A Review Essay on Rupert Read, Wittgenstein among
the Sciences: Wittgensteinian Investigations into the ‘Scientific Method’
Gavin Kitching
As my subtitle indicates, the thoughts that follow emerge
from my engagement with Rupert Read's recent book, Wittgenstein
Among the Sciences. Central to that book is Read's contention that western
culture is saturated with what he calls ‘scientism'. Scientism is here to be
understood as the view that only science can provide valid knowledge of the
world, and Read argues that it is also present in philosophy itself. It is
sometimes (not always) combined with the view that there is a single scientific
‘method’ that provides such knowledge. (For a brilliant discussion of scientism
in philosophy and some of its consequences, see Michael Hymers, Philosophy
and Its Epistemic Neuroses)
I think that this argument is not only powerful and
important, I think it is true, and I wish to devote this review article to
saying why it is true in the field of economics, a subject on which Read
touches in section 2.4 of the book (in a very good critique of Milton
Friedman’s influential paper ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’), but a
subject about whose scientism I think there is a lot more to
be said than Read offers in that section. However, in trying to formulate at
least some of that ‘more’ I have found myself drawn beyond economics, and back
into the broader terrain of Wittgenstein Among the Sciences. For
in considering the enormously varied, sometimes contradictory, but cumulatively
and massively ‘overdetermining’ reasons why economists (and others) want what
they do to be seen as a science, I have found myself
considering questions of politics and of public policy more generally, questions
on which Read touches, especially in his concluding interview with Summers, but
does little to develop. Also, in anatomising the pursuit of a spurious
‘normal science’ of economics as a defence mechanism against
the very recognition of its endemically unstable and revolutionary
(i.e.unscientific) nature, I have found myself drawn back to Kuhn, and to the
importance of the Read/Kuhn insistence that pursuing unanimous, uncontentious.
‘puzzle solving’ within a paradigm, and doing so for long
periods of time, is a hallmark of all true sciences. And this itself explains,
I think, both why many economists try to maintain that pursuit in the face of
endemic paradigm challenge, and why their attempts always
fail.
Above all, however, in considering the deep and
multi-layered scientism of economics, I have been led to the politics of
Wittgensteinian philosophy itself. Rupert Read, like myself, belongs to that
group of revisionist Wittgensteinians who insist that Wittgenstein’s philosophy
need not commit one either to political quietism or conservatism, indeed can do
much to deepen one’s radicalism through a frank recognition that it relies as
much or more on one’s will and morality as on the facts of the world. However,
even though I take that view I have always been troubled by the insistence of D.Z.
Phillips and others that philosophy cannot underwrite or justify any set
of political ideals or actions. That while philosophers may, as individual
citizens, pursue environmentalist causes, or criticise capitalist greed, or
fight for (or against) censorship of the internet, they cannot do so any better
(or any worse for that matter) than any other citizen on the basis of their
knowledge of philosophy.
I now think this view is wrong, and it is wrong because its
conception of politics is too narrow, relies too much in fact on a one-sided
diet of examples. It is true that a Wittgensteinian understanding of language
does not equip one to be any better a campaigner for (or against) nuclear
energy, or for (or against) a financial transactions tax, or for (or against)
cuts in social services, than any other citizen. But it does equip
one to critique the conceptions of meaning and action that are at play in
standard economics discourse. And it does equip one to
demonstrate that the distinction between the humanities and the sciences is
not, as Read says, a distinction of ‘subject matter’ but a distinction of ‘subjectivities’,
i.e. a distinction between ways of knowing, a distinction between how people
act (and thus know) in different contexts. In fact Wittgensteinian philosophy
can provide a deep philosophical defence of the humanities as
a specific type of intellectual practice and (thus) encourage and
reinforce the efforts of those who wish to throw back the ever more
insistent attempts to ‘social scientise’ humanities disciplines. In a word,
philosophy, and specifically Wittgensteinian philosophy, does equip one to
engage in certain forms of academic politics. Indeed
I would go so far as to claim that, insofar as it is true, it obligates one to
so engage. If it is true that the vocabulary of emotions is fundamentally
misunderstood if taken purely as a description of measurable ‘mental’ or
‘psychological’ ‘states’, if it is true that the vocabulary of material wants
and desires is fundamentally misunderstood if taken purely as the expression of
measurable individual ‘preferences’, if it is true that our vocabulary of
‘fundamental human rights’ is fundamentally misunderstood if taken purely as
descriptive of certain intellectual convictions, then these truths must affect
one’s attitude to the curricula and pedagogy of Departments of (respectively)
Psychology, Economics and Politics.
And in the case of economics at the moment, critique of the
intellectual discourse can have a far wider political and policy resonance. For
in the midst of the most severe crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, economics
as a discipline has moved from its normal state of subdued paradigm disputation
to intense conceptual and policy ‘warfare’. At the present time critics accuse
proponents of ‘economics orthodoxy’ of perpetrating a ‘Zombie’
discipline of ‘dead ideas’ that have led directly to the current
crisis and the suffering it is causing, while its defenders accuse their
opponents of being hostile, not just to the discipline of economics but to ‘the
market economy’ itself and to the ‘freedom’ and ‘prosperity’ it brings. This is
hot, heavy, ideological stuff, the kind of stuff which finds many academics
(including many academic economists) keeping their heads down. But it is also
the kind of stuff, and the kind of moment, which encourages the deepest
conceptual ferment and openness. At this moment a few economists (a very few!)
are even prepared to debate the question of if, whether, and how, economics
could, or should, be
considered a ‘science’ at all. And if that is not a moment for
Wittgensteinian intellectual/political intervention, I do not know what is.
