Economic heterodoxy expresses much admiration for the late Imre Lakatos, erstwhile professor of logic at the London School of Economics. Lakatos' philosophical standard for healthy scientific investigation went beyond Karl Popper’s principle that scientific conclusions should be empirically falsifiable, and arrived at a definition of true science as being capable of predicting new facts.

While we fail to see how this strenuous criterion does anything to commend heterodox economics, we can understand how heterodoxy might be charmed by Lakatos’ inclusion of neoclassical economics among his other exemplars of scientific degeneracy, viz.: astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, Freudian psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, etc.¹ Here we have it on the most au courant of philosophical authority that neoclassical economics is not a science because it discovers nothing new.

SFEcon, being as incompetent in textural analysis as it is in all forms of necromancy, only wishes to inquire as to what might precede heterodoxy's because.

It is very much the rule rather than the exception for a scientific quiddity to exist in theory for decades, or even centuries, before a specimen is discovered in terms of something quantifiable. The gene and the electron are but two of the more familiar examples to be cited in this regard. And who is to say that measures of utility will not someday find acceptance within the economics guild?

There can be little doubt that the real counterparts of utility actually exist. Nothing prevents the economist from approaching a factory or a household to note down its inputs and outputs, profile the skills of its inmates, map its physical plant, examine the technologies by which its transformations are performed, etc. All this information is most assuredly out there; and, in some sense it must be allowed that it ‘adds up’ to the technical potential of an economic system. The question for economic science is one of how this seething amalgam of data might be distilled into the boundary conditions of a sound material philosophy.
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¹      Matteo Motterlini, 1999.