Abstract
This text discusses interdisciplinary exchange and the intellectual obstacles to interdisciplinarity that arise from attempts to talk across conflicting and incommensurable paradigms in different disciplines, from the vantage point of economics.
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Notes
- 1.
Laurent (2012, p. 222) proposed a focus on research programmes as “conceptually coherent entities”.
- 2.
Interdisciplinarity is a word with many meanings and can be considered from many perspectives. There are multiple interdisciplinarities. Following Pombo (2004) I use interdisciplinarity as an umbrella term, meaning a continuum of progressive integration of disciplines, going from the less demanding forms of disciplinary exchange (a simple juxtaposition of disciplines, which retain their full autonomy – let us call this pluri or multidisplinarity) to the complete integration of knowledge, with a new set of common-denominator concepts, which transcends the original disciplines (transdisciplinarity).
- 3.
“Horizontal exchanges” are meant here to designate interactions taking place between different social sciences (e.g. economics, sociology, political science and anthropology). “Vertical exchanges” occur when social sciences take inspiration and seek guidance and insight from lower-level physical, cognitive and life sciences.
- 4.
Economists are the least likely of any social scientists to cite journals outside their field.
- 5.
Similar statements may be found in other “heterodox” national and international organizations, for example the Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Política (https://www.sep.org.br/01_sites/01/index.php/instituicao/estatuto), the Association Française d’Économie Politique (https://assoeconomiepolitique.org/presentation-2/), the Association for Social Economics (https://socialeconomics.org/about/) or the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE) (http://iippe.org/about-iippe/).
- 6.
- 7.
“Ontological integrity” is understood here as a fundamental presupposition of a realist understanding of science and expresses the adequacy of our theorizing in relation to the fundamental nature of the phenomena observed (see Oakley, 1999).
- 8.
A paradigm is an intellectual as well as a sociological category. It corresponds to a specific way of thinking and the set of institutional arrangements within which the scientific activity occurs. The paradigm may be defined by the shared beliefs of a given scientific community regarding fundamental aspects of their discipline (subject matter and understanding of the nature of reality, the tools and language considered suitable for building up knowledge about it, and the commonly held values and appraisal criteria for assessing scientific quality). Scientists working within different paradigms “see different things and see them in different relations one to the other” (Bernstein, 1983; Dow, 2002, 2008; Kuhn, 1996, pp. 148–150; Neves, 2016, p. 500).
- 9.
See Köhn (2017).
- 10.
Bibliographical references to the Knight-Keynes concept of uncertainty significantly declined in mainstream economics journals after the 1950s, a decline paralleled by the corresponding move towards the formalization of economics (Hodgson, 2011). In effect, it was difficult to fit the concept of fundamental uncertainty into a formal model. Yet, according to this author, formalization per se was not the only reason for the decline of the Knight-Keynes concept of uncertainty within mainstream economics circles (chaos theory is mathematized and also did not attract the attention of mainstream economists). Data on publications instead suggests that it is the relevance attributed to building models aimed at reaching useful predictable outcomes that helps explain why the concept was abandoned. In Hodgson’s words: “Uncertainty is not only unquantifiable but it restricts precise prediction. It is thus prevented by a double-lock from entry into the mainstream. Mainstream economics would have to abandon both its obsession with formalization and its primary goal of prediction for the door to be opened.” (idem, pp.165-6).
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Neves, V. (2023). The Utopia of Interdisciplinarity: A View from Economics. In: Pombo, O., Gärtner, K., Jesuíno, J. (eds) Theory and Practice in the Interdisciplinary Production and Reproduction of Scientific Knowledge. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20405-0_10
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