In that spirit I present below a detailed examination of the
role of scientism in economics, an examination which aims to assess its
consequences for economics as a discipline. This examination owes something to
the explicit views on economics in Wittgenstein among the Sciences,
but more importantly it aims to instantiate the Wittgensteinian method for
the identification and study of scientism which Read lays out in the book, and
which is, I believe, its most significant contribution.
In applying Read’s method to economics in a more
comprehensive way than he himself does I hope to show how a practice-focused
Wittgensteinian approach to this issue helps one to avoid dogmatic critique of
economists’ scientism – can even allow that it serves some legitimate purposes
– and can thus facilitate and encourage the efforts of those economists who
wish to ‘open’ their discipline methodologically. For dogmatic critique tends
to provoke equally dogmatic defences of the status quo (and
indeed currently heated debates within the economics profession
are, I believe, doing just that). And it is just in these situations that
well-informed outsiders have a productive role to play.
Scientism in Economics
My aim is to assess the consequences for economics as a
discipline (for practices within that discipline) of the claim that economics
is a science. My approach will be broadly ‘consequentialist’, I will describe a
range of intellectual practices engaged in by economists, practices which they
take to exemplify and embody ‘the science of economics’ as they understand it.
I will also describe the ways in which such practices are methodologically and
epistemologically justified as scientific, within the
profession. I will begin with those practices which seem to me to most
persuasively vindicate economic scientism and then proceed to those which seem
notably less persuasive. Finally I shall consider certain practices of
non-economists (notably those of politicians and other state policy makers)
which tend to reinforce economic scientism externally.
Practice 1: Focus on Mass or Aggregated Human
Action
This is the aspect of economists’ activity most consistently
missed or underestimated by outsiders to the discipline, and for a very good
reason. Many introductory textbooks begin (as innumerable critics note) with
postulated ‘economically rational’ individuals buying and
selling in a market. But epistemologically and methodologically speaking these
‘individuals’ are nullities. They are not actually ‘individuated’ in any way
(physically, psychologically, sociologically, culturally) and their
specifically economic activity is always mass activity –
‘producing’, ‘consuming’ ‘buying’, ‘selling’, ‘saving’, ‘investing’ etc. The
only genuinely individual behaviour postulated for these
entities is response to price signals, and even this is conceptualised and
measured en masse. I begin by noting this ‘aggregative’
intellectual practice in economics because it is one of the most persuasive,
and pervasive, supports to scientism within the profession. Economists, (like
sociologists, and many historians) are concerned with the consequences of mass
human activity, and consequences conceived as radically removed from individual
intentions, desires, preferences, precisely because of their mass or aggregated
nature. Indeed economists generally take it that one of the roles of their
‘science’ is to explain how the consequences of mass economic activity may
diverge from the intentions of (in different cases) some/many/all of the
‘economic actors’ involved. This does not mean that there are no descriptive or
explanatory costs for economics in its exclusive focus on the aggregated
activity of spurious (i.e. non-individuated) individuals. As we shall see,
ignoring the psychological, sociological, cultural identities of actual
economic actors seriously prejudices the predictive accuracy of economics,
while any attempt to seriously incorporating such variables makes actual
economic behaviour radically indeterminate. But grasping the substantively
(substantively, not formally) ‘aggregative’ focus of economics does help one
better understand why economists (economists specifically) have so little
methodological objection to analogising the economic effects or consequences of
human activity to the physical effects or consequences of natural forces.
A change in (say) the magnitude of investment consequent upon an increase in
the savings ratio can be analogised to (say) a change in the
volume of a gas consequent upon an increase in its temperature, because the
former seems to have ‘almost’ as little to do with individual (or even small
group) human volition as the latter does. Along with many
other people I would argue that appearances are deceptive here, and that the
‘almost’ above conceals a radical epistemological difference. But however that
may be, it is important to understand that the kind of critique that
Wittgensteinians routinely make of scientism in psychology or cognitive science
cannot be extended to economics in any direct way, because, initial appearances
to the contrary, economists simply have no interest in what individual human
beings think, feel, or indeed do.
