The Conventional Economics Methodology and the Postulates Selection Problem: An Alternative Approach in Islamic Economics

Postulates and Presumptions are the basis for human sciences. Theorists often assume that these are universal. So they try to extract some theories from these postulates. Conventional economic methodology does not explicitly answer the question about how we choose the propositions. The main question of this paper is what the source of ideas which are the basis for economic theories. In this study we found that there are three point of view in conventional economic theory for this question: pre-empirical, empirical and instrumentalist’s approaches. We also provide some critics for these points of view and offer a new alternative Islamic approach. This approach is based on two fundamental principles: human arbitrary and reality of revelation expressions. Based on these two principles we offer a two-layered methodological approach that extracts the universal law of phenomenon from revelation expressions and partial relationships from Lived experiences of theorist. The revelation expressions are in the first layer as the primary postulates and Presumptions and the lived experiences of theorist are in the layer two as the secondary postulates.