Philosophy of Science in the FT

Wednesday

In yesterday’s Financial Times columnist Michael Skapinker wrote an interesting piece — Business has not yet found its Copernicus — in which he discusses the impact that Thomas Kuhn’s famous work on the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had on his own intellectual development.

Skapinker makes the interesting point that while Kuhnian paradigm shifts might not apply to areas outside science, in the socio-political realm economics has come the closest to establishing itself as a science. (Not only is economics a science, after a fashion, but like the “hard” sciences such as particle physics it is a mathematical science, on which cf. E. Roy Weintraubs’ How Economics Became a Mathematical Science.)

Skapinker suggests that the recent financial crisis might have been the opportunity for a paradigm shift in economics, except that no other paradigm was available to take the place of the “normal science” represented by contemporary economics. I agree with this, and Skapinker’s observations suggest a couple of points about revolutions, scientific and otherwise:

1. The exact mechanism of theory change within a Kuhnian model has been the occasion of much debate. We have all heard that nothing can stop the progress of an idea whose time has come. The converse of this is that nothing can advance the prospects of an idea whose time has not yet arrived. A paradigm, whether scientific or social, might suffer repeated crises and remain an accepted paradigm because no alternative has emerged that can serve the same function. History provides many examples of this — e.g., revolutions during the Middle Ages, when no political paradigm other than aristocratic feudalism existed. Thus: a crisis, in and of itself, and no matter how severe, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a paradigm shift.

2. We should view scientific revolutions, including revolutions in the “soft” sciences like sociology and psychology, as a matter of degree. No revolution is total. Not all epistemic paradigms come crashing down in a single catastrophic collapse. Anomalies can emerge within one portion of a theoretical paradigm, and even mount to the point of forcing changes, while other portions of the same paradigm can remain untouched. Perhaps the Kuhnian model applies most clearly and directly to scientific revolutions, but still applies, perhaps a little hazily, outside science, to revolutions generally.

I‘ll look forward to more asides on the philosophy of science in the pages of the Financial Times, and when the economic paradigm shift does emerge from some future crisis, I suspect the FT will be there to tell the story.

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