Practice 2: Conceptualising Consequences or Outcomes as
‘Things’ or Objects
This practice follows directly from 1 above. In economics
only mass human activity matters and it issues in consequences or outcomes –
‘production’, ‘consumption’, ‘saving’, ‘investment’ etc - which, once they have
taken these noun forms, are readily conceptualised as ‘abstract’ (albeit
‘material’) ‘things’. So much is obvious. Rather less obvious is that the
attraction of this form of ‘objectivist’ conceptualisation is considerably
increased for economists (for economists specifically) by the fact that each
and every one of these outcomes or consequences is simultaneously a
monetary magnitude. Thus ‘investment’ can not only be theoretically postulated
as a ‘thing’ (in algebraic equations say), in ‘real economies’ it can be
empirically measured (as a sum of money) to a high degree of accuracy. In short all the
‘things’ that economists are concerned with are monetarily measured or
measurable ‘things’ (though not all the ‘forces’ they are concerned with are
monetarily measured or measurable ‘forces’ – see below). But to
understand that economists deal exclusively not just in the consequences
of aggregated human activity, but in a particular sub-class of such
consequences that can be monetarily ‘valued’ and ‘measured’, is to better
understand the appeal of scientism in the discipline. Once conceive the total
of investment and the savings ratio as 'things' whose compositions and
magnitudes have little or nothing to do with individual human volition then why
not conceive a fall (or rise) in the latter as a ‘force’ acting
‘causally’ on the former? Why not conceive it in a manner
analogous to the way in which (say) the rise and fall of air pressure in a balloon
acts ‘causally’ on its altitude?
There are many answers to these ‘why not?’ questions, and
perhaps the most significant of them, as Rupert Read indicates, is to do with the
way in which descriptions of economic behaviour may (in certain
crucial situations) affect that behaviour, a way which
immediately problematises any analogy of economic ‘causality’ to physical
causality. But that is not the point I wish to stress here. My aim rather is
that readers understand economics well enough to feel the
force, and appeal, of these scientistic analogies within the discipline, and
their apparent ‘reasonableness’.
Practice 3: Axiomatic Deduction and Mathematical
Modelling
Once the consequences of mass economic activity are
conceptualised as ‘things’ with measurable monetary magnitudes, it becomes
possible to project them into logical space and to examine their ‘relations’
under various assumptions, a process much facilitated by symbolising both the
‘things’ themselves and their ‘relations’ algebraically. From the late
nineteenth century onwards, ‘normal science’ in economics, was, as Read
correctly intimates, not so much empirical investigation of the economic world,
as mathematically symbolised logical explorations of radically simplified
‘economic relations’ under varying initial assumptions. With a two crop
agricultural ‘economy’ using varying inputs of ‘labour’, ‘water’ and
‘fertiliser’, and assuming certain technical input/output relations in the crop
production functions, what is the optimum yield of both crops obtainable from
the least cost combination of the three inputs? Technical papers solving such
puzzles dominate the professional economic journals now as they have done for
over a century, and to that degree economics appears to pass
the Kuhnian ‘normal science’ test. More germanely, and whether the economists
in questions know about Kuhn or not, the widespread use of moderately advanced
mathematics throughout the discipline, and an equally widespread disciplinary
consensus on what constitutes good, routine ‘analytical’ work in economics, all
further strengthen economists’ conviction that they are engaged in some
meaningfully scientific enterprise.
More recently (i.e. in the last forty or so years) the
development of high speed computers with massive data storage and processing
capacity, has allowed economists to build economic models which attempt to simulate ‘real
economies’, i.e. to construct computer models in which the number and range of
economic variables and relations is supposed to at least approximate the
complexity of real economies and to which real economic magnitudes can be
fitted. The ultimate point of such model building is to attain the holy grail
of positivist economics – prediction. It is hoped that with sufficiently
complex models fitted with sufficiently exact and robust data it may be
possible to predict the future trajectory of economies under a range of
realistic conditions. To date however achievement has not matched hope. This is
not so much because computer models cannot produce accurate predictions (along
with many inaccurate ones) of the trend of some particular variable.
(The rise in house prices say, or in land values). It is because all such
models seem radically unable to predict the ‘thing’ most desired – i.e.
significant systemic malfunctions and crises. And it turns out
‘of course’ that the failure of even the most complex and powerful models to
predict what policy-makers most want predicted derives, at
bottom, from the fact that, the explanation of mass economic activity and its
consequences cannot proceed in total abstraction from the
attributes, (intellectual, psychological, emotional) of the individual human
beings (the real ones) who compose that mass. Or, to be more precise,
explanations that proceed on this basis only work, even in a limited way, when
the behaviour of economic actors is ‘stable’ in ways that make it (limitedly)
predictable. But of course times of crises are precisely times when such
stability disappears or is much reduced. However, in this matter too I am less
concerned that readers should feel the weaknesses of economic scientism
(however real and profound) than its strengths. Epistemologically defensible,
and therefore ‘reasonable’ objectification, exact measurement of the objects so
identified, mathematisation, computerisation, a certain form of ‘normal
science’ maintained for over a century. Economists, I want to emphasize here,
have grounds for believing that if theirs is not a ‘science’
of society then (truly) nothing is.
