Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics: Essays on the Styles of Economic Reasoning (Contributions to Economics) 3030945855, 9783030945855

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Contributions to Economics

Alberto Fragio

Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics Essays on the Styles of Economic Reasoning

Contributions to Economics

The series Contributions to Economics provides an outlet for innovative research in all areas of economics. Books published in the series are primarily monographs and multiple author works that present new research results on a clearly defined topic, but contributed volumes and conference proceedings are also considered. All books are published in print and ebook and disseminated and promoted globally. The series and the volumes published in it are indexed by Scopus and ISI (selected volumes). More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/1262

Alberto Fragio

Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics Essays on the Styles of Economic Reasoning

Alberto Fragio Department of Humanities Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Unidad Cuajimalpa Mexico City, Mexico

ISSN 1431-1933     ISSN 2197-7178 (electronic) Contributions to Economics ISBN 978-3-030-94585-5    ISBN 978-3-030-94586-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

It is perhaps worth saying that this study is more about offering a preliminary exploration of an area of investigation than about fine conceptual distinctions or detailed defences against all conceivable objections. M. Kusch, “Disagreement, Certainties, Relativism”, 2018.

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The kind of intelligibility required by historical sense can rarely be achieved when the only thing at stake are details and facts. H. Blumenberg, St Matthew Passion.

The early steps of historical epistemology can be dated to the first decades of the twentieth century. The philosopher Dominique Lecourt referred to Gaston Bachelard’s (1884–1962) contributions on the history of physics as “historical epistemology”, since “the discipline which takes scientific knowledge as its object must take into account the historicity of that object. […] If epistemology is historical, the history of the sciences is necessarily epistemological”.1 This approach was thereafter resumed and further developed during the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first by well-known historians of sciences such as Lorraine Daston, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and Jürgen Renn, among many others. These historians emphasized the historicity of major epistemological categories such as “observation”, “objectivity”, “evidence”, “demonstration”, and “explanation”. Often seen as a second historicist turn in history and philosophy of science, historical epistemology works on the assumption that any process of knowledge validation can be historicized. It is, therefore, well at home in a historical study on the formation of a scientific experience. In short, historical epistemology establishes that the history of science has less to do with the evolution of theories about immutable objects than with the temporal and local variability of the scientific entities that articulate scientific knowledge and practice. In recent years, attempts have been made to explicitly develop a historical epistemology of economics. In this sense, Mary Poovey’s pioneering book, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society

 Dominique Lecourt, L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard [1969], Vrin, Paris, 1978, p. 9. [my transl.]. 1

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(1998), stands out.2 According to Poovey, the early sciences of wealth and society should be understood as disciplinary ancestors of today’s economics and social science. These sciences are among the very first based on what she calls the “modern fact”, that is to say, the belief that numbers are preinterpretative or even noninterpretative and, along with the observational basis, constitute the bedrock of systematic knowledge. As a result, the early sciences of wealth and society “were among the first to rely on numerical representation as a critical component of knowledge production”.3 Poovey believes that her approach overlaps with “the subset of the history of science that Lorraine Daston has called historical epistemology. Indeed, as ‘a history of the categories of facticity, evidence, objectivity, and so forth’, historical epistemology is the methodological label I consider most appropriate for this book”.4 Furthermore, the term “historical epistemology of economics” was first used by Mislav Žitko in a paper devoted to the study of models, fictions, and explanations in economics.5 Žitko examined the practice of modeling in neoclassical economics as part of the orthodox theory. His main claim was that the history of modeling is key to understand how economic models operate and the ways in which they have been accepted as valid instruments of inquiry in economics. Two special issues published in Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2014/2) and in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (2017/34A) explicitly develop historical epistemology of economics as a historiographic program. This led to a myriad of case studies focusing on the epistemic and social practices in different contexts and periods such as eighteenth-century France, Victorian Britain, or Postwar Germany. Following the distinction between “economy” and “economics” – that is to say, the economic process as it happens in societies, and the discipline or disciplines that study that process – Ute Tellmann suggests distinguishing between “historical epistemology of ‘the economic’” and “historical epistemology of ‘the economy’”.6 While the former refers to the level of theoretical discourse, the latter indicates the economic objects.7 In some of its versions, historical epistemology has also been organized around the concept of “style of scientific reasoning”, initially introduced in Ludwig Fleck’s 2  Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998; M. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy. Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008. See also Mischa Suter  and Caroline Arni, “A Science of the Specific. An Interview with Mary Poovey”, Historische Anthropologie, 24, 3, 2016, pp. 432–444. 3  M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, op. cit., p. 4. 4  Ibid., p. 7. 5  Mislav Žitko, “Models, Fictions and Explanations: A Study in Historical Epistemology of Economics”, Filozofija i društvo (XXIV), 4, 2013, pp. 84–101. 6  Ute Tellmann, “Kommentar: The Economic or the Economy?  – Reflections on the Objects of Historical Epistemology”, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 37, Heft 2, 2014, pp. 165–169. 7  Further details on this topic in Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, The Chicago University Press, Chicago and London, 2005; and “Constructing ‘The Economy’”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 39, 1, 2009, pp. 3–19.

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book, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact [Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache] (1935), and later in Alistair C. Crombie’s encyclopedic work, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (1994). This historiographical methodology, to the development of which several authors such as Ian Hacking or Arnold I. Davidson have also contributed, brought about a pluralistic understanding of thinking and doing science, centered on the differential aspects in the production and validation of scientific knowledge. Fleck’s work has been appropriated within the context of economics in Philip E. Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009); and P.  E. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013).8 In the former, another famous concept formulated by Fleck (1935), that of “thought collective” (“Denkkollektiv”), is retrieved and reformulated. In this respect, the authors postulate the existence of a “neoliberal thought collective” and provide an account of its formation starting with the foundation of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Differently, in the latter, Mirowski uses the notion of “neoliberal thought collective” to analyze the financial crisis of 2008 and the specific role of the neoliberal doctrine in its gestation. It is there argued that the elusive character of the “neoliberal thought collective” explains why the neoliberal doctrine has survived, against all prediction, the invalidating trial of the financial crisis.9 Furthermore, Karen Lovejoy Knight, in A.C.  Pigou and the ‘Marshallian’ Thought Style. A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics (2018),10 relies on Fleck’s notion of “style of thought” (“Denkstil”) in order to provide a historical account of Arthur C. Pigou’s contributions in economics as opposed to Alfred Marshall’s work. Furthermore, the sociologists, Daniel Hirschman and Elizabeth Popp Berman, have introduced the notion of “economic styles of reasoning” in order to analyze the ways in which economists may influence policymaking.11 Inspired by Michael J. Reay’s concept of “American-style economics”, the authors connect the studies on performativity in economics with Hacking’s styles of scientific reasoning: “Styles of reasoning are not scientific paradigms, nor particular theories or models. Rather, styles of reasoning are collections of orienting concepts, ways of thinking about problems, causal assumptions and approaches to methodology that enable

8  Philip E. Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009. P. E. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso, London, 2013. 9  One should also remark that in 2006 Mirowski received the prize of the Ludwik Fleck Society for his book The Effortless Economy of Science, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004. 10  Karen Lovejoy Knight, A.  C. Pigou and the ‘Marshallian’ Thought Style. A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics, Palgrave, Cham, 2018. 11  Daniel Hirschman and Elizabeth Popp Berman, “Do Economists Make Policies? On the Political Effects of Economics”, Socio-Economic Review, 2014, pp. 1–33.

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people to produce new kinds of statements and new explanations”.12 They argue that economists may shape the “cognitive infrastructure of policymaking” by spreading an economic style of reasoning among elites: The economic style of reasoning includes basic concepts such as incentives, growth, efficiency and externalities. It includes economic ways of approaching problems: by using models, systematically weighing costs and benefits, analysing quantitative empirical data, considering incentives, and thinking marginally. It suggests causal policy stories linked to economic theories: that investing in education will increase human capital and thus raise wage levels, or that increased government spending will stimulate the economy. And it makes certain methodological assumptions: about the importance of quantification and the possibility of using monetary value as a means of commensuration, for example. […] We suggest, though, that this style of reasoning circulates, at least in a weaker version, well beyond those who call themselves economists.13

Thus, the economic style of reasoning would not only produce knowledge but also may help to make decisions with effects on policies. Along with professional authority, institutional position, and economic policy devices, the economic style of reasoning as a cognitive infrastructure of policymaking would be one of the preconditions that turns economics into a source of political power. With all these antecedents in view, in this book I will rely on the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning in order to address several topics in the history of economic thought, with special emphasis on ecological economics. I will review notably seven different styles of economic reasoning, and, in the light of their conflicting nature, account for common communication difficulties and disagreements in economics. The acknowledgment of the multiple styles of economic reasoning together with their specificities will allow us to better understand why economists who do not share the same style of reasoning can hardly persuade one another. Such an understanding can ultimately provide an excellent standpoint to try and overcome communication difficulties in the field. In the first chapter, I define historical epistemology and the styles of reasoning in discussion with Martin Kusch’s criticism of this kind of historiographical methodology. I argue that the shortcomings pointed out by Kusch result from assuming a realistic conception of the styles of reasoning, as if they were actually existing structures that vertebrate the history of science, and not so much heuristic and discursive tools aimed to the production of historical narratives. Following Arnold I. Davidson’s insight, my basic claim is that the styles of reasoning should be taken as a special kind of metaphor, a “historiographical metaphor”, whose purpose is to express the different ways of doing science and writing its history in a context of epistemological pluralism. In the second chapter, I deal with the impact of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning on the analysis of communication breakdowns. To this aim I will make reference to the famous debate between Popper and Kuhn in the occasion of a symposium held in London in 1965. Popper saw in Kuhn’s early 12 13

 Ibid., p. 16.  Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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investigations on paradigms and incommensurability an example of what he labeled the “myth of the framework”, that is to say, “the belief that it is impossible for the investigators to shortly come out of the framework of concepts and principles within which they are working, and compare it with other competing frameworks”.14 In my opinion, the issue of the “myth of the framework” can help us clarify some basic assumptions underpinning the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning as well as its relevance for a theory of communication. In this regard, I will argue that the epistemological explanation of communication breakdowns implies a framework-based relativistic understanding of the styles of reasoning, while the taxonomies of styles presuppose a non-framework-based transcendental understanding of the styles of reasoning. On this ground, I will suggest a revision of Dow’s theory of modes of thought in economics as well as of the ensuing polemics concerning methodological pluralism in ecological economics. In the third chapter, I present a historical answer to the question of why ecological economics fails to persuade many economists, even though, as a scientific discipline, it has been growing in importance for several decades now. My main claim is that the stabilization of a biophysical style of economic reasoning, in the period that goes from Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1925) to the publication of the famous report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972), was decisive for the emergence of ecological economics as a scientific discipline in the last third of the twentieth century. However, this biophysical style of reasoning is not necessarily shared by other economic disciplines. The process of disciplinary formation of ecological economics could not prevent communication breakdowns in economics, and perhaps even aggravated them. The fourth chapter deals with the decline of the historical style of economic reasoning with reference to Joseph A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Paul A.  Samuelson.  I will present two main claims.  The first one argues that Schumpeter’s theory of business cycles stems from a historical understanding of economic crises and, consequently, it can be conceived as an instance of the historical style of economic reasoning. The second point argues that the decline of this historical style can be linked to the growing success of Keynesianism, to the detriment of Schumpeter’s work. The decline of the historical style clearly revealed an irreconcilable conflict among different economic rationalities during the second half of the twentieth century and brought the epistemological legitimacy of economic history with respect to synchronic analysis into question. The fifth chapter revolves around some of the most significant polemics with neoclassical economists in which Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly were involved. I will follow the dispute over the relevance of thermodynamic concepts in the analysis of economics. While Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly argued that the entropic explanation of the economic process is the correct explanation, neoclassical economists argued on the contrary that it was irrelevant. For

 Ulises Moulines, Popper y Kuhn: dos gigantes de la filosofía de la ciencia del siglo XX, Batiscafo, Barcelona, 2015, pp. 106–107 [my transl.].

