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Reflecting on Pluridisciplinarity and Economics

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EST)

Hosted By: History of Economics Society
  • Chair: Muriel Dal Pont Legrand, Côte d´Azur University

Economics and Pluridisciplinarity: Methodological Issues and Future Prospects

John B. Davis
,
Marquette University and University of Amsterdam

Abstract

Pluridisciplinarity refers to relationships between different disciplines. To assess economics in regard to pluridisciplinarity, this paper begins by distinguishing four forms of relationships between disciplines (Cat, 2017), and then identifies which form currently fits economics best. Since the four forms place different weights on boundaries between disciplines, a primary methodological issue is how boundaries between disciplines as distinctively conceptual phenomena should be explained. One common approach, an ‘inventory’ method, is criticized; a structural core-periphery approach is defended (Davis, 2019). The paper then argues that economics’ future pluridisciplinarity depends on what forces operating on current economics might work to break down its core-periphery structure. The paper discusses three: specialization in research, modeling as the dominant research practice in economics, and the ‘empirical turn’ in economics. It then identifies which of the other four forms of relationships between disciplines these forces might promote, and finally uses an open-closed conception of boundaries drawn from Sraffa and Wittgenstein (Davis, 2012) to characterize this possible future sort of pluridisciplinary relationship.

Agent-Based Approach and Economics: Quantifying Disciplinary Interaction

Muriel Dal Pont Legrand
,
Côte d´Azur University
Alexandre Truc
,
Côte d´Azur University

Abstract

In the late 1980s, the Santa Fe Institute promoted an interdisciplinary environment to develop researches in relation to economics as a complex system. The researchers involved in the institute originated from a variety of disciplines (e.g., economics, physics, computer science) and contributed to the foundations of complexity economics. One particular methodological approach promoted by the Santa Fe was the use of agent-based models (ABM) to simulate the behavior and interactions of multiple agents in a system. In this paper, we propose to investigate the diffusion of ABM in economic and study the role of interdisciplinary exchanges in the development of this particular approach. Using scientometric methods, we show how the importation of agent-based models in economics led to the emergence of specific research programs at the frontiers of multiple disciplines. With macroeconomics, finance, environmental sciences and energy economics as some of the founding topics of the fields, ABMs developed in economics by opening themselves to the influence of physics, computational sciences, environmental sciences, and ecology.

Pluridisciplinarity as an Epistemological Device: The Case of Early Experimental Economics

Annie L. Cot
,
University of Paris-Sorbonne

Abstract

Recent historiographical research allows us to trace the process by which experimental
economics gradually became a specific sub-discipline by borrowing both its epistemology and its protocols to experimental psychology. Paradoxically, the emergence of the field of experimental economics owes its very existence to John Stuart Mill's famous veto on its conditions of possibility, the emergence of the field of experimental economics owes to John Stuart Mill's famous veto of its very conditions of possibility, displayed in Book 6 of A System of Logic. "There is a property common to almost all the moral sciences, and by which they are distinguished from many of the physical; this is, that it is seldom in our power to make experiments in them." A century later, the opening on other “moral sciences” – anthropology, sociology, psychophysics, psychometrics, management, statistics, medicine – led various authors both to question and challenge this veto and to set up the first, hasty, improbable, experiments that would, after the war, lead to the constitution and slow recognition of this major epistemological turning point within the discipline: the possibility of economic theory becoming an “experimental science”. Two historical moments are explored in the paper: (1) the interwar pluridisciplinary basis of the institutionalist’s experimental claim as a means of criticism of standard deductive economics on the one hand, and the first attempts to produce both field and lab economic experiments during the 1930s and 1940s on the model of other social sciences on the other hand; and (2) the first post-war attempts to test new economic theories by means of experimental protocols essentially borrowed and adapted from those of social psychology.

Discussant(s)
Muriel Dal Pont Legrand
,
Côte d´Azur University
Annie L. Cot
,
University of Paris-Sorbonne
John B. Davis
,
Marquette University and University of Amsterdam
JEL Classifications
  • A1 - General Economics
  • C0 - General