Practice 4: Analogising Mass Human Activity to a Natural
Force or Forces
I have already touched on this above, but now wish to
consider it in detail. We have seen that by conceptualising certain
consequences of mass action as ‘things’ or ‘objects’, economists are then
enabled to trace ‘causal relations’ between and among them. (In considering
Practice 2 above, we gave the example of treating the ‘relationship’ between
the savings ratio and the volume of investment as logically analogous to the
‘relationship’ between the air pressure in a balloon and its altitude). I also
noted then that, while all the objects so conceptualised can be measured as
monetary magnitudes, the scientistic analogy of the mass human action that
produces such magnitudes to some form of natural force is much more problematic
for economists. What is problematic is not that the increase or decrease of
such magnitudes cannot be measured monetarily. Of course they can, and
routinely are, - usually as a ‘rate’ or percentage. What I mean is that when
one thinks through how a given volume of investment is
‘produced’, how a given savings rate is ‘achieved’, how a
certain volume of savings is ‘converted’ into a certain volume of investment, how a
certain level of output ‘increases’ (or ‘decreases’), it immediately becomes
apparent that all of these happenings are the result of mass human activity,
and would not occur without that activity. But the effect of using
subjectless, mechanistic scientistic vocabulary like ‘produced’, ‘achieved’, ‘converted’
, ‘increases’, ‘decreases’ (the scare quotes above were genuinely scare
quotes!) is to occlude or obscure the point that, we are not dealing here with
physical or natural phenomena at all here, but with the results of human
thoughts, feelings, intentions and actions. At this point in fact, the analogy
between an economic system and any kind of physical or natural system breaks
down. This is not in itself a problem. All analogies break down
somewhere. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be analogies. But what is important is
(a) to recognise that an analogy is just an analogy and is
therefore ‘doomed’ to breakdown and (b) to understand all the implications of
such a breakdown – what the breakdown reveals about the analogy as a whole.
In this particular case what the break down reveals is that
the objects and magnitudes that economists measure (the ‘total’ of investment
at time x, the ‘savings ratio’ at time y, the’ level of output’ at time z) are
artefacts of economists’ conceptualisations. There is a certain sense in which
they ‘do not exist’ at all. In what sense? In the sense that mass human
activity (including the activity we call ‘economic’) is ceaseless.
Across the world as a whole human beings are working every hour of every day,
and many of them are also saving ceaselessly, investing ceaselessly, consuming
ceaselessly and (indeed) disinvesting and reducing their savings ceaselessly.
In short, the world of real economic activity is endlessly dynamic, endlessly
changing, and that ceaselessness, that continuous motion or
dynamism, is only ‘arrested’ at’ time x’ or ‘time y’ - as a given ‘volume’ of
investment or a given ‘magnitude’ of saving - in the conceptualisations
and equations of economists, not in the real world. When, at 11 am on 3rd Jan
2011, economists in some country’s Department of Treasury report that their
country’s GDP ‘is’ $274.6 billion it is already, in reality, not $274.6
billion, but something more (or less). And that ‘something’ is ‘forever’
unknowable, at least in the present-tense. (Because, of course, by the time
‘it’ is known ‘it’ will again be something else). This logical point, much
emphasized by the Austrian School of economists in particular, has many
implications, one of the most important of which is that ‘economic equilibrium’
is almost entirely an artefact of economist’s conceptualisations and equations
and not a characteristic of the real world. [Varoufakis
and Halevi have a very good discussion of the Austrian school, a
school of economists unusual in combining a strong cult of the market with a
deep, and philosophical informed, hostility to any attempt to model economics
on natural science. Friedrich Hayek is probably the best-known member of this
school.] For only postulatedly fixed magnitudes can be in equilibrium (or
not), and such magnitudes are only sustainedly present in economist’s
equations, not in real economies. But we must say ‘almost entirely’
because we cannot say that we know that real economies are never in
equilibrium. What we can say, however, is that by the time we knew they were
they would not be. And we can also say that the formal requirements of
equilibrium or so demanding that real economies are certainly not in
equilibrium the vast, vast majority of the time, if ever.
Practice 5: Recognising that Economics Discourse Affects
Real World Economic Activity only in a ‘Fitful’ and ‘Incomplete’ Way
Another implication of the breakdown of the scientistic
analogy between the economic world and the physical world is that the human
beings whose activity is creating economic ‘magnitudes’ and ‘relations’ are
thinking, emoting entities whose economic activity (like all their
activity) is affected by what they know (or think they know), by what they hope
and fear, by what they expect or are seeking to avoid. And this means of
course, that in the contemporary world, and indeed for the last 200 or so
years, human economic activity has been affected by, among other things, what
economists tell other human beings, other ‘economic actors’, about ‘what is
happening’ in the economy. And economists affect ‘real world’ economic activity
not only by providing knowledge, - and information - to economic actors,
knowledge or information which may influence what they do or abstain from
doing. Economists also affect economic actors emotionally, because the analyses
they present, the projections they proffer, affect people’s hopes and fears,
their expectations about how the world will be or could be.
Now all economists, even those of the most determinedly
scientistic and positivistic bent, know that economics as a discourse affects
economics as a real world activity. Given the explanatory emphasis that they
place on the role of ‘confidence’ in the creation and solution of all economic
crises, they could scarcely not be aware of this. But the more
scientistic the bent of an economist the more ‘fitful’ and ‘incomplete’ is this
recognition. For of course what Read, (and many others), call the ‘hermeneutic’
dimension of all social science (including economics), the ‘feedback loop’ it
creates between the human beings being studied and the human beings studying
them, is what most threatens to explode the entire analogy between economics
and any form of natural science. And what explodes it is not that
social scientists affect the object or objects they are studying while natural
scientists do not. (For the experimental activities of quantum physicists
affect the activity of the ‘quanta’ they are studying, and, more prosaically,
every natural science can affect the physical world when its results are
‘applied’ to interventions in that world). What explodes the analogy between
economics and any form of natural science is that the economic actors whose
activity economists are studying understand the knowledge and
information that economists produce. They know what it means in
short, and that knowledge can, and often does, affect what such actors do. In
short it is the way – the ‘hermeneutic’ way – that economics
affects real world economic activity, that differentiates it completely -
by which I mean epistemologically and ontologically – from any form of natural
science.