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Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly, the neoclassical explanation – based on equilibrium prices, efficient markets, and externalities  – is manifestly inadequate. In contrast, neoclassical economists such as Robert Solow and Joseph E. Stiglitz considered the entropic explanation to be inaccurate, unable to produce technically sound models, and loaded with grandiloquent pronouncements. In the sixth chapter, I will retrieve Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology in order to apply it to the history of ecological economics. In so doing, I will undertake a case study on the epistemological constructive and destructive functions that some metaphors played in the development of ecological economics as a scientific discipline. In particular, I will investigate the “environmental metaphors of scarcity”, under which I include the metaphors of “economic metabolism”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprint”, and “natural capital”. Some of these epistemic metaphors were clearly aimed against the conceptual hegemony of neoclassical economics, and all of them were linked to biophysical indicators aimed at measuring sustainability and environmental impact. Thus, these metaphors can be also taken as “metric metaphors”. In this regard, I will outline a metaphorological paradigm of metrization, namely metaphors that are terminologized through a measurement methodology. I will then argue that these metric metaphors  – especially that of “natural capital”  – despite their initial destructive epistemological function provided the ground for a revival of neoclassical economics within ecological economics itself. The metric metaphors of ecological economics carried the neoclassical Trojan horses, as response to the problem of environmental accounting for the so-called “natural assets” and “ecosystem services”. In the seventh chapter, I pay attention to mathematical ecology in the light of the neo-Kantian thesis according to which modern science ensued from the process of mathematization of nature. The issue of a historical epistemology of mathematical ecology finds a suitable place in this context, that is to say, in what I call “the two chief epistemic styles of mathematical ecology”, the “Galilean style”, and the “fictional style”. The first one – the “Galilean style” – finds exemplification in astronomy studies and considers nature as an expression of rationality. The Galilean style works on the assumption that the laws of nature can be discovered and expressed in the language of mathematics. Differently, the “fictional style” takes mathematical representations as “fictions” aimed to adjust the empirical basis to a scientific theory. Its distinctive feature lies in assuming an ontological distance between the natural object and its mathematical representation. My main claim is that the historical oscillation between both chief epistemic styles proves the epistemological historicity of mathematical ecology. In the eighth chapter, I retrieve classical historical epistemology from the point of view of the reception of neo-Kantian traditions in both French historical epistemology and in Thomas S. Kuhn’s early work. According to the American philosopher Michael Friedman, while triggering the so-called “historical turn”, Kuhn reinstated the history of science as perhaps the most important object for the philosophy of science. In this last chapter, I show that this reinstatement is rather a rehabilitation of the philosophical and epistemological uses of the history of science, something already present in the continental historiography of science in the

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first half of the twentieth century, and especially in Gaston Bachelard’s work. In this respect, I undertake a review of the European history and philosophy of science during that period, paying special attention to Gaston Bachelard as one of the leading representatives of the French historical epistemology of the 1930s. The late and quite problematic reception of Bachelard’s thought in the early work of Thomas S. Kuhn provides an opportunity to review the main philosophical tenets of classical historical epistemology. This line of inquiry may help to define what the continental history and philosophy of science is, notably in relation to classical historical epistemology. Moreover, it may open new perspectives for the emerging field of historical epistemology of economics and the historiography of styles of economic reasoning. This book was supported by the Mexican Program of Basic Scientific Research Conacyt/SEP, in the context of the research project “History of Ecological Economics and Theory of Natural Capital” (Reference 286529, 2018–2022, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa). Additionally, I benefited from the research project “Improvisation and Emotional Contagion. History and Philosophy of Emotional Experiences” (PID2019-108988GB-I00) led by Javier Moscoso in the Institute of History at the Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). I am also very grateful to Peter Galison for hosting me as a visiting scholar in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University, and to Óscar Carpintero (Universidad de Valladolid) for his smart criticism and generous remarks. I would also like to thank the attendees of the several conferences during which I had the opportunity to discuss the progress of this research, in particular the colleagues of the School of Philosophy and Humanities at UPTC in Tunja, of the Instituto de Investigaciones “Gino Germani” in Buenos Aires, and of the IMGWF of the University of Lübeck; I would like to thank the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Unidad Cuajimalpa) and the Department of History at the Universidad Iberoamericana, as well as the participants to the Permanent Seminary in Theory of History and to the Equilibrium and HISTEX seminaries. I owe great intellectual debt to Miruna Achim, Violeta Aréchiga, Manuel Ávila, Fernando Betancourt, Cornelius Borck, Norma Durán, Ricardo Laleff, Pamela Loera, Victoria López Mellado, Alfonso Mendiola, Javier Moscoso, Ricardo Nava, Martina Philippi, Giovana Quintero, Analiese Richard, Josefa Ros Velasco, Sandra Rozental, Antonio Sánchez, and Nuria Valverde. Partial or preliminary Spanish versions of Chaps. 2, 4, and 8 were published in Cuestiones de filosofía, Historia y Grafía and HoST, respectively. I would finally like to thank Tessa Marzotto for the English revision of the manuscript. This small book is dedicated to Pamela. Mexico City, Mexico  Alberto Fragio

Contents

 tyles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: S A Reply to Martin Kusch��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 2 To Resist the Temptation of Structure: Styles as Historiographical Metaphor����������������������������������������������������������    3 3 Reply ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 3.1 Six Theses on the History and Philosophy of Styles of Scientific Reasoning������������������������������������������    7 4 Discussion and Final Remarks����������������������������������������������������������    7 The Myth of the Framework and the Modes of Thought in Economics����   11 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   12 2 The Myth of the Framework ������������������������������������������������������������   15 2.1 The Myth of the Framework Revisited ��������������������������������   18 3 Thinking Modes in Economics ��������������������������������������������������������   21 3.1 Open and Closed Systems of Thought����������������������������������   23 3.2 Modes of Thought and Methodological Pluralism ��������������   27 4 The Debate on Methodological Pluralism in Ecological Economics�����   28 4.1 Richard B. Norgaard (1989) and Frameworks without Relativism����������������������������������������������������������������   29 4.2 Clive L. Spash and the Methodological Closure������������������   32  istorical Epistemology of Ecological Economics H and Styles of Economic Reasoning ����������������������������������������������������������������   37 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 2 A Historical Epistemology of the Styles of Economic Reasoning������  39 2.1 Antecedents��������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 2.2 Seven Styles of Economic Reasoning����������������������������������   44 3 Speciation of Scientific Disciplines and Communication Breakdowns��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   50

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 he Crisis of the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning: Joseph T A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-­Roegen, and Paul A. Samuelson ������   53 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 2 Joseph A. Schumpeter and the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   56 2.1 Economic Crises in Historical Perspective ��������������������������   56 2.2 Schumpeter’s Evolutionism and the Macrodynamics of Capitalism������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 2.3 Business Cycle Theory ��������������������������������������������������������   59 2.4 Charismatic Innovation, Creative Destruction, and Economic Progress��������������������������������������������������������   60 3 Parting Ways: Georgescu-Roegen and the Entropic Style of Economic Reasoning��������������������������������������������������������������������   62 3.1 Georgescu-Roegen Meets Schumpeter ��������������������������������   63 3.2 Rejection of a Position at Harvard and Return to Romania�������   65 3.3 Schumpeter’s Influences on Georgescu-Roegen������������������   66 4 Final Remarks: Schumpeter and the Decline of the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning������������������������������������������   67 Fundamental Disagreements in the Origin of Ecological Economics ��������   69 1 Five Assaults to Neoclassical Economics ����������������������������������������   72 1.1 First Round: The Double Critique to Mathematical Reason and Mechanistic Epistemology��������������������������������   73 1.2 Second Round: The Debate on The Limits to Growth (1972)������������������������������������������������   76 1.3 Third Round: Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979)����   79 1.4 Fourth Round: Land Economics (1986)��������������������������������   87 1.5 Fifth Round: Ecological Economics (1997) ������������������������   91 Environmental Metaphors of Scarcity ����������������������������������������������������������   99 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 2 The Metrization Paradigm and the Environmental Metaphors of Ecological Economics������������������������������������������������������������������  102 2.1 The Replacement of the Neoclassical Function of Production by Economic Metabolism������������������������������  104 2.2 Economy Has Organs and a Plimsoll Line ��������������������������  106 2.3 Carrying Capacity, Ecological Footprint, and Natural Capital ��������������������������������������������������������������  108 The Two Chief Epistemic Styles of Mathematical Ecology��������������������������  113 1 Historical Epistemology and Ecology as an Epochal Threshold������  113 2 Modern Mathematization of Nature��������������������������������������������������  115 3 A Brief History of Mathematical Ecology: Authors and Topics������  116 4 Mathematical Ecology as a Discipline Speciation Case ������������������  120 5 Leggiadro viso: The Old Myth of a Self-Speaking Nature ��������������  121

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Classical Historical Epistemology in Retrospect: A Review Essay��������������  123 1 Is There a Continental History and Philosophy of Science?������������  123 2 Thomas S. Kuhn and the Continental History and Philosophy of Science������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  126 3 Ernst Cassirer and Neo-Kantian History of Science������������������������  128 4 French Historical Epistemology as Continental History and Philosophy of Science����������������������������������������������������������������������  130 5 Final Remarks: Thomas S. Kuhn Meets Gaston Bachelard��������������  137

Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

Martin Kusch’s critique of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning qualifies as one of the most important contributions in the last decade to the understanding of this historiographical approach, often considered as a second historicist turn in history and philosophy of science. However, his criticism has not yet received an adequate response and the opportunity has been thereby missed to improve this kind of methodology in history of science. In this chapter, I will argue that the shortcomings pointed out by Kusch result from assuming a realistic conception of the styles of reasoning, as if they were actually existing structures that vertebrate the history of science, and not so much heuristic and discursive tools aimed to the production of historical narratives. Following Arnold I. Davidson’s insight, my basic claim is that the styles of reasoning should be taken as a special kind of metaphor, a “historiographical metaphor”, whose purpose is to express the different ways of doing science and writing its history in a context of epistemological pluralism.

