===================== HES POSTING ===================== 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. ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]