Moreover, this point is of more practical importance in the
case of economics than in any other social science. Because, far more
than any other social science, economics has a very strong ‘popular’ presence
in the world. There is a large and ‘high profile’ section of the economics
profession operating as ‘analysts’ and ‘pundits’ in the mass media, in the
business and financial press, in the news and current affairs departments of
radio and TV, or (these days) in numerous online economics and business
websites. At all times these popular, high profile economists, operating at the
‘interface’ between the discipline of economics and the real world of economic
activity, are seeking to influence happenings in that world as
much (at least as much) as they are reporting those happenings. (Or, to be more
precise, they are seeking to influence what happens by reporting
what is happening in certain ways). At times of economic crisis in particular,
their activities are often overwhelmingly focussed on what the
‘confidence’ and ‘expectations’ of economic actors, often to the extent that
the knowledge or information such economists provide is slanted, even
consciously censored, in ways designed to’ lift’ confidence, or to at least
not’ damage’ it further. At times of crises in short this high profile section
of the economics profession is not only aware of the hermeneutic dimension of
economics, it becomes absolutely front and centre in all its activity. In a
word, at times of crises, orthodox ‘public’ economists become advocates,
or even propagandists, become intensely motivated to persuade their
fellow human beings (company CEOs, pension funds managers, politicians,
treasury officials, the ‘ordinary’ consumer of this or that product) to act in
certain ways and to cease to act in others. But when do physicists (however
high profile) become ‘intensely motivated’ to persuade atoms or molecules to
change their behaviour? When do biologists or geneticists (even Richard
Dawkins) become ‘intensely motivated’ to persuade genes or genomes of anything?
However, the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ academic
economists do not belong to this high profile section of the profession. They
are therefore not regularly engaged in attempts to influence or
persuade economic actors, indeed normally their only influential or persuasive
interaction with other human beings, is with their students. Such students may
be ‘economic actors’ (to the extent that they are consumers or paid workers as
well as students) but their economist teachers do not address them as such
actors when teaching them. It is therefore far easier for such ‘workaday’
economists to ‘recognise’ the hermeneutic dimension of their subject
(especially at times of crisis) but continue to ignore it in their lectures or
in the articles and textbooks that they write. What this means, specifically,
is that the structural social position of workaday economists (who are, after
all, the vast majority of the profession) allows them to continue to teach and
research in ways explicitly or implicitly informed by the scientistic analogy
between the economic world and the physical world, while treating the
‘persuasive’ role of economics and economists as a particular use that
can be made of ‘economic science’ rather than as a practice which calls that
science into fundamental epistemological doubt. This is what I mean by saying
that the majority of economists recognise the affect of economics on economic
activity only in ‘fitful’ and ‘incomplete’ ways.
Such recognition is ‘fitful’ because in their day-to-day
practice there is no pressure for its continual, or even frequent, recognition,
and because persuasive, even propagandistic, activity by high profile
‘colleagues’ is felt, uncomfortably, to conflict with notions of scientific
‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ central to the professional identity of many
economists. And this is precisely why ‘persuasion’ is presented, by mainstream
economists, as simply one, vaguely embarrassing, vaguely unrespectable, ‘use’
that may be made of economic science.
Such recognition is ‘incomplete’ because the explosive
implications of economic persuasion for the scientific claims of economics are
simply not grasped. And by ‘not grasped’ here I mean something essentially behavioural,
i.e. I mean that the scientistic analogy between the economic world and the
physical world continues to structure all the teaching and research of such
economists. Whereas, if they grasped the full epistemological and ontological
implications of the persuasive use of economics, continuing with the analogy,
and the teaching and research which assumes it, would be impossible for them
(except perhaps for purposes of critique).
Practice 6: Engaging in an Unrealistic ‘Normal Science’
as a Defence Mechanism
In discussing axiomatic deduction and mathematical modelling
in economics ( Practice 3 above) I noted that economists do engage in an
uncontentious ‘normal science’ and have done so for more than a century.
However, seen from a natural science perspective that ‘normal science’ is
peculiar in at least two respects. Firstly, as Rupert Read emphasizes, it
routinely uses unrealistic initial premises or assumptions and (contra Friedman)
this is certainly not the norm in routine natural science
theorising or experimentation. And secondly, as Read also states, such ‘normal
science’ continues even when, in Kuhnian terms, significant groups of heterodox
or oppositional economists are continuing more or less radical, more or less
‘revolutionary’, opposition to the ‘paradigm’ which it assumes. Indeed Read is
right to emphasise that economics has never, in its entire history,
been free of fundamental paradigm disputation. As I have emphasised elsewhere,
virtually every cohort of graduate economics students across the world contains
a larger or smaller minority of students who become critical, to a greater or
lesser extent, of its founding assumptions and methodologies. Such students
either leave the discipline entirely or become recruits to its ‘heterodox’ wing
of teachers and researchers. In the terms made famous by Isaac
Deutscher, economics has produced ‘heretics’ and ‘renegades’ for as long as
it has existed. So whilst many of its ordinary practitioners may do ‘normal
science’ they do not – and contrary to the Kuhnian account –
do it as part of some long period oscillation between ‘normal science’ and
‘revolutionary’ ferment. Because economics, like all the other social sciences,
exists in continual, paradigm-threatening, ferment.