1  Introduction Martin Kusch’s criticism of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning is expressed in two important articles, “Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies” (2011) and “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning” (2010), to which one should add a review of Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity (2007), titled “Objectivity and Historiography” (2009). From these contributions, one can extrapolate Kusch’s four main objections: 1. Outdated historiographical position. The styles of scientific reasoning rely on an outdated historiographical approach, excessively indebted to old intellectual © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Fragio, Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics, Contributions to Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2_1

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Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

h­ istory, at least in the form practiced by Alistair C. Crombie in his contributions to the history of science.1 2. Continuist, internalist, without revolutionary change. The theory of styles does not provide adequate elements to understand the revolutionary changes in the history of science. It tends to maintain instead a continuous and internalist perspective.2 Generally speaking, since it assumes a quite idealist position, it shows serious difficulties in explaining the relationships between the external and internal elements of science, in particular regarding the sociological and institutional dimensions of science. The development of science is thereby reduced to the “grand march” of styles of reasoning.3 3. Styles as super-social and autonomous entities. This historiographical tradition is prone to anthropomorphize styles, that is to say, to speak of them as if they were autonomous agents and even independent from their own history, to the point of becoming timeless canons of objectivity. Along the same lines of the deistic view of creation, once styles have emerged, they are assumed to have their own course of action which does not require further intervention, and somehow they come to transcend contingent and social circumstances.4 4. The demarcation problem among styles. There are no clear and satisfactory criteria to single out each style.5 In my opinion, Martin Kusch’s critical remarks are accurate and should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, I will argue that these shortcomings of the theory of styles of scientific reasoning result from assuming a realistic conception of styles, as if they were effectively to be understood as existing structures that support the history of science, instead of heuristic and discursive tools for the production of historical narratives.

1  Martin Kusch, “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 2010, p. 158. 2  “Put in a nutshell, an internalist believes that we can explain the Scientific Revolution by attending to developments in the realm of ideas alone –social, political and economic causes can be ignored without much explanatory loss. ‘Externalism’ sees the latter types of causes as crucial”. M. Kusch, ibid., p. 164. 3  Ibid., pp.  164-169. M.  Kusch, “Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies”, Erkenntnis, 75, 2011, p. 486. 4  Ibid., p. 169; M. Kusch, “Reflexivity”, op. cit., p. 490. 5  Ibid., p. 164.

2  To Resist the Temptation of Structure: Styles as Historiographical Metaphor

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2  T  o Resist the Temptation of Structure: Styles as Historiographical Metaphor In an essay written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Lorraine Daston – one of the main promoters of contemporary historical epistemology,6 and clearly skeptical concerning the theory of styles of scientific reasoning – reminds us of the need to refrain from structures when thinking about the history of science. It is well known that in his famous book, Kuhn claims that “paradigms structured science just as their succession structured the history of science”.7 In this regard, Daston has referred to an essential tension between structure and historicity in Kuhn’s early work. And she adds, “Most historians of science no longer believe that any kind of structure could possibly do justice to their subject matter”.8 However, this “temptation of structure” is not new. As to the history and philosophy of science, the reference to structure has important exemplifications in Kant’s and Husserl’s transcedentalism, in Cassirer’s structural realism, in the synchronic analyses of scientific experience launched by the Vienna Circle, and, nowadays, in metatheoretical structuralism, just to mention a few examples.9 Concerning the historiography of science, I argue that the aporia pointed out by Kusch derives from a realistic conception of styles that tends to see them as an underlying structure that articulates both knowledge and scientific practice. In other words, the antinomies occur in that one is thinking styles through structures. Thus, the standard theory of styles of reasoning turns into just another episode in the strong temptation felt for structure in the history of science. While suggesting a different approach to styles, Arnold I. Davidson, in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (2001), observes that “the notion of a style of reasoning appears to be wholly metaphorical, and it is not even an especially lucid metaphor”.10 In a previous work he even suggests, without developing his point much further, that the styles of reasoning “are largely metaphorical”, and he adds that despite “their metaphorical appearance really helps us to

 For more on contemporary historical epistemology I refer the reader to Alberto Fragio, De Davos a Cerisy-La Salle: la epistemología histórica en el contexto europeo, Editorial Académica Española – Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, 2011. 7  Lorraine Daston, “History of Science without Structure”, in: Robert J.  Richards and Lorraine Daston, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty. Reflections on a Science Classic, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016, pp. 124–125. 8  Ibid., p. 117. 9  Barry Gower, “Cassirer, Schlink and ‘Structural Realism’: The Philosophy of the Exact Sciences in the Background to Early Logical Empiricism”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 8, 1, 2000, pp. 87–95. 10  Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001, p. 126. 6

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Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

understand the emergence of psychiatry as an autonomous medical discipline”.11 What is particularly remarkable about this passage is the connection it draws between styles, metaphors and the emergence of scientific disciplines. It should be noted, however, that styles as metaphors are by Davidson closely associated with an enunciativist conception of knowledge, that is, the tendency to reduce scientific knowledge to its linguistic expression, regardless of specific epistemic cultures. Davidson’s suggestion to characterize styles as metaphors is notably introduced in response to the following problem: “what are the conditions under which various kinds of statements come to be comprehensible?”.12 While I accept that the styles of reasoning can be considered as metaphors, I also believe that one further element should be added: Styles are indeed a special kind of metaphor, a “historiographical metaphor”, devised to express the differential aspects of science. The connection between metaphors and historiography is far from new.13 Nevertheless, I consider it convenient to define the historiographical metaphor as a metaphor that is used to write history, that is to say, one that allows for organizing a historical narrative and to provide order to its object of study. In this sense, historiographical metaphors belong to the epistemology of history. Their basic function is to articulate a heterogeneous historical material in order to give some meaning to it and build a historical narrative. Undoubtedly, the “historical source” is the historiographical metaphor par excellence.14 Among the most emblematic cases, although often unnoticed, ranges also Kuhn’s metaphorization of the classical – linguistic – notion of “paradigm”,15 which significantly displaces its original meaning of “formal scheme in which the words that admit flexible or derivative modifications are organized”.16 In this regard, with his Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960), Blumenberg keeps closer to the traditional definition, as he notably envisions a kind of metaphor declension organized by the different metaphorical paradigms, such as the terminologization of metaphors, metaphorized concepts, or absolute metaphors.17  A. I. Davidson, “Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry”, in: Peter Galison and David J.  Stump, (eds.), The Disunity of Science, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 75–100, here p. 76. 12  A. I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 126. 13  See, among others, Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1960. English transl. by Robert Savage, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Cornell University Press, New York, 2010. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1973. Frank R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. 14  H.  Blumenberg, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge. Beobachtungen an Metaphern, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2012. 15  A. Fragio, “Descubrir la emergencia, disolver la revolución: el cambio científico a través de sus metáforas”, Revista de Filosofía, 1, 2007, pp. 33–45. 16  RAE, Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española, online dictionary, 2021 (my transl.). 17  Further details on this point in Chap. 6. 11

3 Reply

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Based on Koselleck’s famous distinction,18 I argue that historiographical metaphors are, at the same time, factors in historical narration and indicators of experience. Consequently, “styles of scientific reasoning” as historiographical metaphors play a significant role in the writing of the history of science, as they convey the original factum of epistemological pluralism, and show the differential aspects of scientific culture. Besides, styles are also metaphors of experience, indicators of the processes of formation of scientific experience, and are closely linked to the constitution of a disciplinary corpus. In this respect, there is an essential tension pertaining to styles as historiographical metaphor: on the one hand the metaphor cannot hide its conventionality, but, on the other hand, it has the ambition to show the organization of scientific experience. I will later refer to this latter aspect as the “phenomenology of styles of scientific reasoning”.

3  Reply Based on the previous remarks, I formulate the following reply to Martin Kusch’s critique: i. Outdated historiographical position. The styles of reasoning are one of the best historiographical options to tackle the double problem of historicity and epistemological pluralism. There is no point in denying that there are different ways of doing science, and therefore some kind of historiographical tool to account for them is required. Kusch recognizes that “our central epistemic concepts, and indeed reasoning itself, have a history. And it is an important task of epistemology to reflect on the consequences of this historicity”.19 The styles are a historiographical device to address precisely that historicity. ii. Continuist, internalist, without revolutionary change. Crombie’s understanding of styles as longue durée lends itself to the critique of conveying the position of a continuist and internalist historian.20 Arnold I. Davidson, however, does not insist on long-lasting styles. Quite the contrary: strongly influenced by Foucault’s work, he tends to emphasize ruptures and singularities. The ruptures are also part of the historiographical ethos that encourages historical epistemology since its Bachelardian origins.21 Moreover, it is often forgotten that Kuhn himself came to recognize non-holistic scientific changes, something that is in  Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft  – Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am M., 1979. English transl. by Keith Tribe, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 19  M. Kusch, “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology”, op. cit., p. 169. 20  In this regard, Kusch states: “the longer durée we are opting for, the less properties the resulting style will have, and the thinner its concept will be”; “the diversity of situations the style has to cover is too great”; “loss in content goes hand in hand with loss in explanatory power”; “the prospects for explanation are brighter if we opt for courte-durée styles instead”. Ibid., p. 170. 21  Further details on this point in Chap. 8. 18

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Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

line with short- and medium-term styles of scientific reasoning. The “revolution as speciation”, for instance, outlined by Kuhn in his latest contributions is precisely a non-revolutionary type of scientific change.22 On styles and revolution, it is also worth recalling the following statement by Mary S. Morgan: “Indeed, the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not just one of content, but of styles of reasoning”.23 iii. Styles as super-social and autonomous entities. The styles defined as historiographical metaphors are not pre-existing entities that scientists would participate in the Platonic way. By considering them as a historiographical tool, styles lose their causal efficacy, although we should not completely renounce that they can capture the phenomenology associated with a certain historically situated scientific experience. Additionally, the mystification of the style causality can be corrected by reconnecting styles to specific scientists. After all, scientists are people who think and practice science in a certain context, and they do so in ways that identify them. The styles as historiographical metaphors are not transhistoric.24 iv. The demarcation problem among styles. Since historiographical metaphors are metahistorical metaphors, that is to say, narrative tools aimed to convey a second-­degree historical-philosophical reflection on plural historical sources, the demarcation problem can be assessed from a different viewpoint. Although I will later refer to this issue, I now suggest that the demarcation criteria among styles of reasoning can be provided by the phenomenology of a style of reasoning: its objects, concepts, statements, evidences, observational regimes, epistemic cultures and the specific type of explanations it produces. These are some of the elements based on which a taxonomy of styles can reasonably be elaborated for historiographical purposes. Moreover, the approach of the styles of reasoning allows the old Popperian question of demarcation to be reversed. The sciences incorporate some elements, discard others, and seem to do it consistently. What is the reason for all of this? It is possible to speak of a “legitimacy of style”, in the sense that once differentiation has occurred, the different ways of doing science resist being subsumed within each other. Rather, different styles tend to coexist in time, and usually we cannot say, in Lakatosian terms, that one style “supersedes” another.

