Comments on Giacomo Borbone’s Book The Relevance of Models. Idealization and Concretization in Leszek Nowak

Abstract

: Chapter II of Borbone’s book addresses Nowak’s innovative views and reconstruction of the methods used in Marx’s economic works, namely, Marx’s delineation of the law of value, as well as Marx’s explanation based on this law as performed by the method of gradual concretization. In Chapter III, Borbone provides a comparison of Nowak’s approach to scientific laws and scientific explanation with that of Hempel. From that comparison Nowak’s approach comes out as superior to that of Hempel due to the former’s ability to re-construct laws containing equations, the possibility to address the issue of the explanation of a scientific law from other scientific laws, as well as a more fine-grained view on the very nature scientific explanation.