Review of Economic Philosophy

Tag: Ontology

  • From Universal to Economic Ontology

    Abstract

    This article first offers a simplified version of a universal ontology, conceived as a general framework for description of the material and mental world. It analyzes the notions of entity, property, relation and temporality and their joint development in terms of relationship between parts and whole or else of emergence of a new entity. It illustrates the preceding principles as concerns economic science, for which the entities are the agents, the goods and the institutions. It then insists on the coupling the latter achieves between physical and psychological properties as well as the reasoning it proposes in terms of equilibrium and more recently learning.

    Keywords

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  • Whatever happened to neoclassical economics?

    Abstract

    Proponents of historical epistemology have highlighted how named concepts are amongst the most fundamental features of successful science. Advances in understanding, not least through the development of critically oriented projects, can be significantly boosted by way of key aspects being formed into named concepts, given the attention the latter tend to receive. I focus here on an analytical phenomenon that I believe warrants being rendered the object of a named concept in modern social science. Such a development, I suspect, would work to the benefit of the discipline of modern economics especially. In fact, the phenomenon in question already once was the object of a named concept within economics, and over 100 years ago. It was associated with the label neoclassical economics. The label lived on, as did the phenomenon for which it was, with reason, introduced. But the two, the label and the labelled, parted company, with the former used thereafter mostly incoherently and the latter persisting unarticulated and indeed mostly unrecognised. So, I also explore how all this happened and question whether there is anything to be taken from this history.

    JEL Codes: A12, A14, B00, B12, B13, B15, B23, B25, B40, B41, B49, B50, B59.

    Keywords

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  • Talking about structures: the ‘transcendental’ argument

    Abstract

    A distinctive feature of the Critical Realist approach is its reliance on the so-called ‘transcendental argument’ for the existence of social structures. Focusing on Tony Lawson’s version of the argument, this paper aims at showing that it is unsatisfactory and concludes that Critical Realists should dispense with it.

    Keywords

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    Classification JEL:  B410

  • Time, Mechanisms and Technology: Challenges of Abstraction and Decision in Realist Economic Theory

    Abstract

    This paper argues that Humean causal successionism, which has been the principal target for critique by Bhaskar’s Critical Realism, remains very present in the concept of “mechanism” itself. It is argued that the concept of mechanism implies a Newtonian abstraction of time which is uninspected within Critical Realism. However, this is a broader problem of mechanistic abstraction, and the paper discusses the problem both within Critical Realism and within the discipline which focuses on the study of mechanisms, cybernetics. The question of how descriptions of causal mechanisms, for all the benefits they bring to social methodology, can reconcile themselves with their own abstractions is addressed through suggesting the dissolution of the time problem in real experience. The pedagogy of teaching abstractions, the creation of contexts for collective playing with new distinctions and the role of technologies in facilitating playful contexts is discussed. The deeper implications for realist research and the need for reconciling the problems of abstraction with the problems of pedagogy and technology are discussed.

    Jel Codes: B400, B410, B410

    Keywords

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    Outline

    • Introduction: the hidden ontology of mechanicism
    • Economics and abstraction
    • The nature of mechanism in critical realism
    • Time, mechanisms and cybernetics
    • Absence, constraint and mechanism
    • Abstraction and successionism
    • Decision, performance and play
    • Technology, teaching and absence
    • Conclusion

  • The individual and the society in Walras

    Abstract

    Modern analyses present the general equilibrium as an archetype of methodological individualism, enabling the reconciliation of individual interests through the market. This article aims at showing the originality and the specificity of the treatment of this issue by Walras. We first show that Walras considers the individual (oneself) and the society (the others) as natural objects, which necessarily coexist, thus rejecting an individualistic ontology. But Walras also rejects holism and develops an analysis that considers the individual and the state as two complementary and inseparable entities. This results in a vision of the economic role of the state that is far removed from individualistic liberalism. The state must intervene to make free enterprise possible by organizing markets and maintaining competition. To do so, the state must have its own resources, not obtained through taxation, but through the nationalization of the land.

    JEL classification: B4, B13, B21.

    Keywords

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  • Concerning the meaning of agent-based models with complex interactions in economics

    Abstract

    Cognitive Economics considers both individual (cognitivist) and collective (evolutionists) point of view. Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) simulated by Multi-Agent System (MAS) allows us to integrate these two approaches. MAS is a complex interactive system, whose properties are generic. What kind of explanation can we expect from an ABM?

    Our argumentation is based on a decomposition of the modeling activity, in which ontology occupies a central place. The model is restricted to the formal (syntactic) system. Its properties come from it (asemantic) structure: the meaning must be found in the associated ontology. But the same formal model can have several ontologies: under what conditions could a particular semantic claim to have an explanatory power in economics? The meaning and explanatory power of ABMs is discussed according to two “world in the model” approaches: the “isolationist” and “credible world”.

    The discussion is illustrated by an ABM family of discreet choice with social influence that shares a common formal structure with the physical model of Ising, but differs in the auxiliary formalization of the behavior of the agents. This brings us back to the role of the cognitive and intentional assumptions of the cognitivist program, compared to the explanation by relational structures alone, which is limited to the relations between agents’ actions and their macroscopic effects, without worrying about their determinants.

    Classification JEL: B41 D01 C00.

    Keywords

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    [See the article on Cairn]