Explanatory pluralism in economics: against the mainstream?

Abstract

Recent pleas for more heterodoxy in explaining economic action have been defending a pluralism for economics. In this article, I analyse these defences by scrutinizing the pluralistic qualities in the work of one of the major voices of heterodoxy, Tony Lawson. This scrutiny will focus on Lawson's alternatives concerning ontology and explanation to mainstream economics. Subsequently, I will raise some doubts about Lawson's pluralism, and identify questions that will have to be addressed by heterodox economists in order to maintain the claim of pluralism.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

An overview of the history and contributions to post-autistic economics can be found on their website www.paecon.net. We have got to mention that the topic of pluralism in economics has been discussed and has been defended earlier, e.g. by a group of economists (organized by G. Hodgson, U. Ma¨ki and D. McCloskey), in a ‘Plea for a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics’, published in 1992 as an advertisement in the American Economic Review, vol. 82, no. 2, p. xxv; and in Salanti and Screpanti (1997). For an overview of the different defences of pluralism in economics, see Sent (forthcoming).

For those readers unfamiliar with Critical Realism, I refer to Roy Bhaskar—the founder of what is now a broad church within the social sciences—who considers Critical Realism as a third position, next to positivist and hermeneuticists views, being ‘a qualified, critical and non-reductionist, naturalism, based upon a transcendental realist account of science and, as such, necessarily respecting (indeed grounded in) the specificity and emergent properties of the social realm’ (Bhaskar 1998, xiv). An introduction to the literature on Critical Realism can be found in Archer et al. (1998).

Retroduction is described as consisting ‘in the movement, on the basis of analogy and metaphor amongst other things, from a conception of some phenomenon of interest to a conception of some totally different type of thing, mechanism, structure or condition that, at least in part is responsible for the given phenomenon … It is a movement, paradigmatically, from a “surface phenomenon” to some “deeper” causal thing’ (Lawson 1997a, 24).

To be fair to Lawson, we have to mention that he considers the conclusion of the transcendental argument necessarily constituting contingent claims: ‘It represents, in short, an investigation that necessarily takes contingent historical premises and specific social conditions, and aims to produce hypothetical and conditional conclusions; an investigation which can never be foreclosed, it is always open to elaboration and transformation’ (Lawson 1997b, 19). However, his conviction is firm: ‘The transcendental realist account in question, I submit, emerges as the most adequate, indeed uniquely sustainable, analysis that is available’ (Lawson 1997b, 23).

The idea of an ontological fallacy in relation with Critical Realism has been used before by Wade Hands (1999, 181).

I do not want to defend neutrality as the norm to follow; I just want to unveil Lawson's choices.

I would rather call these kind of explanations, explanations of regularities or causal-dependency relations (than explanations of ‘enduring mechanisms’), but let me put that in a footnote for now.

Does the ‘antecedently established knowledge of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms’ have to be the subject of theoretical explanations before it can be used as a condition sine qua non for formulating practical explanations? How would practising economists evaluate this?

P and P′ are supposed to be mutually exclusive.

Against scholars that are convinced that every explanation of a fact is an explanation of an explicit or implicit contrast (e.g. van Fraassen 1980, 130; Ylikoski 2001, 31; contra Humphreys 1989, 137), I defend that explanations of facts are to be distinguished from explanations of contrasts both in structure and in motivation. Furthermore, I want to emphasize that I do not consider the motivations mentioned here as the only possible ones.

Interests that can be understood as knowledge-interested, but might as well have a political basis, or be based on gender, or on social situation, historical context, forms of inequality, etc.