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Comment on “Towards a Realistic Epistemology for
Economics.”
© Copyright 2002 George M.
Frankfurter
I am fully in sync with Mouchot that we must define who we are, or else we never understand not just what we are doing, but also why we are doing what we are doing. American Yupiedom calls this “finding one’s inner self,” a task that is just as important for those who never lost their inner selves as for those who had nothing to lose. What I find unfortunate, however, in the “Towards a Realistic . . .
” piece is that Mouchot starts with a rather
dubious definition of what science is to arrive at the conclusion that
economics is economics (does that mean also that economists are
economists—boys will be always boys ala the American folklore?), and, thus,
it is a Totalité1 If Kuhn were right, that is, if “normal science” is what the
scientific communities know “what the world is like,” then nothing is science. If a scientific community, natural or
social, agrees on what the world is like, such concurrence is ephemeral, or
dissent is termed junk science. The
words of Arthur Koestler, “The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved
right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it,” ring as true as ever. But most of the time there is a great deal
of disagreement among scientists of any field about “what the world is like.” Whether economics is science or not is up to the believer. I for one tend to agree with Rick Szostak (1992) that economics is mostly art, and very little science (engineering), not totally unlike architecture.2 This view of economics fits well with Guerrin’s claim, repeated by McCloskey (2002) that microeconomics is “. . . formalism useful only for the generation of articles in the American Economic Review.” That would make economics (at least micro, but most certainly financial, too) ars gratia artis, the fact that the monetary well-being of the artists is dependent on their publication record, notwithstanding. Or perhaps neoclassical economics (certainly financial economics in its entirety) and neoclassical economists are the theology of the religion of free markets, and its appointed theologians, respectively. So, math and stat is just a modern version of the “How many angels can dance on a pinhead” dilemma’s solution. It is also possible that economics is populated by theorists, “guys who are trained in Mathematics-Department math,” because it is an instrument to test one’s ascendance to economics’ knighthood. Thus, it can be a remnant of feudalism where a knight’s purity of heart was decided in a jousting tournament, amounting to whether or not one could knock out of the saddle another fellow cantering all 500 pounds man and armor on the back of a miserable horse. For my taste Tony Lawson’s (2001) well-put argument that mathematics doesn’t make economics scientific, and that something can be scientific without mathematics, suffices. Whether economics is a science, an art form, a religion, or jousting is not the critical question. Harry Truman3 used to say that he wished for a one-armed economist, because all economists say one thing on one hand and another thing on another hand. That is a folksy portrayal not of split-personality economists, but of what knowledge of the economic world out there might be. And I don’t even want to get into the perilous subject of how realpolitik can influence one’s views. Thus, what is important for the research program of PAE is a new ontology. That is, what is to be known. This is the true challenge facing economic postmodernity (if I may use the term as synonymous to PAE). We must take inventory of the issues that would create an interdisciplinary research program neoclassical economics was so careful to avoid. A realistic epistemology will follow naturally.
1 Totalité might have a hidden meaning in French, as
per de Saussure’s definition of la Langue,
but I am still struggling with its meaning in relation to epistemology, i.e.
how it is to be known what is to be known. 2. If “. . .
we are forced to admit that economics will remain eternally ‘youthful” as Mouchot (ibid.) suggests, it is with its behavior we associate youthfulness. For how can otherwise economics have
subfields titled “the history of economics thought”? The images youthfulness brings to my mind
are overactive sex drive, lack of responsibility, very little wisdom,
selfishness and self-indulgence, perhaps because I am too old. 3. President of the United
States of American 1945-1953. |