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The Economics of Scientific Knowledge 
 
John Davis 
Department of Economics 
Marquette University 
 
Wade Hands, in his recent HES editorial "SSK as a Resource for the 
History of Economic Thought" 
(http://www.eh.net/~HisEcSoc/Resources/Editorials/Hands/), briefly 
surveyed the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and generated 
debate over what SSK involves. For economists, historians of economic 
thought, and economic methodologists, perhaps the most interesting 
SSK-like approach is the economics of scientific knowledge (ESK). ESK is 
much like SSK, but uses economic concepts rather than sociological 
concepts to analyze what scientists do and what the content of science 
involves. Actually, recent ESK is probably better characterized as 
neoclassical ESK, since the economics concepts used are rational choice, 
utility maximization, self-interest, cost-benefit calculation, efficiency, 
the marketplace of ideas, equilibrium, and so on. There is a 
non-neoclassical ESK based in heterodox economics that emphasizes 
institutional structures, but most of the current attention given to ESK 
adopts neoclassical concepts. In particular, philosophers such as Philip 
Kitcher (1993) appear intent on explaining the 'progressiveness' of 
science as an invisible hand process (cf. Hands, 1995, Mirowski, 1996). 
 
A key feature of both SSK and ESK, Hands has argued (forthcoming), is that 
they 'endogenize' the content of science by explaining it in terms of 
social and economic factors, thereby treating scientific knowledge as 
socially constituted and contingent, rather than as something objectively 
privileged and universal. Few today dispute this basic lesson originally 
outlined by Thomas Kuhn, but some, concerned that SSK and ESK imply 
thorough-going relativism, wish to recover some semblance of epistemic 
stability and detachment for science. Among them are those who believe the 
logic of the market and neoclassical economics provide, or will provide, 
an account of science as being above the social fray. For two reasons, 
this seems a flawed vision. 
 
First, because neoclassical economics is only a theory of market exchange, 
it must re-shape and squeeze the social production process that science 
involves into the categories and language of self-interested traders. No 
one would deny that there are dimensions of the science world that will 
fit this market story. But any casual investigation of how science is done 
will quickly show a range of social relationships and processes that go 
beyond exchange activities. Indeed, even where exchange processes are 
involved, it is hardly obvious that the neoclassical atomistic agent 
corresponds to the real actors in science. 
 
One particular point of disanalogy between science and a neoclassical 
exchange process may be cited to reinforce this point. As a theory of 
market exchange, neoclassical economics needs to model scientific thought 
as a body of discrete, transferrable commodities over which individuals 
have exclusive private property rights. Now of course there is the patent 
system, but clearly innovation often speeds around patent rights precisely 
because no one owns the vast edifice of scientific thinking. How well, for 
example, is the development of basic theory in gene science modelled on 
commodity exchange? And, are scientific results and research findings 
published in academic and scholarly journals a form of property with the 
same exclusivity conditions as things people buy at the mall? Questions 
such as these suggest that the issue confronting ESK should be less how to 
represent science as a market process, and more just where does science 
come into contact with the market. This brings up my second reason for 
saying we should be reluctant to turn to the logic of the market to 
explain science. 
 
SSK was originally intended - in the Strong Program and social 
constructivism - to broaden our understanding of science by adding to the 
list of factors thought instrumental to its development. Indeed it was no 
accident that a *sociology* of scientific knowledge developed for this 
purpose, since the social factors sociology considers were thought to be 
the types of factors operating in science production process. 'Social' 
factors? Clearly these are factors not reducible to individual behavior. 
Social factors are causal items based on relationships between 
individuals, on institutions, on community practices. 
 
