Abstract
Unity/disunity and specialization/unification are usually thought of in terms of opposing duals. As such, they have marked the debate about science for a number of years. In this chapter it is argued that connections (and the isolative strategies we adopt) are crucial and that an understanding of sciences as theoretical open systems has the potential to break the barrier between specialization and unification. A suggestion is made to consider open systems of knowledge as the way to manage both our cognitive limits and the ultimate, ontological, interconnectedness of the world. Taking this route, it is shown that the full adoption of an open systems approach in economics will have deep implications for the way the discipline is understood and developed as well as how it relates to the other social sciences.
This chapter builds on (and significantly revises) the paper I presented at the First Lisbon Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science – Unity of Science. Non Traditional Approaches, Lisboa, Teatro da Trindade, 25-28 Outubro 2006.
Vítor Neves is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he concluded his doctorate in economics in 2003. He is also researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES, University of Coimbra), collaborates with the Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL) and is a member of the Stirling Centre for Economic Methodology (SCEME), United Kingdom. His research interests are focused on the history of economic thought, economic methodology, public economics and housing economics. He has been doing research on the meaning of the ‘economic’; economics and interdisciplinary exchange; open systems; objectivity in economics; and social costs and social value.
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Notes
- 1.
As Pombo (2006, 29) noted, the idea of “unity of science” means a variety of things, each of these meanings being connected to a different conceptual context and set of problems. A similar view can be found in Hacking (1996), who suggested three different “unities” of science: a metaphysical belief (or sentiment) in one scientific world, reality or truth; a practical precept to look for the connections between phenomena; and a single standard or mode of scientific reasoning.
- 2.
We call “horizontal exchanges” to interactions taking place between social sciences such as economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and law. “Vertical exchanges” occur when social sciences take inspiration and seek guidance and insight from lower-level physical, cognitive and life sciences.
- 3.
For a very interesting discussion of the changes occurring in recent economics, in which it is suggested that one uses an import-export model and looks at the history of economics in terms of a (non-regular) cycle of alternating unity and plurality periods, see Davis (2006).
- 4.
To use Mäki’s label for his recent seminar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki (see http://www.helsinki.fi/filosofia/tint/events/interdisciplinaryencounters.htm)
- 5.
Or, following Hacking’s (1996) terminology, unity as integrated harmony of different domains of inquiry rather than unity as singleness (“the subsumption of all phenomena under a single principle, law, or language”).
- 6.
Following Dow, dualism may be defined as the propensity to classify concepts, statements and events in terms of all-encompassing, mutually exclusive pairs of either/or categories, with fixed meanings (cf., for instance, 1996; 2002). Yet, as this author noted, although “[m]ethodological discussion has often focused on duals: induction/deduction, rationalism/empiricism, prescription/description, modernism/postmodernism (…) none of these purist positions is actually sustainable” (2002, 167).
- 7.
The ‘interdisciplinary isolation’ conceptual framework, proposed by U. Mäki, will be considered here as a helpful, descriptive device for understanding the process that led to the present situation of compartmentalized and segmented sciences. For a critique of isolation as a method in the social sciences, see Runde (1996) and Lawson’s (1997).
- 8.
Isolations, Mäki claims, are ubiquitous: “Every concept, model and theory is based on an isolation of a slice of the things and properties in the world to the exclusion of the rest of what there is” (2004, 321).
- 9.
In some cases (although these are more uncommon in interdisciplinary isolations) items are explicitly considered but excluded from the isolated disciplinary field by means of some form of idealization, usually through the postulation of limits or ideal types (for instance, setting the value of variables to be 0 or |∞|).
- 10.
As Coase (1994, 46) puts the issue: the study by economists of the effects of the other social systems on the economic system will, I believe, become a permanent part of the work of economists. It cannot be done effectively by social scientists unfamiliar with the economic system. Such work may be carried out in collaboration with other social scientists but is unlikely to be well done without economists. For this reason, I think we may expect the scope of economics to be permanently enlarged to include studies in other social sciences. But the purpose will be to enable us to understand better the working of the economic system.
- 11.
Of course, there are also material isolations occurring in nature, but apart from some very infrequent cases of spontaneous isolations, they are usually the result of human intervention taking place in an experimental context (experimental isolations).
- 12.
On the beautiful Leibnitzian metaphor of sciences as oceans see Pombo (2006).
- 13.
A system, be it closed or open, is a network, a structure with connections – a set of elements (things or ideas) linked by a set of connections so as to form a coherent whole (cf. Potts 2000). As Loasby (2005, 59) emphasised, “not only different sets of elements but also different ways of connecting a given set of elements define different systems”.
- 14.
Of course, if pressed, virtually all economists would accept that the economic realm is an open system. However, the emphasis on becoming a hard science (some refer to ‘physics envy’) led to a central concern with mathematical tractability (particularly noticeable after the Second World War) and a consequent closing of economics.
- 15.
See Dow (2002, 139–140), Chick (2004, 6) and Chick and Dow (2005, 367).
- 16.
Since the 1950s.
- 17.
For instance, Wassily Leontief, the Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economics in 1973, wrote: Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions. … Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and the operations of a real economic system. (Leontief 1983: viii ff.)
The picture, unfortunately, remains up to date.
- 18.
The ‘statements of principles’ of some heterodox economics associations, for instance of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy: http://eaepe.org/eaepe.php?q=node/view/5 and of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics http://www.sase.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=5&Itemid=43 are enlightening in this regard.
- 19.
And interlinked with the natural environment as well.
- 20.
von Bertalanffy, one of the originators of General System Theory, distinguished an open system from a closed one in terms of the interrelations with their respective environments. While a closed system was one where there is no exchange of materials, in an open system import and export would take place, with continuous influxes and outfluxes and a consequent change (generation and destruction) of the components of the system (cf. Bertalanffy 1973). Such a conception is here largely subscribed. However, following some more recent authors (cf., for instance, Chick and Dow 2005, Loasby 2003, Mearman 2005), I wish to emphasise that openness and closure are not duals; they occur in a continuum and we should think of them in terms of dimensions and degrees of closure.
- 21.
“Since these four substructures are connected by a process of continuous interaction, it follows that modifications in one must lead to transformation of the whole” (Kapp 1961, 115).
- 22.
A stratum (an entity or aspect) of reality is said to be emergent, or to possess emergent properties, “if there is a sense in which it has arisen out of some ‘lower’ level, being conditioned by and dependent upon, but not predictable from, the properties found at the lower level” (Lawson 1997, 176), thus turning the higher-level stratum irreducible to the lower-level one.
- 23.
“just as we look for a common denominator when we intend to add or subtract different fractions, so must we find or construct ‘a set of common-denominator concepts in terms of which we can express the otherwise incommensurable concepts of our different disciplines, subject matters and cultures.’ [quotation from Northrop]” (Kapp 1961, 127, emphasis added).
- 24.
This would mean to reject, as Kapp did, the current practice in economics of deducing conclusions from a narrow, disciplinary concept of man (homo economicus) which isolates one particular motif of human behaviour (calculative rationality) and leaves to other social sciences those (‘non-rational’) patterns of behaviour that do not take fully into account the real costs and expected benefits of one’s actions. These other forms of behaviour, Kapp claimed, should also be considered as an integral part of our concept of man – of what he called the ‘institutional man’ (cf. Kapp 1968, 93)
- 25.
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Neves, V. (2012). Sciences as Open Systems – The Case of Economics. In: Pombo, O., Torres, J., Symons, J., Rahman, S. (eds) Special Sciences and the Unity of Science. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2030-5_12
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