It seems to me that these two distinguishing
characteristics of ‘normal science’ in economics – its unrealism and its
coexistence with continual paradigm challenge - are linked. To see how and why,
let us revisit the prototypical example I gave of economic ‘normal science’
under ‘Practice 3’ above.
“With a two crop agricultural ‘economy’ using varying inputs
of ‘labour’, ‘water’ and ‘fertiliser’, and assuming certain technical
input/output relations in the crop production functions, what is the optimum
yield of both crops obtainable from the least cost combination of the three
inputs?”
That this technical puzzle is based on grossly unrealistic
premises hardly requires emphasis. An ‘optimal’ yield for 2 crops ‘derived’ in
abstraction from such factors as soil quality, climatic interventions, and varying
skill levels of farm management and labour, is unlikely to be of any practical
help to any real farmers. It is true that this kind of optimisation method can
be developed and refined by adding additional variables, but it will still
struggle for practical relevance insofar as indeterminates like climatic
variation and managerial expertise cannot be meaningfully modelled. And the
same limitations apply whatever ‘industry’ or ‘sector’ it is
applied to (and it is applied to a great many in the standard economic
literature). Indeed there are, as Read intimates, reasons for thinking that, in
such mathematico-logical exercises, terms like ‘crops’, ‘water’, ‘fertiliser’,
‘production’ ‘yield’ ‘inputs’, ‘labour’, ‘management’, ‘sector’, ‘industry’
have no realistic reference at all. They are in fact
simply ordinary language terms attached to mathematical
symbols and given a narrow mathematical use. They only appear –
through their ordinary semantics - to have a reference beyond the mathematical.
Moreover, and for much the same reasons, such ‘science’ is
unlikely to receive any significant attention or critique, even within the
economics profession, let alone outside it. Such work is ‘uncontentious’ (and
thus ‘normal’ within the paradigm) only in the sense that it counts as proof of
professional competence, (and is thus career enhancing) while having no wider
significance, meaning, or use at all.
But just for that reason such exercises are a perfect form
of ‘normal science’ for a discipline under continual, and informed, paradigm
challenge. Since they have no practical application whatsoever they pose no
threat to the paradigm by being found explanatorily wanting or practically
inefficacious in the real world. In other words, this kind of ‘normal science’
will never generate the kind of insoluble puzzles or
contradictions which Kuhn sees as the harbingers of a paradigm crisis. Also,
this kind of economic ‘normal science’ can also claim to be uncontentious - and
thus ‘scientific’ and objective’ - insofar as it has no explicit persuasive
intent or function at all. In both these respects then the
mathematical-deductive form of economic ‘normal science’ is, as intimated
above, a perfect ‘defence mechanism’ for those economists who wish to see
themselves as pursuing an unproblematic, ‘technical’ and ‘mature’ science in a
situation of continual paradigm ferment. Indeed, as a defence mechanism such a
practice clearly allows its practitioners to ignore or deny the fact that there is continual
paradigm ferment, and it is difficult not to think that this is at least part
of its ‘professional’ appeal.
All these observations lead us to a wider and more important
one, their logical converse as it were. – viz that the more relevant
economics seeks to be for the real world of economic activity the more overtly
'popular' it becomes in intent, tone, and presentation. (Its mathematical
content usually diminishes radically for example). And equally, the more
overtly persuasive it becomes in intent, tone and presentation the more contentious
and contested it becomes, both among economists and non-economists. In a
word,when economists wish to influence the real economy they must, and
generally do, give up practicing their normal science! This is
surely an extraordinary observation to make about any putative
science, whether from a Kuhnian point of view or any other.
Scientism in Economics: External Supports
Along with Rupert Read and many other Wittgensteinians I
hold that scientism in economics is itself only a part of the deep scientistic
drift in western culture as a whole. Even to state why I believe this would
take me well beyond the scope of this review essay, as indeed it is beyond the
explicit scope of reference of Wittgenstein among the Sciences itself.
However, in line with that broader conviction, I would wish to emphasise that
scientism in economics is not solely generated within, or supported by, the
practices of the economics profession. It has significant external supports as
well, most notably in the world of politics and public policy.
