Economics in the Social Sciences: Emergence and Co-existence of Different Discourses and Methods (original) (raw)

Economics in the Social Science Spectrum: Evolution and Overlap with Different Academic Areas

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2021

Causes for the distinct and growing separation of the academic domains of economics and neighboring fields are ongoing processes of specialization, fragmentation, and evolution. Thanks to the proliferation of publications and knowledge in economics, degrees of specialization have emerged. One of the great paradoxes in economics is the existence of mainstream economics, which is taught to undergraduate students and dominates textbooks, alongside new contributions that enter the arena via other disciplines (e.g., psychology, history, and law). The paper delineates some developments in economics over the last 100 years oscillating between continuity and change. Especially, the interplay between different domains in the social sciences is discussed as fields of tension and cooperation between economics and other disciplines. The message of the article is that economics is not a homogeneous body of being, content, and learning. Economics has a diverse knowledge base on a theoretical and methodological level with different forms of economic capacity, conceptual sensitivity, and methodological rigor. Many different approaches coexist with corresponding camps of authors. A multiplicity of topics and discourses can be observed with an interesting division of economics with one branch focused on mathematics, econometric tools, and applications, and the other branch moving towards increasing social scientification with strong links to psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology. The Oxford credo of politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) has undergone a revival in this respect.

The Quandary of the Economic Science

2007

The economic science is passing through one of the most critical periods of its existence. The crisis it runs through has its origins in its methodological grounds as well as in its capacity to express the deep political and economical mutations nowadays. Throughout this article, we have tried to stress the inadequate characteristics of the present theoretical framework, the impossibility to reflect the new realities through a decayed conceptual framework, the need to reexamine some postulates and assertions that do not correspond to the present train of events anymore. We have also tried to identify the basis of the economic science restructuring, as well as the objectives and directions oriented towards this challenge. We have pleaded for a science configuration open to multidisciplinarily framework, debate pluralism, and new, realistic and practical approaches.

Science or Ideology :Where does Economics stand? - Ideological Roots of Scientific Discourse

The notion of both 'ideology' and 'science' are numerous, contentious and sometimes contradictory depending on different authors' cognitive vantage points with its own sociohistoric genesis. This paper seeks to critically evaluate Joseph Schumpeter's view on relationship between 'ideology' and 'science' and its mutual interdependence in generating knowledge in social sciences like economics. In economics his analysis is much more broad and contextual than his other contemporaries. His view of 'Ideology' as "pre-analytic vision about real world economic events conditioned by social-historic positioning of social agent/theorist" and 'science' as "mere box of analytic tools continually evolving and getting perfected" and former being continuously subjected to critical assessment of later, is evaluated from the soundness of its epistemological and ontological standpoint. Borrowing from different schools of philosophy (Marxist, Critical Realist, and Philosophy of Science), Schumpeter's construction on 'ideology' and 'science' is critically evaluated.

What Would a Scientific Economics Look Like?

Evidence, Inference and Enquiry, 2011

Is a scientific economics possible?or desirable? There has been a long history of discussion as to whether social "science" is possible. Many issues have been involved, including the extent to which events in the social realm are predictable, the difference between causation in the natural sciences and agency in human affairs, and the role (if any) of a sympathetic understanding of the motivations of social actors (verstehen). The aim of this paper is more modest, and does not cover all these topics, nor does it review the rich literature on the philosophy of economics. It merely asks what lessons one particular social science, economics, can learn from methods that the natural sciences, and especially biology, have used so fruitfully in understanding how the world works. Within economics the focus is on theorycausal explanation and modellingespecially core mainstream theory, as depicted in textbooks, on the characteristics of markets and firms that affect growth and bubbles; macroeconomics and econometrics, for example, are not covered. Since this type of theory is widely regarded as the core of orthodox economicsmacroeconomists tend to refer to the desirability of "micro foundations"this focus goes to the heart of the discipline. One motivation is that some economists claim economics to be scientific in some sense, so the issue needs to be considered to what extent and in what ways this may or may not be justifiable. It is true that important elements appear to resemble natural science, and indeed An example is the issue of whether or not assumptions need to be realistic; being locked in this dispute is liable to distract participants from the deeper question, whether it would be better to base theory on evidence and place less reliance on assumptions of all kinds. This paper therefore compares one particular natural science, biology, with the practices of economics, hoping to act as a guide to a better methodology. The focus on methodology rather than substance is important: biological processes are not a good model for social processes, as the causal mechanisms are quite different 4. The analogy is at a more abstract level. In taking biology as the model, a judgement is clearly involved that it is successful, whereas economics is not, or rather, less so than it could be. The first part of this is easy to justify: biology has developed a large body of causal knowledge, covering for example mechanistic biologyhow the body works (physiology, biochemistry, cell biology, etc)and evolutionary theory which explains how the diversity of living forms originated. The basis of this knowledge was accumulated in a remarkably short time. In 1855 biology could scarcely be said to exist. By 1955 the work of Mendel,

Taking philosophy of science to economics

Metascience, 2016

I am becoming more and more convinced that economics is full of interesting philosophy of science problems but also that those problems are tough nuts to crack with standard philosophy of science approaches. Standard realist and antirealist arguments do not really fit because well-supported theories that are overturned by later better supported theories are nearly nonexistent. So no-miracles arguments or pessimistic inductions get little purchase (Kincaid forthcoming). Instead it is a field with a plethora of generally highly mathematical models and an elaborate set of statistical tools. Perhaps economics is much like ecology, except that the mathematics are much more elaborate as are the stats, and social, political and moral values are close to the surface everywhere. These two books are testimony to the complex philosophy of science issues raised by contemporary economics. Both deal with central issues, with Bowman's book being noticeably more successful on my view. Spiegler's book is about economic models and argues that the requirement of mathematical models is generally not met by economic phenomena, and thus that economics should forego modeling and instead use interpretive, hermeneutic approaches. Bowman's main claim is that economics outside the laboratory requires expert judgment and cannot reach reasonable conclusions by relying on mechanical statistical inference rules. Spiegler is certainly right to be puzzled by the role of highly abstract mathematical models in economics. While their role has diminished in recent decades in favor of more local, empirical models, they are still a mainstay of the profession. Despite the 2008 crisis, macroeconomic modeling is dominated by approaches that assume there is only one consumer and one producer and that