 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “Revolution as Evolution: The Concept of Evolution in Kuhn’s Philosophy”, in: Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis (eds.). Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited, Routledge, London, 2012, pp.  138–139. Further details on this topic in Chap. 3. 23  Mary S.  Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, p. 37. 24  Concerning one of Arnold I. Davidson’s contributions, Peter Galison says: “No transcendental style of reasoning about perversions, sexuality, and impulses exists, we must give up any transhistorical unity in the psychological sciences”. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, p. 11. 22

4  Discussion and Final Remarks

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With this reply I do not wish, however, to hide the epistemic vices – using another fortunate metaphor – that the styles of reasoning show. I would like instead to draw attention at least to two of them: (i) insofar as the historiographical metaphors articulate the historical narrative, they easily become the center of interest, and hence they tend to attract excessive attention by displacing the historical object itself –a clear example is also offered by the Kuhnian paradigms regarding the history of the physical sciences; it is precisely this decentralization of the historical object of study that facilitates the articulation of very heterogeneous sources; (ii) ironically, an excessive theoretical emphasis on a certain historiographical metaphor  – e.g. paradigm, research programs, styles – soon reveals its emptiness, its intrinsic lack of informative quality.

3.1  S  ix Theses on the History and Philosophy of Styles of Scientific Reasoning Programmatically, I would like to state the following in relation to a historical epistemology of styles of scientific reasoning: i. “Styles” are a historiographical metaphor. ii. Their added value for the historiography of science is that they allow for addressing epistemological pluralism, the phenomena of scientific disunity, and the different ways of doing science. iii. They offer a heuristic tool to analyze the historical processes of formation of scientific experience. iv. Styles facilitate the study of the emergence of scientific disciplines in contexts of epistemological pluralism. v. It would be desirable to complement the enunciativist conception of scientific knowledge, which framed the styles of scientific reasoning in relation to the validation of statements (Hacking/Davidson) and the appearance of conceptual spaces (Davidson), with a notion of style based on “epistemic cultures” (Karin Knorr-Cetina, Mary S. Morgan). vi. The historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning ultimately constitutes a historiographical metaphorology or, in a complementary way, a metaphorological historiography.

4  Discussion and Final Remarks I will now briefly take into account the problem of demarcation among styles. To this aim I avail myself of the input coming from the phenomenology of styles of scientific reasoning. Granted that the styles emphasize the different ways of doing science, one might expect several peculiar features to become visible. In my

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Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

opinion, it is possible to distinguish at least seven components based on which the phenomenology of a certain style of scientific reasoning can be established: –– –– –– ––

Style objects, concepts, and propositions Style evidence and observational regimes Epistemic cultures Styles of explanation

In the wake of authors such as Crombie, Hacking, and Davidson, a style of reasoning is recognized based on the introduction of new objects, concepts, propositions, and evidence. Additional elements include observational regimes25 and epistemic cultures.26 Contemporary historical epistemology has been characterized precisely by the elaboration of historical case studies that demonstrate the historicity of these elements.27 More generally, a style of reasoning is singled out by a kind of explanation that is specific to it, a style of explanation, and involves different conditions of possibility for observation, the collection of evidence, the introduction of concepts and objects, the validation of propositions, and the use of epistemic cultures. Styles of explanation enable the historical analysis of the dynamics of scientific explanation, and are of special relevance in the understanding of both scientific change and the process of formation of disciplines. From this point of view, a scientific discipline is a fairly restrictive systematization of the kinds of explanation that are acceptable. That is why the styles of explanation are closely linked to both the process of scientific discipline formation and the phenomena of incommensurability and incommunicability.28 With regard to epistemic cultures, initially defined as those “cultures that create and warrant knowledge”,29 I suggest an extension of this notion in order to include  Javier Moscoso, “Celos románticos. Celos mórbidos. Un capítulo en la historia de la patologización de las pasiones”, Iberical. Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, 6, 2014, pp.  13–22; J.  Moscoso, Promesas incumplidas. Una historia política de las pasiones, Taurus, Madrid, 2017. 26  Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 1999. K.  Knorr-Cetina and W.  Reichmann, “Epistemic Cultures”, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 7, 2015, pp. 873–880. 27  See, among others, Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of Scientific Observation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011. L. Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson and Harry Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994. 28  Further details on this point in Chaps. 3 and 5. 29  K. Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, op. cit., p. 1. In a later work, Knorr-Cetina and Reichmann provide this broader definition: “amalgams of arrangements of mechanisms and elements bound together by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence which, in a given field, make up how we know what we know”. Knorr-Cetina and Reichmann, “Epistemic Cultures”, op. cit., p.  873. A discussion of this and other related notions in Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds.), Cultures Without Culturalism. The Making of Scientific Knowledge, Duke University Press, Durham, 2017. Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with 25

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the material, visual, and symbolic bases that support scientific knowledge. Some examples in this regard are the recent studies on the material culture of epistemic practices and related work on information recording and storage systems.30 These works clearly break with the enunciativist conception of knowledge – that tends to reduce scientific knowledge to its linguistic expression – and emphasize both physical and symbolic conditions that make the production of knowledge possible. Finally, I believe that the discussion would benefit from the introduction of the notion of “epistemic metaphors” to indicate the epistemological functions that some metaphors play in scientific culture. I understand epistemic metaphors as those metaphors typically leading to the production of scientific knowledge. As a result, they not only belong to the language of science but are also an integral part of epistemic cultures and their history. The main difference between a conventional metaphor and an epistemic metaphor is that the latter is provided with a constructive or destructive epistemological function. Blumenberg has remarked that some metaphors have the function of mediating in regard to an experience of inconceptuability, resulting in what he calls “absolute metaphors”.31 As previously mentioned, among his paradigms for a metaphorology he points to cases in which metaphors become concepts, and concepts become metaphors. In this respect, Blumenberg successfully grasps the epistemological function of some metaphors. I would add, however, that epistemic metaphors not only have constructive-figurative functions, of opening the way to new conceptualizations, but they may also have a critical-­ destructive role regarding the old conceptual systems.32 I can now say, in short, that historiographical metaphors – and, among them, that of style – constitute a type of epistemic metaphor with which to organize the historical narration.

Models, Metaphors, and Machines, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2002, p. 305. It is worth keeping in mind that Crombie understands styles in a cultural context. Further details in Alistair C.  Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation, Duckworth, London, 1994, p. ix. 30  L. Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive”, Osiris, vol. 27, 1, 2012, pp. 156–187. L. Daston (eds.), Science in the Archives. Pasts, Presents, Futures, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017. Thomas A. Stapleford, “Historical Epistemology and the History of Economics: Views Through the Lents of Practices”, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 34A, 2017, pp.  113–145. Cornelius Borck and Armin Schäfer (eds.), Das psychiatrische Aufschreibesystem, Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn, 2015. Omar Nasim, Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013. M. S. Morgan, The World in the Model, op. cit. 31  Blumenberg, Paradigms, op. cit. 32  Further details on this point in Chap. 6.

The Myth of the Framework and the Modes of Thought in Economics

The film ends with […] maybe the greatest final freeze-­ frame ever. Mike D’Angelo, “The Man Who Viewed Too Much”, 7 July 1997.

In this chapter I deal with the impact of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning on the analysis of communication breakdowns. To this aim I will make reference to the famous debate between Popper and Kuhn on the occasion of a symposium held in London in 1965. Popper saw in Kuhn’s early investigations on paradigms and incommensurability an example of what he labeled the “myth of the framework”, that is to say, “the belief that it is impossible for the investigators to shortly come out of the framework of concepts and principles within which they are working, and compare it with other competing frameworks”.1 In my opinion, the issue of the “myth of the framework” can help us clarify some basic assumptions underpinning the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning as well as its relevance for a theory of communication. In this regard, I will argue that the epistemological explanation of communication breakdowns implies a framework-­ based relativistic understanding of the styles of reasoning, while the taxonomies of styles presuppose a non-framework-based transcendental understanding of the styles of reasoning. On these grounds, I will suggest a revision of Dow’s theory of modes of thought in economics as well as of the ensuing polemics concerning methodological pluralism in ecological economics. All of this is meant to prepare the ground for the next chapter, in which I will articulate the proposal of a historical epistemology of styles of economic reasoning in relation to the history of ecological economics.

 Ulises Moulines, Popper y Kuhn: dos gigantes de la filosofía de la ciencia del siglo XX, Batiscafo, Barcelona, 2015, pp. 106–107 [my transl.].