Doing justice to these wider supports would also take far
more words and space that I have available here, but suffice it to say
that just because any significant public policy will - in any healthy
democratic society – be the subject of deep political and ideological
contestation, there is much political utility in any form of discourse which
can be claimed to be ‘above the fray’ because ‘impartial’, ‘objective’ and
(above all) ‘scientific’. Developing that argument further would take me into
the familiar-enough terrain of ‘economics as ideology’. But this
is terrain which I do not wish to enter here, partly because it is so well
trodden (and I have little to add to those, Marxists and others, who have
trodden it), and partly because doing full justice to its complexity would take
a further mass of words. I will therefore make only one observation central to
the theme of this review – the appeal of scientism in economics. It is this. In
a world of overt and heated ideological contestation over policy it is an
important, if paradoxical truth that any ‘heterodox’ branch or tradition of
economics, any branch that openly parades its ‘normativity’, its ‘value
judgements’, its ‘human actor centredness’ is likely to be markedly less appealing
to all politicians and policy makers (whether of left, right
or centre) than one which claims the imprimatur of ‘impartial, ‘exact’,
‘technical’, ‘objective’ science. And the reason for this is that mainstream
politicians believe (and I think rightly) that scientistic discourse will be
far more effective in assisting them to overcome their ideological opponents
than any overtly normative discourse would be. In other words, it is a hallmark
of a scientistic culture that ‘science’ is a far more effective political and
ideological weapon (a far more effective partisan tool) than any form of
discourse that honestly acknowledges or proclaims its partisanship! I should
add here that I hold this to be a part – an important part - of the ‘sickness
of our time’. But I will not even attempt to validate that judgement here.
Conclusions
This relationship of this essay to Wittgenstein
among the Sciences will have been misunderstood if seen simply as an
exploration of scientism in economics stimulated by, or rationalised by, passing
reference to one relatively small section of Rupert Read’s book. As noted
earlier its debt to the book is far deeper than that. This essay was both
provoked, and enormously facilitated, by what I take to Read’s major
achievement in the text – the elaboration of a distinctively Wittgensteinian method for
discussion of scientism. Because the question of whether an intellectual
discourse – any intellectual discourse – should be classified as a science or
not can, at the very worst, degenerate into a empty wrangle about
terminology. But even when the worst does not come to the formalistic ‘word
policing’ worst, and the debate is more substantially about criteria for the
identification of science as a practice or family of practices, the outcome of
such debates can be still be rather flatly indeterminate – i.e. some conclusion
to the effect that “ well it is if one prioritises X and Y criteria, but it
isn’t if one prioritises A and B criteria”.
As against this kind of approach Read, as I understand him,
advocates one which asks not what science ‘is’, but what practices (both
intellectual and experimental, both mental and physical) are associated with
the claim that psychology, or social anthropology, or economics, are sciences.
More importantly still Read emphasises, that, when closely investigated, some
of these disciplines may indeed contain reasonable or defensible
projections/adaptations of natural science procedures, as well as highly
unreasonable and indefensible ones, and as a result there may indeed be grounds
for thinking of the discipline in question as a science and grounds
for thinking of it as something quite other. But when that occurs, one
does not end the matter in the indeterminate ‘criterial’ way above, but extends
the investigation pragmatically ever outwards, asking about wider and wider
layers of practice – professional, organisational, social, political – with
which the claim to scientificity is associated. Then one evaluates them
epistemologically, ethically, politically. And it is in that wider pragmatic
investigation that he is able to unambiguously anatomise ‘scientism’, and its
human and environmental costs, rather than in the technical practices of the
social science disciplines alone.
In this review essay therefore I have tried to follow Read’s
methodological procedure. Doing so has not led me to the conclusion that
economics “is not a science”, for, as I hope emerged particularly from my
investigation of Practices 1-3 there are respects in which it is,
or at least could reasonably make the claim to be. However, in continually
widening and deepening my investigation of the range of practices justified by,
and justifying, the claim of economics to be a science (Practices 4-6 and the
discussion of ‘external supports’) I come to the conclusion that doing
economics as if it were a science has conceptual, epistemological and indeed
political consequences which do a great deal more harm than good, both to
society at large and indeed to economics and economists themselves.
And to end this review essay I would like to outline,
briefly, what I take to be the single most damaging of those consequences, and
one which embraces questions of epistemology, ethics and politics
simultaneously.
In the famous section of Volume 1 of Capital concerned
with the ‘fetishism of commodities’ Marx remarks, in passing, that with the
commodification of the products of human labour “a definite social relation
between men... assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between
things.”
Marx’s ideas on the fetishism of commodities have been
enormously debated of course, with the debate focussing most insistently on
whether he held that ‘fetishised’ forms of consciousness were ‘false’ forms
hiding the realities of capitalism, or whether they were in fact true and
accurate, if ‘alienated’ forms, i.e. true and accurate accounts of a deeply
alienated capitalist world. Translating that question into the terms of this
review would mean asking whether, in describing and explaining the economic
world as a world of relations between things (conceptual ‘things’ and their
money magnitudes) scientistic economics gives a false account of capitalism, or
whether, on the contrary, it gives a true account of a deeply alienated world.
On this view of what Marx is saying, scientistic economics gives a true account
of (deeply alienated) capitalism because it is itself a deeply alienated
account. [For a good preliminary discussion of these issues, see David Andrews,
"Fetishism as a Form of Life" in Marx
& Wittgenstein, edited by Nigel Pleasants and me]
In either case Marx wishes to see the end of such
alienation. But on the first interpretation he might have thought that a social
relation among things could ‘reassume’ the form of a definite relation among
‘men’ (people),even ‘in the eyes’ of economists, through some form of
intellectual or ideological critique of their discourse. On
the second interpretation however economists are just a small minority of the
‘men’ (people) living in a capitalist world.
Therefore they, just like their peers (workers, capitalists, journalists etc)
cannot see economic relations as human relations until they can live them as
human relations, (i.e. until they are, actually, human relations) –
which meant, for Marx, until capitalism is transformed into socialism.
