DEVELOPMENTS IN ECONOMICS AS REALIST SOCIAL THEORY
DEVELOPMENTS IN ECONOMICS AS REALIST SOCIAL THEORY
复制标题
作为现实主义社会理论的经济学的发展
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
1996
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
T. Lawson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
T. Lawson
明确致力于阐述社会存在的本质和/或我们如何接触社会现实的社会理论正在经历经济学的复兴。(1)下面收集的论文都可以算作是对这一趋势的贡献。事实上，它们都以某种方式与所讨论的那种特定的社会理论项目相联系，这种项目在经济学中被系统化为批判现实主义。(2)在这个标题下，近年来产生了许多结果，论点，评论和批评，（3）下面包含的论文旨在进一步发展这些具体的发展。(4)我自己在这篇导言中的目的仅仅是为了促进下面的贡献：概述他们的背景，并勾勒出他们视为“给定”的某些基本思想和结果，这些思想和结果被视为有充分根据的（当然，如果总是可纠正的）前提。在经济学中，批判现实主义扮演了“底层劳动者”的角色，为科学解释提供了更富有成效的方法（Lawson，Peacock和Pratten，1996）。在这一点上，它既是批判性的解释（对经济学的现有状况），又在不同程度上具有发展性的建设性（在阐述另一种观点时）。在以下段落中，按照下列文件的顺序，从（更）关键的时刻到（更）建设性的时刻。批判现实主义在经济学中的一个基本目标是确定主流经济学的基本性质和错误。大多数主流理论的批评者在试图描述它的特征时，都孤立了一些具体的实质性主张，如合理性理论或均衡理论。相反，批判现实主义的论点是，它的本质在于方法层面。事实上，一旦我们认识到，尽管主流项目被广泛认为是持久的，但具体的实质性理论来来去去，往往是以某种速度进行的，那么定义项目的不是实质性理论的见解就足够清楚了。在最近被认为是主流思想核心的著作中，甚至连人们所珍视的理性和均衡概念也被摒弃了（见Lawson，1997：第8章）。然而，通过所有的转变和明显的变形，主流经济学的基本方法被发现保持不变。因此，必须把这一点作为主流项目的最核心和最明确的特征。(5)演绎主义根据批判现实主义的分析，主流项目的方法既是其本质，也是其错误，简而言之，是封闭系统建模。这是一个错误，因为社会世界似乎是典型的开放，不容易受到科学上有趣的局部封闭的影响。在这里，我所说的封闭系统只是指这样的情况，即“无论何时事件（或事态）x，然后事件（或事态）y”发生。分析方法，包括解释模式，如果是在这样一个前提下形成的，即这种形式或结构的详细说明至少在科学中是必要的，那么这些方法可以被称为演绎主义的。在其他地方（Lawson，1997），演绎主义被解释为主流经济学的特征，在一个开放的社会系统中，演绎主义是现代经济学的基本错误。这并不意味着因为演绎主义是错误的，科学和解释就不可能。相反，后者需要更充分地概念化。这里有一个重要的观察，即演绎主义中所预设的那种事件推理实际上只在相当特定的条件下发生。事实上，在天文学之外，科学上感兴趣的事件通常只发生在实验控制的条件下。一旦认识到这一点，就很容易看出，任何把科学与涉及对事件进行详细阐述的活动联系起来的概念，都是在系统地把科学与世界上发生的大多数事情隔离开来。…
Social theory explicitly committed to elaborating the nature of social being and/or how we access social reality is experiencing something of a revival in economics.(1) The papers collected below can all be counted as contributing to this trend. In fact they all in some way connect with a specific social theory project of the sort in question, one that has been systematized within economics as critical realism.(2) Under this head, numerous results, arguments, conjectures, and critiques have been produced in recent years,(3) and the papers included below aim to take some of these specific developments further.(4) My own object in this introduction is merely to facilitate the contributions which follow: to outline something of their context and to sketch certain basic ideas and results they treat as "given," that are taken as sufficiently well grounded (if of course always corrigible) premises. UNDERLABORING Within economics critical realism has taken the role of underlaborer for a more fruitful approach to scientific explanation (Lawson, Peacock and Pratten 1996). In this it has been both critically explanatory (of the existing situation in economics) and in varying degrees developmentally constructive (in elaborating an alternative perspective). In the following paragraphs, as in the ordering of the papers included below, the move is from the (more) critical to the (more) constructive moment. One basic object of critical realism in economics has been to identify the basic nature and error of mainstream economics. Most critics of the mainstream project have, in attempting to characterize it, isolated particular substantive claims, such as theories of rationality, or of equilibrium. It has been the contention of critical realism, in contrast, that it is at the level of method that its essence lies. In fact the insight that it is not substantive theory that defines the project is clear enough once we recognize that, despite the mainstream project being widely regarded as persisting, specific substantive theories come and go, often with some rapidity. Even the cherished conceptions of rationality and of equilibrium have been dispensed with in recent contributions regarded as central to the mainstream (see Lawson 1997: chapter 8). Yet through all its transformations and apparent metamorphoses the essential method of mainstream economics has been found to remain constant. It is this, then, that must be taken as the most central and defining feature of the mainstream project.(5) DEDUCTIVISM The method of the mainstream project which, according to critical realist analysis, is both its essence and its error is, briefly put, closed system modeling. This is an error in that the social world appears to be quintessentially open and not susceptible to scientifically interesting local closures. By a closed system here I simply mean situations in which regularities of the form "whenever event (or state of affairs) x then event (or state of affairs) y" occur. Methods of analysis, including modes of explanation, which are formulated on the presupposition that elaborating regularities of this form or structure are at least necessary in science(6) can be labeled deductivist. It is deductivism so interpreted that, it has been shown elsewhere (Lawson 1997), characterizes mainstream economics and which, in an open social system, is the essential error of modern economics. Now it does not follow that because deductivism is a mistake, science and explanation are thereby impossible. Rather the latter need to be more adequately conceptualized. An important observation here is that event regularities of the sort presupposed in deductivism actually occur only under rather specific conditions. In fact outside astronomy event regularities of interest in science usually occur only in conditions of experimental control. Once this is recognized it is easily seen that any conception which ties science to activities involving the elaboration of event regularities serves systematically to fence off science from most of the goings on in the world. …