The Wrong Type of Pluralism: Toward a Transdisciplinary Social Science
Dave Colander (colander@middlebury.edu)
Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics
Abstract:
When heterodox economists talk of pluralism they generally are talking about pluralism within the economics professionÑthey are asking: how can we have a more pluralistic economics profession? This paper argues that another, perhaps more useful, way to think of pluralism and economics is from the perspective of all the social sciences. When looked in reference to the social science profession rather than in reference to the economics profession, the amount of pluralism increases significantly, since different social sciences follow quite different methodologies. But looking at pluralism from the social science perspective reveals a different type of pluralism problem in social science. While there may be plenty of pluralism within social science as a whole, there is a serious question about whether it is appropriately distributed. This paper argues that heterodox economistÕs agenda should be a greater blending of all the social science departments. It summarizes proposals to do so on both the undergraduate level and graduate level, and explains why supporting variations of these proposals would be a strategy that would further the objectives of most heterodox economists more so than would their current strategy of pushing for more pluralism in economics.
Keywords: Pluralism; heterodox; social science; epistemic game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 B4 B5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.middlebury.edu/services/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/1102.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mdl:mdlpap:1102
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vijaya Wunnava (vwunnava@middlebury.edu).