I have no idea which of these interpretations of Marx’s
views on fetishism and alienation is right, for, as on so many other matters,
there seems persuasive evidence, both in Capital, and in other
parts of his oeuvre, for both. (It is difficult, for example, to
think he would have devoted as much time and energy as he did to the
intellectual critique of classical political economy had he held to some
unalloyed version of the second interpretation). It may also be that these two
interpretations are not mutually exclusive, i.e. that Marx did indeed hold that
classical political economy (like the scientistic economics that succeeded it)
could only be rendered clearly false by transforming the reality that it
accurately described, but that an important initial stage in that political
struggle for that transformation was to demonstrate that the truth and accuracy
of classical political economy could only be obtained by certain kinds of
intellectual manoeuvres. And the point of Marx’s analysis of classical
economics was to show that it could produced true and accurate accounts of
capitalism only because these manoeuvres were themselves deeply alienated, and
alienating. That is, they were manoeuvres which subtly and brilliantly obscure
the extent to which economic activity under capitalism is still, at bottom,
human activity. But they are ‘true’ and ‘accurate’ insofar as capitalism itself
operates in ways which obscure the same fact. In fact classical political
economy was both a description (a true description) of the means by
which that obscuring is done and itself a further (intellectual) layer of that
obscurity.
At any rate whether or not the above is an accurate
rendition of what Marx was doing, it will certainly do as a
rendition of what I am doing in my discussion of the
scientism of contemporary economics. Modern scientistic economics is, in Marx’s
terms, a deeply fetishised and alienated form of discourse. But more to the
point, those of its practices which are most scientifically plausible are those
which describe certain economic activities that are lived as a
relation between things, not only by economists but by everybody else. And
conversely, those of its practices which are least scientifically plausible are
those in which it continues to describe as relations between things economic
activities which economists, as well as the rest of us, can see (albeit with
difficulty) are relations between people – human relations.
One might say that the latter practices are those in which economic’s alienated
nature stands revealed, even to economists.
And this does indeed lead us to conclude that it is only
when economic relations (including global economic relations) are lived as
relations between people that scientism in economics will end. It will end
because it will no longer be required, and (more prosaically) because
perceiving economic relations as relations between things will then be simply
to perceive them wrongly – empirically inaccurately – in a way which will be
‘obvious’, to economists and everybody else. But that, of course is a lot
easier said than done, especially in a world of global capitalism
where the ‘relations between men’ are extraordinarily complex relations
between people thousands of miles apart, and of widely differing languages,
cultures, nationalities and ethnicities, as well as classes. In a recent book I
try to suggest how a beginning might be made to the humanisation of global
capitalism through its conscious political regulation.
But until economic activity becomes transparently human
activity (if it ever does) there remains the awkward pragmatic question of what
is to be done, now, about scientism in economics.
In addressing this question, one point should be
made clear from the beginning. Nothing said in this review would come as news
to the (not inconsiderable) community of ‘heterodox’ economists around the
world. Indeed I am indebted to my reading of their work for all seven of the
items in the critique of scientism above. [During 20 years living and working
in Australia I learned a great deal from attending the annual conferences of
the Australian Society
of Heterodox Economists (SHE)]
As noted, economics is probably unique in the volume of ‘heretics’ and
‘renegades’ it has produced - and reproduced - in every generation, since its
inception. But it is equally unique in its power either to drive such people
from the profession altogether (‘renegades’) or to exclude them from
institutional influence and marginalise them intellectually if they remain
practitioners (‘heretics’). In fact, another practice closely associated with
scientism in economics, and one that I was too intellectually ‘delicate’ to mention
earlier, is a positively brutal use of power – on journal editorial boards, on
promotions committees, on curricula committees, on grant awarding bodies – as a
back up to, or in frank substitution for, failed or exploded intellectual
argument. [(also p.13) See the discussion of the, often brutal, academic
politics of economics in Quiggin]
In this situation I certainly think there would be nothing to be lost (for the heretics) and perhaps something to be gained, if economically informed Wittgensteinian (and other) philosophers were to ‘pitch in’ on their side – at conferences, in media and website debates etc. For whilst I do not think that Wittgensteinians know what is wrong with scientistic economics any better than the best of the heretics do, they are perhaps equipped to describe and anatomise the conceptual roots of scientism in a way which – through its clarity and transparency – can further strengthen the heretics in the fight. Whether, in ‘pitching in’ Wittgensteinians, and others, should demand, or suggest, that economics should stop calling itself a science, and adopt some other name - ‘Economic Studies’ ‘Political Economy’, ‘The Human Science of Economics (ugh!)’ – seems to me entirely a matter of political tactics. It would certainly be important to stress that, whatever it was called, the systematic study of economics could still make use of at least some of the statistical and mathematical tools that scientistic economics has developed. But aside from that, I do not care, Rupert Read does not care, and Wittgenstein would not care (how deeply he is still misunderstood in these ways!) what economists call what they do. We care what they do!
Wow. That's really good stuff. Thanks, Gavin.
ReplyDelete[Readers may be interested to check out http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4367 in which I expand a tiny weeny bit more on what is meant to be going on in 2.4 of the book.]