In 1947, the MIT economist Paul Samuelson published a book titled Foundations of Economic Analysis that attempted to unify all of economics under a single mathematical framework.
Samuelson’s attempt to unify economics was emblematic of what philosophers of science had been trying to achieve in science as a whole, yet starting in the 1970s some philosophers of science began a countermovement against the unity of science, one that held that it wasn’t unification that science needed but its very opposite—a variety of methods and approaches.
The countermovement became known as scientific pluralism. It seeks to challenge, if not undermine, the kind of unifying effort represented by Samuelson’s Foundations.
It’s a movement that Jeremias Düring, a 2024-25 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar, knows well. A philosopher of science and PhD student at the University of Wuppertal, Jerry is writing a dissertation on scientific pluralism and in particular the discussions about pluralism in relation to economics.
“As a philosopher of science,” Jerry says, “economics is a fascinating case study in that economists largely agree about what legitimate economics looks like--so much for pluralism, right? And yet against the backdrop of consensus, we see quite a lot of difference and divergence, starting at the very beginning with the micro/macro and the positive/normative distinctions.”
In his dissertation, Jerry is attempting to bring together, on the one hand, the literature on scientific pluralism and, on the other, the literature on economic pluralism, with the goal of showing how, in the concrete case of ecological economics, philosophy of science and philosophy of economics could benefit from mutual interaction.
“You’ve got these discussions about pluralism among philosophers of science over here, and among economic methodologists, historians of economics, and heterodox economists over there, yet they all basically talk past each other. What I want to show is that each can actually learn a lot from one another.”
As Jerry points out, pluralism can be especially beneficial during times of crisis, enlarging the scope of concerns beyond the standard ones of monetary costs and benefits. “Hence my focus on the field of ecological economics, which is dealing with the crisis of climate change.”
What further makes economics a compelling case for Jerry is the division of the discipline into one large camp, the mainstream, which represents almost the entirely of economics, and one tiny camp, the heterodox, which is not only tolerated by the mainstream but which has had earnest engagements with some of its most prominent members. A case in point is a 1997 special issue of Ecological Economics, in which Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel Prize winners, took up criticisms of standard production theory put forward by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, an important economist in his own right.
“Just how did the special issue come about? What was behind it? What role did the editor of the journal play? My hope is that Solow’s and Georgescu-Roegen’s papers in the Rubenstein Library will shed some interesting light on those questions.”
As reasonable as it might sound, scientific pluralism is not without controversy. “Advocating multiple approaches is one thing,” says Jerry, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from the University of Münster. “But many skeptics worry that pluralism can become a policy of ‘anything goes.’ A lot of the debate is about where to draw the line between the rigor of the tried and true and the potential benefits of an unorthodox approach.”
Jerry will return to Germany in January.
