Ariel Rubinstein has said almost exactly the same thing in his 2004 presidential address to the econometric society (I wonder what Gintis thinks about that); and as people have pointed out both Van Fraasen and (to a certain extent) Nancy Cartwright have made similar arguments. Cartwright has pointed out that all social science modeling involves the creation of “socio-economic” machines (when applied to the physical sciences she calls them “nomological machines”). But Cartwright differs in important respects from Van Fraasen in that she considers such socio-economic machines literally “real” (while Van Fraasen is an anti-realist about scientific theories). However Cartwright, being a good empiricist(albeit a realist one) like Van Fraasen , considers their empirical implications to be crucial. More germane to this discussion, Rubinstein sounds more like Van Fraasen than Cartwright but perhaps more crucially goes against both in stating that economic models are not meant to be testable. To quote him:

“As economic theorists we organize our thoughts using what we call ‘models’ . The word ‘model’ sounds more scientific than ‘fable’ or ‘fairy tale’ but I don’t see much difference between them……like in the case of fables models in economic theory are derived from observations of the world but they are not meant to be testable . Like in case of fables a good fable and a good model can have enormous influence in the real world, not by providing advice or by predicting the future, but rather by influencing the culture, that is, the collection of conventions and ideas that people believe in and which influence the way they reason and act.”

So from both the Cartwright and Van Fraasen perspective, (Rubinstein’s view of) economics would not be considered a science. Therefore I think Gintis’s scorn is misplaced…he should read more philosophy.

Incidentally if you are genuinely interested in these issues you may want to check out Nancy Cartwright’s The Dappled World, which takes a VERY strong (and controversial) position, which is that ALL ‘laws’ of science, not just in the social sciences are true only ‘ceteris paribus’ (i.e. they are ALL context specific).

I don’t know whether you have heard of him, but a philosopher with the rather splendid name of Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen has also argued (in his book Laws and Symmetry) that not just the Laws of Science, but the actual Laws of Nature themselves do not ‘exist’ in any meaningful sense, but are, instead, human created abstractions from real empirical phenomena (van Fraassen is no post-modernist: he believes in a mind-independent world, and the worth of experiments, it’s only when ‘we’ start to abstract ‘laws’ from these experiments that he starts to have doubts).

Of course all this has rather strong implications for the science of economics if its primary aim (to create mathematical, non-context specific laws of economic behaviour) is fundamentally misconceived from the start.

Thanks for the heads up! I’d be interested in what you have to say about the ‘laws of psychology’ as well.

Title yet…?

‘How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science’ by Geoffrey Hodgson, as it deals specifically with the issue of the ontological nature of the ‘laws’ of economics, and the extent to which they are context free (or not). (Hodgson calls this the issue of Historical Specificity).

‘It strikes me more and more that philosophy is only a way to think about ideas as concrete and atemporal. One of the commenters at Marginal Revolution (who may or may not be an idiot depending on whether he means it as a compliment of a criticism) put it this way:

The heterodox approach is largely ignored by mainstream economics (re: neoclassical) because most of the insights are situation-dependent—that is, critical insights from the heterodox school lack the generality upon which neoclassical economics is based on. Most economists cannot and will not tolerate ad hoc explanations to human behaviour. One reason is because the math breaks down, and becomes mostly irrelevant.

How many areas of study that delve into the record of human history and behavior deal in or rely upon insights that are not context dependent?’.

This, it would seem to me, is the solution to the ‘Mondo Dentro’ question asked above. The laws of physics, apparently are NOT context dependent (although Cf Nancy Cartwright’s work). But the laws of economics, regardless of their ‘objectivity’ or whatever, ARE, it seems, context dependent. This is the big difference. And neo-classical economics devotes huge amounts of time and energy to denying this (or at the very least, positing it as a highly undesirable state of affairs. ‘Well we know there are no context free laws of economics. But wouldn’t it be great if there were? In fact, let’s pretend there are, and then…..’).

The reason i mention this is that it essentially the point of the Hodgson book that I quoted from in earlier that no one picked up on.

In the highly unlikely scenario that anyone is interested, I have a book coming out in September that discusses these issues in relating to psychology. Again, the basic issue is the ontological status of the ‘laws’ of psychology, and their context specific/context free nature.

All social theory attempts to engage a dynamic, self-changing totality. Why should we expect that any one discipline examining one specific mode of human activity would have epistemic agency? It seems as though an inter-disciplinary approach would be far more appropriate for all of the social sciences… economics included.

Also, I’d love to hear a response to mondo dentro’s ontological question… From where I’m sitting, neo-classical theory is little different from classical Marxism in that regard. They both lend themselves to dogmatism.

Read the history of twentieth century economics. Enormous effort is made to work out problems that arise in the course of doing economic theory until the whole edifice collapses. What has happened to general equilibrium theory in the past 20 years?

And since economics is by nature a political science, much economic theory is nothing but clever attempts at justifying the author’s prior beliefs.

in fact, being prepared to blithely ascribe stereotypically derogatory traits to a group of strangers, with neither awareness of nor interest in likely affront is exactly the kind of myopic self-satisfaction and self-absorption that the creator of the phrase had obviously hoped to catch.

i really do find offensive that someone thought that the kind of heartless, insular contempt for others that much economics gives the impression of, is best described as autistic. only someone who knew nothing of autism could come up with this phrase. and only someone who didn’t care to learn could then popularize it.

back to topic.

And education (as you’ve defined it) is a practical discipline. You’re comparing oranges to apples. Its like saying that we know nothing about astrophysics, because we don’t know how to get a manned space mission to Mars. A silly comparison.

I imagine that his troubles are over, now that he has that distinguished prize, and can publish whatever he wants in any economic journal whatsoever.

A thought experiment: Take a changing human construct at large and then compare the causal explanation offered by psychology, sociology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, law, literature and education and then rank the explanation in in terms of well-developedness. Does economics really come out at the bottom? What order would you put them in and what are your paradigmatic constructs?

I think they all suck pretty bad but for the effort expended I think I’d probably put psychology and education at the bottom of the list?

I mean try to find a coherent model of the best way to educate someone. What do all those people with degrees in psychology and education really know about the causes of human constructs?