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Fragio, Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics, Contributions to Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2_2

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The Myth of the Framework and the Modes of Thought in Economics

1  Introduction According to the viewpoint of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning, the validation of knowledge depends on the distinctive style of reference. Accordingly, based on this historiographical approach, one can follow the development of a theory of scientific communication, which could be described as a “historical epistemology of disagreement”. In this regard, the styles of reasoning allow us to thematize the difficulties in communication in the realm of science: it is easy to communicate within the same style; it is difficult outside of it.2 Although the main supporters of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning, such as Ian Hacking and Arnold I. Davidson, have rejected the relativist label,3 it is clear that based on their approach an explanation of communicative breakdown ensues which hinges upon a form of epistemological relativism and of pluralism.4 This epistemological explanation is what I call “historical epistemology of communicative breakdowns”. Kinzel and Kusch have extensively reviewed the scholarly literature establishing a relation between relativism and disagreement.5 Nevertheless, the simplicity and radicalness of the historical epistemology of disagreement – communication works well when the same style of reasoning is shared, but breaks down when no style of reasoning is shared – justifies, in my view, a dedicated investigation of its proposal. Due to its historicist orientation, the historical epistemology of disagreement does not entail – at least in principle – the issues linked to an excess of idealization, typical instead of the analytical epistemology of disagreement,6 nor are there reasons to restrict it to an enunciativist understanding of knowledge. However, caution is required with regard to the limits of a strictly epistemological explanation of communicative breakdowns, which tends to underplay other political, cultural, social, or institutional factors. In addition, a serious drawback is connected to the assumption of an artificial separation between internal history and external history. Despite all

2  Karen Lovejoy Knight, A. C. Pigou and the ‘Marshallian’ Thought Style. A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics, Palgrave, Cham, 2018, pp.  122–123. Alexander Peine, “Challenging Incommensurability: What We Can Learn from Ludwik Fleck for the Analysis of Configurational Innovation”, Minerva, 49, 4, 2011, pp. 489–508. 3   Martin Kusch, “Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies”, Erkenn., 75, 2011, pp. 483–494. Luca Sciortino, “Styles of Reasoning, Forms of Life, and Relativism”, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 30, 2, 2016, pp. 165–184. 4  More on the topic of pluralism in Hasok Chang, “Relativism, Perspectivism and Pluralism”, in: Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge, London and New York, 2020, pp. 398–406. Chang, Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism, Springer, Dordrecht, 2012. Particularly interesting are his definitions of descriptive, normative, tolerant, and interactive pluralism. 5  Katherina Kinzel and Martin Kusch, “De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2018, pp. 40–71. 6  Ibid., p. 41.

1 Introduction

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of this, I believe that the historical epistemology of disagreement deserves to be taken into consideration as a distinctive proposal in its own right.7 Kusch has reminded us that epistemological relativism should not be taken as one position only, but rather as a “spectrum of positions”.8 In this regard, one should think about the historical epistemology of disagreement as a particular type of relativist stance. Based on extensive literature, Kusch has defined the general characteristics of the relativist spectrum within what he calls “the standard model of (epistemic) relativism”.9 Following this model, it is possible to identify the distinctive relativism of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning in relation to – at least – the following elements: i. Pluralism: There exist a multiplicity of styles of scientific reasoning. ii. Self-validation, self-assessment, and self-correction: Each style of scientific reasoning validates itself and supports as valid its own criteria of evaluation. Moreover, it accepts modifications and self-corrects.10 iii. No absolutism: none of the styles of scientific reasoning is absolutely correct. iv. Epistemic dependence: Statements are legitimate in relation to a given style of reasoning, based on which they are intelligible and acquire the status of true scientific knowledge. v. Conflict and incommensurability: Some of the styles of scientific reasoning can come into conflict with one another. The statements that are legitimate in relation to one style of reasoning cannot be so in relation to another, within which they are unintelligible. vi. Symmetry: No hierarchy can be established between the different styles of reasoning, as the criteria of evaluation of one given style are not applicable to another style.11 vii. Faultless disagreement: Genuine contradictions can occur among different styles of reasoning, which does not affect the credibility of the conflicting styles and which does not require an attribution of responsibility for the disagreement. viii. Contingency: That a scientific community adopts a given style of reasoning is contingent. What the scientific community has once seen as evident can stop 7  Or anyway as complementary to the scrutiny of the controversies in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Kinzel and Kusch, ibid., pp. 41–42. 8  Kusch, “Epistemischer Relativismus” in: M.  Grajner and G.  Melchior (eds.), Handbuch Erkenntnistheorie, Metzler, Stuttgart, 2019, p.  338. Kusch, “Relativism in Feyerabend’s Later Writings”, Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci., 57, 2016, pp. 106–113. 9  Kusch, “Relativism in Feyerabend’s Later Writings”, op. cit., p. 106. Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge, London and New York, 2020, pp. 3–6. 10  According to Hacking, “styles of reasoning are ‘self-authenticating’: we become convinced that a style gets at the truth only by using that very style itself”; quoted in Kusch, “Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies”, Erkenn., 75, 2011, p. 484. 11  For a critical review of the notion of symmetry in relation to pluralism and perspectivism, I refer the reader to Chang, “Relativism, Perspectivism and Pluralism”, op. cit.

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being seen as such. At the same time, becoming aware of the contingency of the style of reasoning can erode its persuasive power. ix. Tolerance: It is common to tolerate the presence of other styles of reasoning that are different from one’s own. Within this scenario, the historical epistemology of disagreement can be identified as a form of epistemic relativism and pluralism, which simultaneously shapes some kind of explanans of communicative breakdowns in the scientific realm. This epistemological explanation of communication breakdowns clashes, however, against the ensuing attempts to establish a taxonomy of the styles of scientific reasoning, inasmuch as they adopt a transcendental viewpoint.12 In this respect, assuming an implicit epistemic relativism and simultaneously elaborating taxonomies of styles produces a performative contradiction, in that for the purposes of a taxonomy the styles are taken as “transparent” to the meta-critical and meta-­reflexive analysis which aims to identify the characteristics which define and singularize each style of reasoning. The meta-critical analysis typical of the taxonomies of styles of reasoning is ultimately based upon what Ronald N.  Giere named “perspective transcendent facts”.13 This type of analysis entails meta-evidence through which the differentiating features of each style can be compared in relation to a given classificatory proposal.14 One should easily spot here a striking ambivalence pertaining to the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning: while the historical epistemology of disagreement embraces a strain of epistemic relativism and pluralism as explanans of communication breakdowns, the several devised taxonomies of styles adopt a viewpoint which is transcendental, unitary and meta-critical. To the aim of further elucidating this ambivalence of the historical epistemology of scientific reasoning, I believe it is useful to retrieve the famous debate between Popper and Kuhn on the occasion of the symposium held in London in 1965. Popper saw in Kuhn’s early investigations on paradigms and incommensurability an example of what he labeled as the “myth of the framework”, that is to say, “the belief that it is impossible for the investigators to shortly come out of the framework of concepts and principles within which they are working, and compare it with other competing frameworks”.15 In his view, this belief was not only false but also dangerous,

12  Alistair C.  Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation, Duckworth, London, 1994. Arnold I.  Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2002. 13  Giere, “Feyerabend’s Perspectivism”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 57, 2016, pp. 137–138. Véase, asimismo, Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. 14  I borrow the expression “meta-evidence” from Steven D. Hales, “Motivations for Relativism as a Solution to Disagreements”, Philosophy, 89, 1, 2014, p. 82. 15  Moulines, Popper y Kuhn, op. cit., pp. 106–107.

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in that it hindered constructive dialogue and slowed down the development of science as critical and rational endeavor.

2  The Myth of the Framework Organized by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, the London symposium of 1965 is considered a peak moment in the history and philosophy of science. Some of the most important philosophers and historians of the time met there to discuss what was then the recent book by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The contributions to this gathering were published in 1970 under the title Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Within this context, the famous debate between Popper and Kuhn found its stage. The debate has been largely recounted and commented upon on several occasions,16 and has been the subject of a monographic study in the controversial book by Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper. The Struggle for the Soul of Science (2004).17 In the light of the contemporary philosophy of science, this famous controversy opposing Popper and Kuhn might seem a little outdated.18 Nevertheless, it offers –in my view– relevant elements to the analysis of the historical epistemology of communicative breakdowns, notably in relation to “the myth of the framework”.19 In reference to this myth, Popper advocated the opposite claim to Kuhn’s incommensurability.20 In his view, a critical discussion, as  See, for instance, John Worrall, “Normal Science and Dogmatism, Paradigms and Progress: Kuhn ‘versus’ Popper and Lakatos”, en: Thomas Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 65–100. S. López and A. Domingo (eds.), Popper y Kuhn: Ecos de un debate, Editorial Montesinos, 2003. 17  In these terms Fuller would sum up the backbones of the debate: “Popper promoted a version of this strategy in his attack on the ‘myth of the framework’, the Kuhnian idea that the presence of incommensurable theories rendered any explicit normative comparison so difficult that one simply had to wait for history to take its course, as individuals come to adopt one or another theory for their own reasons. In contrast, Popper argued that if the incommensurable theories are truly scientific, they aspire to universality, which means that there will be cases that they have yet to explain or predict. These cases may then serve as relatively neutral ground for designing a crucial experiment to decide amongst the theories”. Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper. The Struggle for the Soul of Science, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004, pp. 38–39. 18  For the moment, one should note that behind the formulation of the myth of the framework stands a dialogical understanding of science, anchored on an enunciativist theory of scientific knowledge, based on which epistemologically prominent is the language of science – and not, for instance, the production of models or epistemic cultures. 19  It is probably not useless to point to Popper’s naive use of the notion of “myth”. Something similar is done by other authors, such as Georgescu-Roegen in reference to “economic myths”. Those who are well acquainted with the work of the historical anthropology, and with texts such as Work on Myth by Blumenberg, would hardly agree with such a superficial and derogatory use of the word “myth”. 20  Stefano Gattei, Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Linguistic Turn’ and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism: Incommensurability, Rationality and the Search for Truth, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008, pp. 52–53. More on incommensurability and the issue of communication can be found in the valuable book 16

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well as the comparing of different intellectual frameworks, is always possible. Consequently, communication breakdowns in the field of science should not be considered as the result of unshared and incommensurable assumptions, but as the lack of a genuine will to overcome them and of true critical spirit. As he considered himself a “critical rationalist”, and the partisan of a universalist conception of science based on mandatory rules, Popper saw in the work of the young Kuhn the canonical model of an antagonist irrationalism and relativism. Granted that scientists are irreparably captive in a framework and the frameworks are incommensurable with one another, it is then impossible to evaluate the merits and demerits of competing frameworks, and the passage from one to the other cannot but be based on an arbitrary decision: “in the absence of common criteria for the evaluating of the different frameworks, each scientist can continue to adhere to the relative truth of their framework, no matter what, as they like”.21 Without going into the details of the debate,22 and in relation to the specific argument at hand, Popper’s criticism of Kuhn can be summarized in the following points: i. Rational discussion within a common framework. According to Kuhn, the rationality of science requires the acceptance of a common framework, which includes a set of assumptions and a shared language. Popper agrees that “‘normal’ science presupposes an organized structure of assumptions […] needed by the community of scientists in order to discuss their work rationally”.23 However, Kuhn is wrong to consider that scientists are “logically forced to accept a framework, since no rational discussion is possible between frameworks”.24 ii. Communicative breakdown. Popper attributes to Kuhn a theory of rational communication based on a single framework: the leading paradigm in times of normal science. In contrast, during periods of extraordinary science, the “communication between scientists had broken down, owing to the absence of a dominant theory”.25 In Popper’s view, the history of science proves this idea wrong in that ever since antiquity discussions between competing theories have been constant and helpful. iii. Fruitful discussions. Kuhn turns a communicative difficulty into an impossibility. Although serious difficulties can be recorded when it comes to having a by Xinli Wang, Incommensurability and Cross-Language Communication [2007], Routledge, London and New York, 2016. 21  Moulines, Popper and Kuhn, op. cit., pp. 106–107. Moulines rejects the idea supported by some scholars, according to which the whole debate originates from diverging opinions on whether the philosophy of science should be normative (Popper) or descriptive (Kuhn). 22  For a broader discussion of the debate, I refer the reader to Worrall, “Normal Science and Dogmatism”, op. cit. 23  Popper, “Normal Science and its Dangers”, in: Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Series: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, volume 4. Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 51. 24  Ibid., p. 57. Emphasis in the original. 25  Ibid., p. 55.

