practice. Their efforts will greatly enhance our understanding of reduction and, consequently, our grasp of the complex process of scien- tific change and the unity and growth of scientific knowledge.

This book has grown out of eight years of close collaboration among its authors. From the very beginning we decided that its content should come out as the result of a truly common effort. That is, we did not "distribute" parts of the text planned to each one of us. On the contrary, we made a point that each single paragraph be the product of a common reflection. Genuine team-work is not as usual in philosophy as it is in other academic disciplines. We think, however, that this is more due to the idiosyncrasy of philosophers than to the nature of their subject. Close collaboration with positive results is as rewarding as anything can be, but it may also prove to be quite difficult to implement. In our case, part of the difficulties came from purely geographic separation. This caused unsuspected delays in coordinating the work. But more than this, as time passed, the accumulation of particular results and ideas outran our ability to fit them into an organic unity. Different styles of exposition, different ways of formalization, different levels of complexity were simultaneously present in a voluminous manuscript that had become completely unmanageable. In particular, a portion of the text had been conceived in the language of category theory and employed ideas of a rather abstract nature, while another part was expounded in the more conventional set-theoretic style, stressing intui tivity and concreteness."