But current neoclassical ESK, no one can deny, is 
individual-reductionist. It firmly denies that social factors not 
ultimately reducible to individual behavior exist. Its project is thus not 
to add to the list of kinds of factors explaining science, especially as 
put forward by SSK, but to *subtract* from that list all those 'social' 
factors admitted in by SSK. And, when it does attempt transitions from the 
individual to the social,' the outcome is mixed at best (cf. the 
Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu results). In effect, then, for those favoring a 
neoclassical ESK, the glass is not half full; it's completely full! 
Nothing more really need be added to the glass, presumably, because 
neoclassicism is both comprehensive and essentially complete as a science 
of economic life. 
 
Thus the second reason to be highly reluctant regarding the market view of 
science is that this view subverts Kuhn's original insight and the intent 
behind SSK. Kuhn and SSK de-throne an ahistorical and essentialist 
science, exposing this modernist ideal as an illusion. Neoclassical ESK, 
however, says that the 'real' science is supply-and-demand. Henceforth, we 
are told, please translate accordingly. 
 
The conception of explanation as translation takes us back nearly a half 
century to back before Quine's critique of analyticity and sameness of 
meaning (1951). The period since then, it seems fair to say, has made it 
clear that there is no such thing as a master discourse, neither one 
provided by philosophy as  the mirror of nature' (Rorty, 1979), nor one in 
the form of neoclassical economics of Arrow and Debreu (Mirowski, 1989; 
Weintraub, 1991; Hands, 1994). Does this make it impossible to understand 
scientific thought? Is there anything that 'grounds' scientific thought in 
a manner different from the way foundationalist and positivist 
epistemologies were to have had it? Let me conclude with brief remarks on 
an alternative ontological approach to the grounding' of science. 
 
Andrew Pickering (1995) characterizes scientific culture, not as 
representational knowledge, but "an assemblage of multiple and 
heterogeneous elements" made and created out of scientists' accommodations 
to the resistances of the material world (p. x). 'Grounding' science is 
not finding correspondence between theory and reality, but seeing how 
particular "skills and social relations, machines and instruments, as well 
as scientific facts and theories" (p. 3) are temporally emergent at 
particular times. Or, as Tony Lawson (1997) puts it, we find out how the 
world works when we engage in experimental activity designed to create 
special circumstances that trigger mechanisms we suspect operate in the 
world. What causal mechanisms and structures we attribute to the world 
depend on what attempts we make at experimental control of the world. We 
thus  ground' our understanding of these mechanisms in the particular 
practical efforts we make to isolate them. 
 
For both Pickering and Lawson, scientists are  producers' whose ideas and 
intentions are a changing reflection of their intervention in a world 
whose underlying structure is opaque and resists exploration. Thus 
scientists don't so much mirror and represent reality in thought as work 
upon it. We may investigate the practices this involves to understand the 
development of scientific thought. An ESK based on this vision of science 
as a social-production process would contribute to explanation of the 
factors influencing the social determination of scientific beliefs. 
 
 
References 
 
Hands, D. 1994. "Restabilizing Dynamics: Construction and Constraint in 
the History of Walrasian Stability Theory," _Economics and Philosophy_, 
10, 243-83. 
 
Hands, D. 1995. "Social Epistemology Meets the Invisible Hand: Kitcher on 
the Advancement of Science," _Dialogue_, 34, 605-21. 
 
Hands, D. Forthcoming. "Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of 
Scientific Thought and the History of Economics," _History of Political 
Economy_. 
 
Kitcher, P. 1993. _The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, 
Objectivity without Illusions_. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
 
Lawson, T. 1997. _Economics and Reality_. London: Routledge. 
 
Mirowski, P. 1989. _More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics: 
Physics as Nature's Economics_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
 
Mirowski, P. 1996. "The Economic Consequences of Philip Kitcher," _Social 
Epistemology_, 10, 153-69. 
 
Pickering, A. 1995. _The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science_. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
 
Quine, W. 1951. _From a Logical Point of View_, 2nd ed. revised, 1961. 
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
 
Rorty, R. 1979. _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_. Princeton: 
Princeton University Press. 
 
Weintraub, E. 1991. _Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic 
Knowledge_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
 
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