The Temporalities of Economics: The Model Form of Economic Theory

该项目研究了自19世纪世纪后半叶以来经济学，特别是计量经济学和金融经济学中建模技术的出现。该项目的核心是重建经济时间性模型，因为它们涉及现代性中出现的未来偶然性的问题，即偶然性的时间化。该项目从建构主义的社会学理论的社会分化的阅读，认为社会子系统的出现伴随着语义的结晶，不仅减少偶然性，但也产生了意义盈余沿着。在19世纪后半叶经济学的分化中，这一过程体现为对数学模型的日益关注。这些模型的前提是基于数学符号的自指称性的构建，这些数学符号与数学模型之外的任何实质性能指完全脱钩，从而使经济学能够通过“发现”模型中的形式模式来产生剩余意义。因此，这种数学化的经济模型的出现和发展与通过使这种偶然性在形式模型中可计算来工作偶然性的时间化的必要性是联系在一起的。因此，拟议的项目是指SPP 1688年的议程“美学特征”，通过论证，时间性突出的数字在这些模型，因为他们试图科普时间化的偶然性，通过其特定的形式形状。该项目的实证基础，这将通过话语分析为导向的知识社会学（特别是定性内容分析）进行调查，是一系列的转折点，在经济建模，从19世纪60年代以来的边际效用方法开始，并与数学金融的当代讨论结束。模型形式及其时间含义的谱系重建特别关注对模型的挑战和批评以及对这些批评的反应。数据库包括学术出版物，如专著，期刊文章和编辑卷。同样重要的是致力于经济学和其他科学学科之间的相互关系，因为它们对模型中经济时间性的表达产生影响（例如，边际效用理论中的力学，均衡理论中的生态学，以及行为金融学中的心理学），以及对“成功的”论证模式的追踪，以及对那些已经被抛在后面的论证模式的追踪（例如，当代金融中理性预期理论的边缘化）。

The proposed project investigates the emergence of modeling techniques in economics, in particular econometrics and financial economics, since the second half of the 19th century. At the core of the project is the reconstruction of models of economic temporality as they refer to the problématique, emerging in modernity, of future’s contingency, that is, to the temporalization of contingency. The project starts out from a constructivist reading of sociological theories of societal differentiation, arguing that the emergence of societal subsystems comes along with the crystallization of semantics that not only reduce contingency but also produce a meaning surplus. In the case of the differentiation of economics in the second half of the 19th century, this process materializes in an increasing attention toward mathematical models. These models presuppose the construction of an auto-referentiality based on mathematical symbols which are radically decoupled from any substantial signifier outside the mathematical model, thus enabling economics to produce surplus meaning through the ‘discovery’ of formal patterns in the models. Thereby, the emergence and development of such mathematized economic models is bound up with the necessity to work the temporalization of contingency by making such contingency computable in formal models. The proposed project thus refers to the agenda of the SPP 1688 “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten” through the argument that temporality prominently figures in those models as they attempt to cope with the temporalization of contingency through their specific formal shape. The project’s empirical basis, which will be investigated through a discourse-analytically oriented sociology of knowledge (in particular qualitative content analysis), is a series of turning points in economic modeling, starting out with the marginal utility approach since the 1860s and ending with contemporary discussions in mathematical finance. The genealogical reconstruction of model forms and their temporal implications pays particular attention to challenges and critiques issued against the models and the reactions to those critiques. The data corpus comprises academic publications such as monographs, journal articles, and edited volumes. Equal importance is dedicated to interrelations between economics and other scientific disciplines as they impact on the articulation of economic temporality in the models (for instance, mechanics in the case of marginal utility theory, ecology in the case of equilibrium theory, and psychology as concerns Behavioral finance), as well as to the tracing of ‘successful’ argumentative patterns but also of those which have been left behind (such as, for instance, the marginalization of the theory of rational expectations in contemporary finance).