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discussion with people with different frameworks than one’s own, these discussions are usually – if anything – very fruitful. The clash between cultures has stimulated some of the greatest intellectual revolutions.26 iv. Untranslatability. It is a dangerous dogma to believe that different frameworks are mutually untranslatable. On the contrary, comparison and critical discussion between different competing frameworks are always possible.27 v. Framework variability. Rather than being defined by a single dominant framework over extended periods of time, as Kuhn would have it, Popper suggests that typical features of science are criticism and the making of bold conjectures that ultimately advance knowledge.28 In short, the myth of the framework and its relativistic drift would entail losing precisely what makes science science: its critical ethos. Betraying this ethos turns science into an irrational enterprise, that is to say, bad science. “In my view the ‘normal’ scientist, as Kuhn describes him, is a person one ought to be sorry for. […] The ‘normal’ scientist, as described by Kuhn, has been badly taught. He has been taught in a dogmatic spirit: he is a victim of indoctrination”.29 Kuhn, in short, would be fatally immersed in “the logic of historical relativism”.30 For his part, we can summarize Kuhn’s criticisms of Popper in the following terms: i. Normal science and extraordinary science. Popper tends to characterize the entire scientific enterprise in a way that is really only applicable to its revolutionary phases. He confuses normal science, which seems to him dogmatic and bad, with revolutionary science, which he considers critical and good. However, it is not correct to transfer the characteristics of science as practiced in its phase of exceptionality to its phase of normality.31 ii. Revolution as shift in framework. Scientific revolutions are such precisely because they involve the rejection and replacement of a certain framework, or at least of some of its most important parts.32 iii. Assessment. If we could step out of our framework at any time  – as Popper believes – and settle into a better and wider framework, and then step out of it again at will, then there should be no problem in freely entering a foreign framework in order to evaluate it, which certainly does not seem to be the case. On the  Ibid., pp. 56–67.  Ibid., pp. 56–57. 28  Ibid., p. 55. 29  Ibid., pp. 52–53. 30  Ibid., p. 55. The emphasis is Popper’s. 31  Kuhn, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?”, in: Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Series: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, volume 4. Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 6. 32  Kuhn, “Reflections on my Critics”, in: Lakatos and Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 242. 26 27

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contrary, frameworks happen to “grid on the mind” and it is not so easy to break them. In order to break them, they must first be lived and explored.33 iv. Dispensable frameworks. A framework cannot be both essential for scientific inquiry and dispensable.34 v. Second language argument. The issue would not so much concern different frameworks being mutually untranslatable. Rather, their reciprocal relationship would resemble the difficulties of learning a second language, which are different and much more complex than those of doing a translation.35 vi. Partial communication. More than a total communicative breakdown between different frameworks, Kuhn sees communication between incommensurable points of view as incomplete or partial. In his opinion, the very volume edited by Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, is a good example of partial communication.36 One could sum up the perspective of the young Kuhn in relation to Popper’s critique of the myth of the framework with the well-known apocryphal joke by Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well I have others”.

2.1  The Myth of the Framework Revisited As far as I know, Kuhn never worked on the myth of the framework again. Popper, on the other hand, newly addressed this issue in his contribution to a book edited by E.  Freeman,37 and in a short essay included in the posthumous The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (1994). There he briefly made reference to his polemic with Kuhn. In a footnote he remarked that: “The phenomenon of normal science was discovered, but not criticized, by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn is, I believe, mistaken in thinking that ‘normal’ science is not only normal today but always was so. On the contrary, in the past –until 1939– science was almost always critical, or ‘extraordinary’. There was no scientific ‘routine’”.38 This posthumously published essay by Popper can be read as an attempt to generalize the claims formulated in 1965 in the controversy with Kuhn, based on the same idea that relativism finds shelter under the myth of the framework. Based on this view, Popper argues, “truth is relative to our intellectual background, which is  Ibid.  Ibid. 35  Ibid., p. 267. 36  Ibid., pp. 231–232. 37  Popper, “The Myth of Framework”, in: E.  Freeman (ed.), The Abdication of Philosophy, La Salle, Illinois, 1976, pp. 23–38. 38  Popper, The Myth of the Framework. In Defense of Science and Rationality, edited by M.A. Notturno, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p. 76, fn 8. 33 34

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supposed to determine somehow the framework within which we are able to think that truth may change from one framework to another”.39 In particular, Popper criticizes the belief in “the impossibility of mutual understanding between different cultures, generations, or historical periods –even within science, even within physics”.40 In what follows, I isolate some key points in Popper’s argument: i. Definition of framework: Popper understands the framework as “a set of basic assumptions, or fundamental principles –that is to say, an intellectual framework”.41 ii. Definition of the myth of the framework: The myth of the framework corresponds to the belief that “a rational and fruitful discussion is impossible unless the participants share a common framework of basic assumptions or, at least, unless they have agreed on such a framework for the purpose of the discussion”.42 Consequently, the myth of the framework considers that communication breakdowns are due to not sharing the same set of assumptions. iii. Confrontation principle: While discussions within a shared framework tend to be boring and sterile, discussions that involve different frameworks are often interesting and fruitful, especially if there is “the clash, or confrontation, of different frameworks”.43 In fact, for knowledge to increase, the existence of disagreement is required. Criticism and discussion are necessary for the advancement of knowledge. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, is its death. iv. Psychologism: Although the myth of the framework contains a kernel of truth, it is not really a logical principle, but rather “a vicious statement”.44 The myth of the framework results from the delusion ensuing from excessive optimism concerning the power of reason, or from disappointed expectation concerning the results one wished from a discussion.45 v. Translation: “An awareness of the difficulties of translation between different languages has also contributed to the myth”.46 vi. Critical transcendence. Against “the addicts of the various frameworks”, Popper advocates “the ideal of liberating oneself from the intellectual prison of a theory”,47 since “critical thought can challenge and transcend a framework”.48

 Ibid., p. 33.  Ibid. 41  Ibid., p. 35. 42  Ibid., pp. 34–35. 43  Ibid., p. 38. 44  Ibid., p. 35. 45  Ibid., p. 44. 46  Ibid., p. 49. 47  Ibid., p. 53. 48  Ibid., p. 59. It should be noted that critical transcendence is assumed while establishing a taxonomy of reasoning styles. 39 40

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vii. Epistemic independence. It is possible to evaluate the merit and truth value of a theory without pinning it to a specific framework. Rational discussion is viable even within changeable frameworks.49 In this new approach to the myth of the framework, Popper argues in favor of a kind of dialogical ethic based on which the interlocutors have to give up wanting to win the debate at all costs. The slightest clarification of the problem under discussion already qualifies, in his opinion, as a great communicative success. The greatest gain, however, is achieved when a closed framework is broken, and one is freed from the “prison of the moment”.50 The myth of the framework, according this time to Bachelard’s terminology, is simply an “epistemological obstacle”. Without going into assessing who won – or who wanted to win – this famous debate, I would like to point out that the historical epistemology of communication breakdowns assumes the myth of the framework as valid, while the taxonomies of styles imply its rejection. The ambivalence of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning ensues from assuming a framework-based relativistic understanding of the styles of reasoning when it comes to accounting for communicative breakdowns, but a non-framework-based transcendental understanding of the styles of reasoning when it comes to establishing a classification of the styles. In the first case, a framework-based epistemic pluralism is assumed, while in the second a non-framework-based epistemic pluralism is assumed. Following Siegel’s suggestion, the claim of epistemic dependence may be identified as a “framework relativism”.51 This framework relativism would be the ultimate and most comprehensive epistemological explanation of communicative breakdowns between various styles of scientific reasoning, insofar as the validation of knowledge occurs within a framework-based reasoning style. As a result, granted that statements expressing cognitive content are meaningless outside of the reasoning style in which they are formulated, and since the fundamental differences between styles prevent an identification and comparison of the respective cognitive content, framework relativism clearly involves elements of incommensurability. This is how the historical epistemology of disagreement offers a plausible epistemological explanation of communicative breakdowns. However, the elaboration of style taxonomies presupposes that they are perfectly accessible to metacritical or metareflective analysis, and consequently that they dispense with framework relativism in favor of what can be called “perspective transcendentalism”. This amounts to saying that the classifications of styles would be achieved based on some kind of non-framework-based transcendental meta-style of reasoning, with all the problems entailed by what Kusch has identified as the lack

 “Some protagonists of this view even think that we can speak of truth only relative to a framework”; “Without a framework it is not even thought to be possible to agree what constitutes a point of ‘merit’ in a theory”, ibid., p. 54. 50  “Idea of self-liberation, of breaking out of one’s prison of the moment”, ibid., p. 53. 51  Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted. A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism, Springer, Dordrecht, 1987, p. 32. 49

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of reflexivity of historical epistemology.52 Determining a taxonomy presupposes that the characteristics of the different styles can be identified, and that on their basis a meta-theory can be established about the different ways of reasoning and validating scientific knowledge. If phenomena of strong incommensurability were actually given, we would not even be in a position to apprehend the defining characteristics of other styles, as we would be enclosed within the framework of a particular style. In conclusion, the historical epistemology of styles of scientific reasoning switches seamlessly between a framework-based relativistic perspective on styles and a non-framework-based transcendental perspective on styles. Whereas the historical epistemology of communicative breakdowns can be seen as an instance of the myth of the framework, the taxonomies of styles radically challenge it.

