Value judgments and economics expertise

Antoinette Baujard

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper tackles the problem of the demarcation of value judgments in economic expertise. Is it possible to disentangle values from facts, or neutral scientific assertions from value-laden judgments, in the context of economic expertise ? If not, why not ? And if it is, under what conditions ? First, drawing on concepts from analytic philosophy, the paper highlights the interdependencies between descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive judgments. Second, drawing notably on social studies of science, the paper proposes a definition of 'expertise', and translates this into a list of successive stages wherein these different types of judgments are involved. A backward analysis of these stages is provided in order to identify where values stand, and who holds them. Third, reconsidering the positions of neutrality in economics (Mongin 2006), the paper defends the 'weak non-neutrality' view in the context of expertise, and concludes with reflections on what could be done to address the problem of democratic legitimacy raised by the difficulty of demarcation.

Keywords: methodology; value judgments; prescription; evaluation; recommendation; expertise; neutrality; demarcation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-03-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00803552v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00803552v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Value judgment and economics expertise (2015)
Working Paper: Value judgments and economics expertise (2015)
Working Paper: Value judgments and economics expertise (2014)
Working Paper: Value judgment and economics expertise (2014)
Working Paper: Value judgment and economics expertise (2014)
Working Paper: Value judgments and economics expertise (2013)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-00803552

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().