A Coherentist Defense of Economics as an Interdisciplinary Social Science

Abstract

This article provides a normative account to justify why economics should be a more interdisciplinary social science. The philosophy of science we use to ground this defense is Laurence BonJour’s coherentist theory of justification. Through his philosophical framework, we present a justification for economics to be more mindful of its fellow social sciences as a way to understand social phenomena more thoroughly. Our conclusion is that interdisciplinarity may enable economics to represent its own knowledge to itself in new forms. This does not mean economics’ correspondence with reality will eventually become flawless—it simply represents the fact that economic reasoning has plenty of room for improvement.

Keywords:

• interdisciplinarity
• economics
• social sciences
• coherentism
• Laurence BonJour

JEL Classification Codes::

• A12
• A14
• B41

Notes

1 For more on this topic, see Philip Mirowski (1989, 250), who treats economics’ emulation of the natural sciences, and Rik Pieters and Hans Baumgartner (2002, 498) and Joshua Angrist et al. (2020, 10-28), whose works are bibliometric studies on the relation between economics and different groups of disciplines.

2 Klein (2010) catalogs many more sets of properties. This characterization occurs generally in pairs of opposites. For the sake of space, we focus on the properties that are closest to the idea of interdisciplinarity we defend.

3 The year 1959 marks the first appearance of the term in economics articles in the WoS. All of the searches on the WoS outlined throughout this essay were performed on August 13, 2018.

4 Strictly speaking, some of these studies were published in business (Corlett 1988; Stevenson 1989; and Yolles 2007) or in finance (Andrikopoulos 2015), rather than in economics per se. Nevertheless, we kept them in the sample to ensure that the selection remained as faithful as possible to the WoS characterization.

5 For a comprehensive history of epistemic coherentism, see Poston (2014).

6 A system may be logically consistent and yet possess a low level of coherence. In this regard, probabilistic consistency is more suitable than logical consistency for two important reasons. First, it is hard to imagine that a system will succeed in avoiding them completely. Second, it is a matter of degree, with reference to the number of conflicts contained in the system and in the degree of improbability involved in each case (BonJour 1985, 95).

7 For a history of the emergence concept from Hegel to chaos theory and its relationship with the social sciences, see Geoffrey Hodgson (2000a).

8 Heinz Heckhausen (1972, 83-84) defines the material field of a discipline as “the set of objects in an understanding on the common sense level.” On this criterion, various disciplines overlap enormously, and this appears to be the main cause of interdisciplinarity as a “highly valued fad.” The subject matter of a discipline, on the other hand, is “the point of view from which a discipline looks upon the material field cuts” given the possible sets of observables. It is, accordingly, a more refined concept for disciplinary object.

9 The building bridges metaphor is important because, unlike restructuring, it necessarily involves two or more complete, firm, autonomous disciplines—as is the case for the social sciences (Klein 2010, 21).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victor Cruz-e-Silva

Victor Cruz-e-Silva is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), Brazil, and Marco Cavalieri is an Associate Professor of Economics at Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil. This research has been supported by the Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the National Counsel for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The authors would like to thank Felipe Almeida, Eduardo Angeli, Denilson Beal, Mauro Boianovsky, Adriano Codato, and Ramón Fernández for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The authors also would like to thank the UFPR’s Advisory Center for Academic Publication (CAPA).

Marco Cavalieri

Victor Cruz-e-Silva is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), Brazil, and Marco Cavalieri is an Associate Professor of Economics at Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil. This research has been supported by the Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the National Counsel for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The authors would like to thank Felipe Almeida, Eduardo Angeli, Denilson Beal, Mauro Boianovsky, Adriano Codato, and Ramón Fernández for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The authors also would like to thank the UFPR’s Advisory Center for Academic Publication (CAPA).