3  Thinking Modes in Economics Scottish economist Sheila C. Dow’s work on modes of thought in economics offers an important avenue of analysis to delve deeper into the question of framework-­ based and non-framework-based styles of reasoning. The groundwork provided by Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes of Thought (1938) inspired Dow’s view regarding the history of major macroeconomic doctrines. In her book Macroeconomic Thought: A Methodological Approach (1985), she introduced two modes of economic thought, the “Euclidean/Cartesian” and the “Babylonian”. In her opinion, these modes of thought and their associated methodologies allow for the establishment of a demarcation criterion between different schools of macroeconomics. In particular, while orthodox macroeconomics would be guided by the E ­ uclidean/

 Kusch, “Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies”, Erkenn., 75, 2011, pp. 483–494. Kusch, “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 2010, pp. 158–173. Daston and Galison’s book, Objectivity (2007), is to be taken as a contribution to the historical epistemology of scientific objectivity, based on the history of the five styles of scientific objectivity or epistemic virtues (“Truth-to-nature”, “mechanical objectivity”, “structural objectivity”, “trained judgment”, and “presentification”). In fact, Daston and Galison’s book presents many of the historiographic characteristics of reasoning styles, such as pluralism, a comparative approach, and a wide-scale narrative . According to Kusch, the authors aim “to historize both scientific epistemic virtues and the frameworks for investigating these virtues”. However, they incur a reflexivity problem: “which of their five epistemic virtues most guides their own efforts?”, Kusch, “Objectivity and Historiography”, Isis, 100, 2009, p. 129. It is worth noting, furthermore, that Objectivity also does not assume the myth of the framework, insofar as it compares different types of objectivity and does not take into account phenomena of incommensurability. The following quote clarifies this point: “Nor need the psychological be opposed to the collective, except within a framework that assumes that the psychological is ipso facto individual and therefore in contradistinction to the sociological. It is precisely the ineluctability of this framework that our book questions by intertwining epistemology and ethos – and by insisting that epistemic fear can be simultaneously reasonable, psychological, and collective”. Daston and Galison, “Objectivity and its Critics”, Victorian Studies, 50, 4, 2008, p. 671.

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Cartesian way of thinking, post-Keynesian macroeconomics – advocated by Dow – would be based on the Babylonian way of thinking. In the second edition of her book, published under the title The Methodology of Macroeconomic Thought. A Conceptual Analysis of Schools of Thought in Economics (1996), Dow tried to clarify and expand her initial proposal concerning modes of thought in economics based on the notions of open and closed systems,53 in reference to which she briefly tried to respond to the numerous criticisms her work received.54 Dow defined the mode of thought as “the way in which arguments (or theories) are constructed and presented, how we attempt to convince others of the validity or truth of our arguments […]. It is a broader concept still than ‘methodology’, and indeed influences our judgment as to what constitutes an acceptable methodological position”.55 This initial characterization underwent successive transformations throughout her work, often in close dialogue with Kuhn’s formulations. In this regard, she went so far as to affirm that “the modern methodological position most closely associated with the notion of Babylonian thought is Kuhn’s classification of the development of science in terms of paradigms”.56 In later work, Dow noted that “the term ‘mode of thought’ […] refers to the principles of knowledge construction and communication which underpin choice of methodology, and indeed daily life”, and added, “arguments about the relative merits of different methodologies (such as Post Keynesian and mainstream) can founder through lack of recognition that different modes of thought are also involved”.57 In this respect, the problem faced by Dow in her history of macroeconomic doctrines was both philosophical and historiographical. Given that schools of macroeconomics are based on different modes of thought, which in turn determine their methodologies and evaluation criteria, how to write a history of macroeconomics without coming into conflict with the methodologies and evaluation criteria of each school? The mere fact of comparing the different schools of macroeconomics already entails siding with the Euclidean/Cartesian way of thinking, and assuming the existence of a common language on the model of classical logic.58 That is why, in her opinion, granted that there is no way around the pluralism of  Dow, The Methodology of Macroeconomic Thought. A Conceptual Analysis of Schools of Thought in Economics [1985], Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1996, p. 13. 54  For example, Bruce J.  Caldwell referred to the proposed modes of thought as an “awkward attempt at methodological justification”; Caldwell, “Reviews”, Economics and Philosophy, 2, 1986, p. 144. See also John B. Davis, “Book Reviews”, History of Political Economy, June 2000, pp. 403–404. 55  Dow, Macroeconomic Thought: A Methodological Approach, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985, p. 11. 56  Dow, Foundations for New Economic Thinking. A Collection of Essays, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2012, p.  62. “[...] Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm provides a useful focus for the methodological implications of the Babylonian mode of thought”, p. 63. 57  Dow, “Babylonian Mode of Thought” [2003], in: J. King (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics, second edition, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2012, p. 15. 58  Dow, Foundations, op. cit., pp. 69–70. 53

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macroeconomics schools, a discussion of the methodological principles of economic sciences was mandatory.

3.1  Open and Closed Systems of Thought For the sake of our inquiry, a correlation can be established between the proposal concerning open and closed systems of thought and the debate on the myth of the framework.59 According to Dow, the salient features of a closed system are as follows:60 1. Variables can be identified. 2. The limits of a system can be specified, so that it is possible to distinguish clearly between exogenous and endogenous variables. 3. Only specified exogenous variables can affect the system, and they do so in a known or predetermined way. 4. Relations among variables are either known or random. 5. The components of the system are separable, independent and atomic. Also, their nature is constant. 6. The structure of the relations among the components of the system is known or predetermined. In contrast, an open system is defined by the following features: 1. In a complex system there is no certainty that all relevant variables have been identified. 2. System boundaries are semi-permeable or their positions are not clear and/or may change. This implies that the distinction between exogenous and endogenous variables may not be permanent. 3. The effects of the variables on the system can be uncertain. 4. Knowledge of the relations among variables is imperfect. 5. Interactions can occur between agents and these can change. 6. The connections between the structures may be imperfectly known and/or be subject to change. Structure and agency are typically interdependent. Based on this classification, the Euclidean/Cartesian mode of thought would qualify as a closed system, and the Babylonian mode of thought as an open system. The following are some of the main features of the Euclidean/Cartesian mode of thought: i. Closed structure, deduction and dualism. The Euclidean/Cartesian mode is a closed system of thought, but with universal application. It is based on a finite set of axioms to which the inference rules of classical logic are applied. It also makes use of mutually exclusive concepts with fixed meaning. In this regard, 59 60

 Ibid., pp. 166–168.  Ibid., pp. 171–172.

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this mode of thought is dualistic. And it is best exemplified in Euclidean geometry and Cartesian rationalism.61 Within the realm of economics, it finds its best representatives in the general equilibrium theory and mainstream economics.62 ii. Commensurability of arguments. This mode of thought builds long chains of arguments based on classical deductive logic, in which all parts stand in commensurate relationship, insofar as they refer to the same initial set of axioms as to their common origin.63 iii. Consistency. “Inconsistency is anathema to Cartesian/Euclidean thought”.64 iv. Universal evaluation criteria. Universal evaluation criteria are assumed to exist. v. Uniqueness. There is only one correct view of reality. vi. The dual, methodological monism and pure pluralism. Its dual is not the Babylonian mode of thought but the non-Euclidean/Cartesian mode, which Dow tends to identify with postmodern, constructivist and rhetorical approaches.65 While the Euclidean/Cartesian mode focuses on what can be known, and relies on a methodological monism, its dual focuses on the unknown, where “anything goes” and any methodology is valid. This last position is referred to as “pure pluralism”. vii. Intolerance. Based on the idea that there is only a single correct view of reality and one appropriate methodology to achieve it, the Euclidean/Cartesian mode of thought does not accept alternative approaches. For its part, the Babylonian mode of thought is referenced by Dow in “an attempt to identify a way of approaching economic analysis which is quite different from the mainstream”.66 The origin of the term “Babylonian” in economics is a biographical sketch of Newton made by Keynes.67 This term “apparently fell into misuse until introduced to modern economics in Stohs’s (1983) note on the subject of Keynes on

 Dow, “Babylonian Mode of Thought”, op. cit.  Dow, Foundations, op. cit., pp. 53–56. Caldwell comments on this: “In the chapter on equilibrium, it would seem that about the only good thing we can say about equilibrium theorizing is that it exemplifies the Cartesian/Euclidean mode of thought. Thus, when Frank Hahn defends the general equilibrium approach as aiding us to do ‘the best we can’, Dow quickly points out: “The general equilibrium framework is in fact the only one which meets the Cartesian/Euclidean criteria for scientific inquiry, so that ‘the best we can’ means ‘the best we can within that framework’”, Caldwell, “Reviews”, op. cit., p. 143. 63  Dow, “Axioms and Babylonian Thought: A Reply”, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2005, p. 390. 64  Dow, Foundations, op. cit., p. 59. 65  Jack J. Vromen, “Reviews”, Economics and Philosophy, 14, 1998, pp. 160–161. 66  Dow, “Babylonian Mode of Thought”, op. cit., p. 15. 67  Newton “was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago”. Keynes, quoted by Dow, “Babylonian Mode of Thought”, op. cit., p. 15. 61 62

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uncertainty, which he argued could be developed further on Babylonian lines. He had picked up the Babylonian category from Wimsatt’s (1981) discussion in terms of the social sciences in general, in juxtaposition to Cartesian/Euclidean thought”.68 Wimsatt, in turn, had developed the idea from a short essay by Richard Feynman, entitled The Character of Physical Law (1965), in which the American physicist referred to the relationships between mathematics and physics. Feynman identified a Babylonian tradition in mathematics, in which physical laws could be derived from very different starting points, in contrast to the Euclidean approach, which requires deductive reasoning based on a set of axioms.69 Feynman argued that in physics the Babylonian tradition was often preferable. The Babylonian mode of thought thus appears as counteracting the limitations of the Euclidean/Cartesian mode, as revealed both in its application to practical problems and when it comes to ensuring the validity of its arguments. Since the long Euclidean/Cartesian chains of reasoning are built on the constant increase of auxiliary hypotheses, errors can be easily propagated, which make the ensuing final conclusions doubtful despite the self-evidence of the original axioms. On these grounds, Dow argues, an alternative approach relying on short chains of reasoning is required. This should be based on different starting points according to the specificities of the problems at stake and of the methods used to solve them.70 The following are some of the key features of the Babylonian mode of thought: i. Open structure, uncertainty and non-dualism. The Babylonian mode is an open system of thought. It assumes that the full understanding of reality is unattainable. For this reason, it makes use of a wide range of partial analyses in order to deal with uncertainty and incompleteness of knowledge in the most effective way possible. Likewise, it is assumed that there are important limits to the formalization of knowledge and that dualistic forms of reasoning must be transcended. The use of vague categories, for example, can have the advantage of being able to adapt to changing environments. The Babylonian mode of thought is exemplified by Keynes’ work, in particular by his theory of uncertainty and investment, but also by heterodox approaches in economics.71 ii. Incommensurability of arguments. Unlike the Euclidean/Cartesian mode, in which extensive chains of reasoning can be constructed based on the same initial set of axioms, the Babylonian mode of thought does not have one single starting point. Its foundations rest on what could be called “Feynman’s incommensurability”, that is, the idea that any question can be approached from a multiplicity of starting points and the ensuing argumentative itineraries are reciprocally incommensurable. Instead of articulating a single general formal  Ibid., p. 15.  Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), London, 1965, pp. 47 and 56–70. 70  Dow, “Axioms and Babylonian Thought”, op. cit., p. 388. 71  Dow, Foundations, op. cit., pp.  58, 66 and 70. Jack J.  Vromen, “Reviews”, Economics and Philosophy, 14, 1998, pp. 157–163. 68 69

