Commentary: In Response to the Paper by Oran R. Young, How Can International Regimes Solve Environmental Problems? (see pp. 9–29)
The terrain, wonderfully covered by Oran Young, is a dichotomized world consisting of stories wishing to be theories. On the one side we find the economizers – disembedded consequentialists acting according to something called ‘collective action theory.’ On the other side we have the socially embedded citizens of the world intent on practicing what is good (or right). Young helps us to see that both ‘theories’ (and I use that term with great resistance) are ample enough to accommodate almost anything that might appear threatening. We have, in other words, accommodating metaphors whose adherents can pick and choose among confirming signals (assiduously watched for), and can fail to notice disconfirming signals with alacrity. Philosophers would mumble something about verificationist tendencies. As Shackle would put it, ‘what is seen is built upon what is thought (Shackle 1992, p. 66).’ To be fair here, economists have perfected the craft of seeing only what is thought so my comment should not be considered a criticism of political scientists and others who worry about international regimes.
The Philosophical Bases of Institutionalist Economics
The precise nature of the relationship between the disciplines of economics and philosophy has yet to be explicated in detail. Certain family resemblances can be readily verified, and traced to a common lineage. Many of the precursors of Western economic theory, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, were self-identified moral philosophers; many other inhabitants of the pantheon of economic theory, such as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, are recognized as having made substantial contributions to philosophy. Nevertheless, in the modem era, ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny; and the average economist in the late twentieth century would deny any necessary or close links between the two fields. In economics, the facade of the repudiation of philosophical preconceptions is propped up by the widespread conviction that modem economics has successfully adopted the character and attributes of a science. This invocation of science is intended to settle all arguments once and for all and to expiate all sins. Of course, this has been a vain hope. Disputes over method, epistemology, and ontology have not been banished because an invocation of science merely impounds controversy under the rubric of "the philosophy of science," without really
Karl Popper and Economic Methodology: A New Look
Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis (1976, p. 8) states, “the development of economic analysis would look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”