SFEcon would happily commend economic heterodoxy’s impulse to emulate more precise disciplines; but we would also register a concern that heterodoxy’s efforts to take the mystery out of economics by making it scientific are going to succeed more in the way of making science itself mysterious.

We are most concerned with heterodox deconstructions of mainstream thinking that proceed by citing logical contradictions in neoclassical principles of analysis — this in apparent innocence of the fact that, should such comparisons constitute a sufficiency of evidence, any science might be laughed out of court:

Few heterodox economists will not this day occupy a structure or use some conveyance devised by the mechanical arts. They are all likely to eat food that has been refrigerated or to use space that has been made comfortable by some other application of thermodynamics. And they are almost certain to accomplish a vital purpose or two through the agency of indoor plumbing.

But will they pause to consider that each of these facilities was designed on the basis of a philosophical absurdity? The Newtonian Particle has mass but no volume. Boyle’s perfect gas exerts a pressure without occupying space. And Euler’s perfect fluid deforms without generating a viscosity.

Many such examples are available from the hard sciences to inform us that prospective metaphors to reality cannot be judged solely on the ground of reason or in isolation with the phenomena they presume to describe. Two of history’s most prominent scientific observations serve to make this point:

Aristotle, in advancing his concept of the rest mass of a material object, asserted that things in motion tend to stop.

Newton, in his synthesis of Galileo’s mechanics, asserted that things in motion tend to stay in motion.

Taken together, these two statements exhaust all the possibilities for what must follow from an object’s being set into motion; and each directly contradicts the other. So, if we are to be strictly rational in our apprehension of these two assertions, then one must be accepted as factual while the other must be objectively wrong. Such is the model of all philosophical thought prior to our specifically Western science (which is now what is universally meant by the word ‘science’).

Western science observes no obligation to choose between the Newtonian and the Aristotelian concepts of momentum: both are equally visible when viewed from a standpoint chosen to reveal their objective reality; hence the scientist is obligated to choose which premise he will pursue. A premise is neither true nor false. Rather, it is more or less productive than its known alternatives.

Mankind has built engineering marvels for 8,000 years, and the theoretical bases of much early construction remain a mystery. For 2000 of these years, construction was governed by Aristotle’s premise that things in motion tend to stop. Then Galileo suggested we would be better served in presuming that things in motion tend to stay in motion. None of these ideas were right, yet each was functional. Each step in moving from one premise to the next was validated by practical gains in our ability to use the world for our purposes. Clearly, none of these scientific premises were important per se. They achieved importance only insofar as they encouraged action.

All scientific principles fail tests of pure reason. All metaphors are incomplete; and their effectiveness can owe as much to what they leave out as to what they include. It is in the nature of abstraction to be wrong in a great many particulars for the sake of revealing a truth by which one is directed toward actions that are more or less helpful to a given purpose. Models can only be judged by their potency in dealing with a stated objective; and such evaluations are exterior to both the model and to the phenomena it describes. Until a purpose is stated, the quality of an abstraction cannot be tested.

The scientific mood must always be open and incomplete, its results tentative, and its intentions practical. Science concerns itself with inference rather than anything so gaudy as truth in the sense of that which is unassailable everywhere in the field of reason. The Pythagorean Theorem’s achievement of truth is only possible in a two-dimensional, flat, never-world. Its practical embodiment in the draughtsman’s triangle is a compromise with nature.

Science is betrayed when rational critique, in and of itself, is allowed to disfigure a scientific premise for any purpose other than to introduce its successor. Such practice connects economics to certain philosophical premises that have been found wanting and discarded in the development of other scientific disciplines. This view presumes that, because human beings’ rational faculties were developed in nature, they have developed on the model of nature. We might therefore know what is out there in nature by the convenient strategy of introspection.

Enlightenment science did much to dispel this view. Dispassionate comparisons reveal that mind and matter have irreconcilable differences in their designs. Higher human consciousness organizes around abstractions such as straight lines and steady-states — these likely being the only two phenomena altogether absent in the otherwise infinite variety of nature.

Rationalism’s quiddities are fine bases upon which to propound a law or administer justice. But when man first begins to apply his intellect to the natural world, as when measuring things according to a scale of some sort, the limits of his reason are revealed before even one objective phenomenon is explained. He soon discovers that actual space cannot be spanned by rational numbers, and that he must include irrational numbers in his scale. Enlarging his scientific worldview to include temporal phenomena then requires a number system enlarged beyond irrational numbers to even stranger quanta that are properly described as imaginary numbers.

Clearly science should teach us nothing more than that the mind will never be altogether at home in the world. Projecting intellect directly upon data leads us to hallucinate such absurdities as reality emerging in straight lines from a random number generator, and then concluding the world to be at fault when our prognostications are disappointed. Reason is not the method of science so much as it is an after-the-fact test of discovery and a discipline for conveying insight. Insight remains a mystery that reason has never approached.

Truths are matters declaimed by intellectuals, fanatics, and charlatans. Science ends with defensible convictions to the effect that thus-and-such a way of looking at the world is likely to be the most productive in regard to a stated endeavor. And science does not exist prior to specification of the endeavor in which it is to serve.