Science, Economics, “Vision”

Susan Haack Science, Economics, “Vision”* Why... should we not applaud the increasing tendency to envision economics as a science? —r o b e r t h e il b r o n e r (1999:137). AS BOB H E IL B R O N E R WAS T E A C H IN G H IS S E M IN A R ON EC O N O M IC methodology with William Milberg at the New School, I was thinking about philosophy of science: so one frequent topic of discussion in our correspondence was whether the social sciences are properly so called, or whether it is even desirable for these disciplines to aspire to be scien­ tific. In fact, when Defending Science—Within Reason (2003) was finished, I opened my chapter on the social sciences with a quotation from Adolf Lowe, Heilbroner’s own teacher and mentor, to whose work he had introduced me: “[o]nly if a region of inquiry can be opened up in which both the scientific and the humanist approach play their characteristic roles may we ever hope to gain knowledge of man—knowledge rather than figment, and of man rather than of social atom s” (1959: 154). In this chapter, entitled “The Same, Only Different,” guided by the Critical Common-sensist philosophy o f science developed elsewhere in the book, I offered my interpretation of Lowe’s appealing idea of “social science with a human face” by tracing some main similarities, and some main differences between the natural and the social sciences. I didn’t, however, specifically tackle the critique of the scientific aspirations of contemporary economics that Heilbroner had developed *My thanks to Mark Migotti for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.© 2004 Susan Haack social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 0 0 4 223 in the new final chapter added to The Worldly Philosophers in its seventh edition, “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Given this happy oppor­ tunity to remedy the omission, I want to try to sort out what is true in Heilbroner’s critique of economics-as-a-science from what is not. It will be helpful to begin, however, with some thoughts first about the sciences generally, and then about the social sciences specifically. SO SUCCESSFUL HAVE THE NATURAL SCIEN CES BEEN THAT THE WORDS “science” and “scientific” are often used as all-purpose terms of epistem ological praise conveying, roughly, “strong, precise, indisput­ able, reliable, good.” Television actors in white coats urge us to get our clothes cleaner with new, “scientific” Wizzo; university catalogues offer “management science,” “library science,” “military science,” even “mortuaiy science”; Christian fundamentalists demand equal time for “creation science.” In philosophy of science, this honorific usage has encouraged a preoccupation with the “problem of demarcation,” and a presumption that what distinguishes real science from pretenders is its reliance on a uniquely rational scientific method. In the law of evidence, it has informed the courts’ search for a test to discriminate genuinely scientific, and hence reliable, expert testimony, arrived at by that scientific method, from pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.1 Unfortunately, this honorific use also obscures what would other­ wise be obvious: that the remarkable achievements of the natural sciences notwithstanding, not all, and not only, natural scientists are good inquirers; some of those who work in the natural sciences are lazy, some incompetent, some crooked, while plenty of historians or legal and literary scholars are good inquirers. And the preoccupation with identifying real science, the genuine article, encourages oversim­ plification of what is actually a complex pattern of overlapping simi­ larities and differences: the natural sciences differ from other human activities such as cooking, clog dancing, architecture, or advocacy in being kinds of inquiry; from other kinds of empirical inquiry such as history, legal or literary scholarship, detective work, or investigative journalism in the kinds of question that fall within their scope; and 224 social research from natural theology, additionally, in the kinds of evidence and expla­ nation they acknowledge as legitimate. Moreover, the preoccupation with “scientific m ethod” has distracted attention from what would otherwise be obvious conti­ nuities between the procedures o f the natural sciences and the procedures...