Project Description

Trends and Tensions in Intellectual Integration [TINT]:

Inquiries into interdisciplinary and intertheoretic relations in the social sciences, with special attention to the role and credibility of economics

Fields of research: philosophy of economics, economic methodology, philosophy of social sciences, social epistemology, social ontology, science studies

Key words: unity and disunity of science, integration and fragmentation of social sciences, intertheoretic relations, interdisciplinary relations, explanatory styles and strategies, theoretical and explanatory pluralism, rational choice, rational choice sociology, public choice, economics imperialism, nature of economics as science, behavioural economics, economic psychology, experimental economics, neuro economics, new institutional economics, evolutionary economics, geographical economics, economic philosophy of science, scientific realism.

TINT is a collective project that is concerned with issues of unity and disunity in the social sciences considered in their contemporary context. Important transformations are taking place in and between the social sciences, but these changes are not uniform, they rather involve tensions and conflicting tendencies towards both integration and disintegration. The ambition of TINT is to look into these tendencies and tensions from the point of view of the philosophy and social studies of science. Special attention will be paid to economics as a major agent in these developments: its growing role and its credibility as such an agent. The general cultural background – not itself a major focus of TINT – is given by the growing role of economic concepts and considerations in shaping our social lives at large.

Issues of unity and disunity, integration and fragmentation

Questions about unity and disunity, integration and disintegration pertain to situations and processes both within the scientific disciplines and between them. They can be considered along a number of dimensions, such as:

1. Institutional and organisational: norms and principles of organising academic work and intellectual interactions (such as reward structures, publication cultures, styles of criticism).
2. Methodological: methods and general principles of inquiry (such as rules governing theory construction and theory testing).
3. Theoretical: basic theoretical convictions (such as rational choice or power-driven social construction).
4. Metaphysical: the degree of unity of the social world itself (such as whether people’s behaviour is driven by similar or different motivations in different spheres of social life).

TINT examines these phenomena both as real states of affairs or trends towards unity and disunity, integration and fragmentation (recognising that social science disciplines vary radically, from the relatively integrated economics to the highly fragmented business studies), and as programmatic doctrines about the desirability of such trends (ranging from a strong urge for unity to a principled preference for fragmentation). TINT will seek both descriptive analyses and normative assessments, with the conviction that the latter are dependent on the former.

Economics and intellectual expansionism

Economics has adopted a powerful position in the social sciences and science studies in the recent years (at least as important as that of cognitive science and cultural studies). The phenomenon has often been called by the phrase ”economics imperialism”, the idea being that economic concepts and principles have been increasingly applied to domains that lie beyond the traditional scope of economics. This trend will be examined as an academic phenomenon even though there may be general extra-scientific cultural trends in the background (often characterised as the economisation, marketisation, monetisation, and commodification of our social lives at large). The analysis of intellectual imperialism within TINT will focus on three sets of domains: economics itself, other social sciences, and science studies.

• The natural point of departure is to examine the unificationist trend within economics itself. This trend has a long history in economics (just like in many natural sciences), including the integration of production and consumption theories, rational expectations, and geographical economics.
• Social science disciplines to which economic concepts and principles have been increasingly applied include sociology, political science, management science, law, and human geography. Rational choice models are being used for explaining political and social phenomena (such as elections, marriage, crime), invoking concepts such as market exchange, market competition, cost and benefit, investment and return. Among the questions to be posed are: How are those concepts and principles adjusted when applied to these new kinds of phenomena? How has their success been assessed in their new domains? What disciplinary differences are revealed by the emerging clashes, and how do they evolve? How does economics imperialism compare with other species of intellectual imperialism in the social sciences, such as those based on evolutionary psychology and cultural studies?
• Economics, as a resource of analysis, has also recently made an entrance to science studies, social epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Scientific inquiry is being portrayed in terms such as costs and benefits in hypothesis testing, division of intellectual labour, market for scientific ideas, investment in and return from lines of inquiry, intellectual property rights, credibility and intellectual capital of scientists, invisible hand of truth, and so on. This trend often presents itself as a way of rehabilitating science as a truth-conducive endeavour, so as to protect it against the allegedly deflationary sociological accounts.

Integration, fragmentation, dynamics of intertheoretic relations

The imperialist model gives an unnecessarily narrow image of the ways in which disciplines may relate to one another. It seems we need a variety of models and metaphors of integration and disintegration, and of intertheoretic relations in general, to highlight the variety of mechanisms and trends shaping the developments -- such as the metaphor of exports and imports, of mutual criticisms and learning, and of inspiration and innovative association. This seems a worthwhile observation also in regard to the interactions between economics and other social sciences.

Many of the social sciences are traditionally rather fragmented, yet keep seeking higher degrees of unity. Among the social sciences, economics has been able to claim to have attained higher degrees than the other social sciences – but it now seems economics itself has entered a stage of disintegration. The increasing fragmentation of economics is at least partly due to its interactions with the other social sciences, evolutionary biology, psychology and neuro sciences. This poses new challenges to the unificationist ambitions and pursuits and to our attempt to account for them. ’ Intellectual imperialism’ based on unification in terms one dominant theory may no longer be the most appropriate label that could capture all of the relevant processes in intertheoretic relations in their entirety. But the trends are not unambiguous at all. For example, those who seek to establish new neuroscientific foundations for economics often do it in the name of unification.

A major task of TINT is to explore the grounds of pluralism in the social sciences. Some such grounds are built upon trends towards integration and disintegration, but others are at least to some extent independent of such trends. The latter grounds can be elaborated by way of a close analysis of situations of rivalry an complementarity between social scientific theories. Practising social scientists often fail to distinguish between those situations, mistaking complementarity for rivalry. The two situations require different arguments for pluralism.

Case studies will illustrate and test the general accounts. They deal with topics such as the new models of rationality that keep emerging at the interface between economics on the one hand and experimental psychology and neurobiology on the other; past and present forms of fragmentation in management science; disciplinary and theoretic pluralism in science studies.

Credibility of economics as a powerful integrative discipline

Given the powerful role that economics has adopted in the processes of disciplinary integration and unification, there is a pressing need to seek assessments of the scientific credibility of economics. Economics is a controversial social science discipline as indicated by some of its nicknames such as ”the queen of the social sciences” and ”the dismal science”. This alone suggests a call for an analysis the credential of economics as a scientific discipline. TINT approaches the task primarily as a challenge for the philosophy of economics, and secondarily for social studies of economics, including economics of economics.

The most controversial issue related to the scientific status of economics, and one that tends to be very poorly understood, has to do with the nature and role of models and their assumptions in economics. What is the function and possible justification of the highly unrealistic assumptions in economic models? Do models yield explanations, and if they do, what kinds of explanation do they offer? What exactly does it mean to say models depict mechanisms? How does this relate to the urge for explanatory unification? Can good models fail to predict?

The correct interpretation of the capacities and accomplishments of economic models is necessary for an adequate assessment of the status of economics as a scientific discipline. For example, if economic models characteristically are capable of accomplishing fairly modest tasks at most, such as isolating separate mechanisms and providing counterfactual accounts or how-possibly? explanations, this has implications for the use of economics in other domains and for the nature of the epistemic victories it can claim.

Another spin-off of these investigations has to do with modifications of scientific realism, a sub-project already under way. Most formulations of scientific realism are designed with successful parts of physics in mind, with the implication that the social sciences do not appear in a favourable light. Modifications in those formulations are being suggested based on local inquiries into the peculiar features of the social sciences so as to accommodate them in the realist image of science. Moreover, the argument from unification for scientific realism will be reassessed in the context of the social sciences.