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system, reality is segmented into a series of disconnected partial analyses, since it is not possible to combine them into a single argumentative chain. One line of reasoning may be based, for example, on statistics, while another may be based on historical research.72 iii. Inconsistency. The coexistence of a multiplicity of partial analyses may mean that some of these analyses are inconsistent with each other or that it is not possible to group them together in a coherent formal system. However, inconsistency may not necessarily be logical, since the chains of reasoning may well rely on different assumptions.73 iv. Absence of universal evaluation criteria. There are no universal evaluation criteria. Nevertheless, epistemological anarchism does not apply here.74 v. Plurivocity. There is not only one correct view of reality. vi. Non-dual of the Euclidean/Cartesian mode and structured pluralism. Dow argues that the Babylonian mode is neither the dual of the Euclidean/Cartesian mode nor of the non-Euclidean/Cartesian mode, since it actually transcends both modes of thought. Unlike these latter, instead of assuming that everything is knowable or unknowable, the Babylonian mode of thought assumes that there are degrees of knowledge. For this very reason, instead of methodological monism or pure pluralism, the Babylonian mode of thought assumes a “structured pluralism” or “modified pluralism”, in which a variety of methodologies are used for different chains of reasoning, and no method is believed to guarantee ultimate knowledge about the real world. vii. Tolerance. Based on the idea that there are multiple partial views of reality and a variety of methodologies to consistently and rationally support them, the Babylonian mode of thought tolerates alternative approaches. One of the critics of Dow’s theory maliciously commented that this mode of thought cannot avoid its “Babylonian incoherent babble”.75 Of course, Dow has been well aware of persuasion difficulties among schools of macroeconomics, and has never stopped referring to the problems of incommensurability and communicative breakdown: “without some categorization of language itself, within a framework of schools of thought, there would be no point of reference on which to base efforts to communicate”.76 In this regard, she defended the idea of partial communication between schools of macroeconomics through a “structured pluralism”,77 which  Dow, Macroeconomic Thought, op. cit., p. 16. Dow, “Post Keynesianism and Critical Realism: What is the Connection?”, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1999, p. 21. 73  Dow, Foundations, p. 59. 74  Dow, “Axioms and Babylonian Thought”, op. cit., p. 388. Dow, “Post Keynesianism and Critical Realism”, op. cit., p. 20, fn 6. 75  In Paul Davidson’s expression quoted by Dow, “Axioms and Babylonian Thought”, op. cit., p. 385. 76  Dow, Foundations, op. cit., p. 177. See also Dow, “Structured Pluralism”, Journal of Economic Methodology, 11, 3, 2004, pp. 279 and 286–287. 77  “There is reflexivity specifically in the argument that incommensurability of language is only partial, and therefore that communication of sorts is deemed to be possible. Indeed we shall see 72

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would come to stand halfway between a framework-based epistemological pluralism and a non-framework-based epistemological pluralism.

3.2  Modes of Thought and Methodological Pluralism Dow remarks that the very notion of pluralism acquires a different meaning if it is seen against the backdrop of a closed system mode of thought – as in mainstream economics – or if it is inscribed in an open system mode of thought –as in post-­ Keynesian, evolutionary and institutional economics. The first case is referred to as “pure pluralism”, which would correspond to the negation of the Euclidean/ Cartesian mode of thought. Based on this kind of pluralism there would be no way of comparing different understandings. We would not be in a position to cross-­ evaluate the wide spectrum of possible methodologies, and rational justifications would be eliminated in favor of “anything goes”.78 As to the second case, instead, open system pluralism is referred to as “structured pluralism” or “modified pluralism”. This would be precisely the case when the identification of various schools in economics occurs according to a Babylonian mode of thought, which “requires some criteria by which to choose segmentations of the subject matter for analysis, the chains of reasoning to pursue, and the methods employed to pursue them. This means that pluralism in Babylonian thought is not ‘pure pluralism’, but rather structured. The subject matter is regarded as too complex to be captured fully in any one analytical system, so a range of choices as to methodology is possible”.79 Dow’s main conclusion is that pure pluralism is untenable inasmuch as the production of knowledge and its subsequent communication require selection criteria. Instead, she considers structured pluralism as an attainable option, especially if grounded in some type of ontology, such as the one proposed by Tony Lawson with

this issue is one that is addressed by structured pluralism”. Dow, “Structured Pluralism”, op. cit., pp. 276–277. 78  As is well known, the expression “anything goes” was popularized in epistemology by Feyerabend. It should be remarked, however, that “Feyerabend’s slogan ‘anything goes’ does not say: do whatever you like, it’s all justifiable; it says that all principles of scientific rationality have exceptions, such that it is sometimes rationally defensible –in order to achieve scientific progress– to intentionally go against them”. M. Kusch, “Relativist Stances, Virtues and Vices”, Aristotelian Society, Vol. XCIII, 2019, p. 287. 79  Dow, “Babylonian Mode of Thought”, op. cit. In a previous work she clarified: “I had originally chosen the term Babylonian, thinking of it as being relatively unencumbered with old meanings, and having been attracted to Feynman’s account of mathematics. But, of course, the term does have old meanings, and my use of it suffered from the more dualistic habits of thought prevalent in the 1980s. Addressing the dualistic (‘anything goes’) interpretation has at least provided a vehicle for trying to spell out the middle ground. But I have already concluded that a different term is required, which is why the argument is now expressed in terms of ‘structured pluralism’; this hopefully conveys better the intended combination of logical rigor and uncertain knowledge (rather than a dualistic choice between the two)”. Dow, “Axioms and Babylonian Thought”, op. cit., p. 388.

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his “critical realism”.80 In any case, the requirements inherent in effective, albeit partial, communication prevent the simultaneous use of an excessive number of methodologies. Therefore, the pluralism embraced by the schools of thought can only be structured.81 Some critics of Dow’s work have repeatedly pointed out that this approach is insufficient and affected by circularity. If each school of macroeconomics is caught up in its way of thinking and methodology, it is not surprising that it does well when evaluated according to its own criteria and poorly when the criteria of other schools are applied. This entails, for example, “that post Keynesians cannot but reject theories of mainstream economists and vice versa. What room, then, is left for a reasoned debate? […] Dow is quite optimistic in believing that paying attention to each other’s methodological underpinnings makes economists belonging to different schools not only more tolerant towards each other, but may also result in economists now and then persuading other economists”.82 In addition, as one might have already noticed, Dow’s theory of modes of thought not only reproduces a structuralist understanding which resembles the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning – discussed in the previous chapter – but also features a problematic oscillation between a framework-based relativism and a perspective transcendentalism. Dow’s analysis of the two great modes of economic thought is carried out by means of a transcendental meta-style of non-­ framework-­based reasoning. However, it replicates very similar issues to those pointed out by Kusch concerning the lack of reflexivity in historical epistemology. Despite all these ambivalences, Dow’s proposal for a structured pluralism has been accepted by Clive L. Spash, who has introduced it into the debate on methodological pluralism in ecological economics. In the last section I will review the ensuing controversy in order to make sense of the history of ecological economics from the point of view of the historical epistemology of the styles of reasoning.

4  T  he Debate on Methodological Pluralism in Ecological Economics Dow’s theory of the modes of thought in economics has seen important development in the debate on methodological pluralism in ecological economics, where “structured pluralism” has become a key point.83 In fact, some of the main promoters of ecological economics, while seeking a meeting point between social and natural scientists, have jumped at the opportunity to combine modes of thought

 Dow, “Post Keynesianism and Critical Realism”, op. cit., pp. 15–33.  Dow, Foundations, p. 174. 82  Vromen, “Reviews”, op. cit., p. 161–162. 83  Alex Lo, “The Problem of Methodological Pluralism in Ecological Economics”, MPRA Paper, No. 49543, 2014 (http://mpra.ub.unimuenchen.de/49543/). 80 81

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from both the economic sciences and the environmental sciences.84 One should bear in mind that ecological economics incorporates truly heterogeneous traditions with respect to conventional economics,85 such as general systems theory, based on the influence of heterodox economists, such as Kenneth E.  Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, as well as thanks to the reception of diverse approaches typical of physical sciences, ecology and biology, among others.86 The distinctive features of the types of evidence employed by ecological economics and how it generates arguments and persuasion strategies qualify this approach for an analysis based on the perspective of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning. In particular, the approach of historical epistemology applied to economics seems to provide a particularly well-suited ground for the study of the differential aspects of ecological economics, as well as of the historical process shaping its field, as we will see in the next chapter. Here I am going to limit myself to addressing the debate on methodological pluralism in ecological economics in reference to two antagonistic cases, that of Richard B. Norgaard and collaborators, and that of Clive L. Spash. I will argue that Norgaard’s can be taken as a case of non-framework-based methodological pluralism, while Spash’s is a case of framework-based methodological pluralism.

4.1  R  ichard B. Norgaard (1989) and Frameworks without Relativism Norgaard’s 1989 article “The Case for Methodological Pluralism”, published in the first issue of the journal Ecological Economics, is often seen as one of the standard texts on ecological economics. This short essay, together with the accounts of post-­ normal science and complex systems,87 outlined the initial epistemological pledge of the then nascent contemporary ecological economics. In it, Norgaard made a case for methodological pluralism. His main claim is that in ecology and economics there are “ways of knowing”, with their respective associated methodologies. However, while ecology features great methodological richness, the “neoclassical

 Robert Costanza, “What is Ecological Economics?”, Ecological Economics, 1, 1989, p. 1.  With great lucidity, Dow points out that: “methodological pluralism has probably been most strongly advocated by economists associated with non-mainstream schools of thought”, Dow, Foundations, op. cit. p. 163. 86  Óscar Carpintero, “When Heterodoxy Becomes Orthodoxy: Ecological Economics in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 72, No. 5, November 2013, pp.  1287–1314. Carpintero, “Kenneth E.  Boulding: Beyond Economics”, Critical Economy Review, No. 14, 2012, pp. 303–319. Carpintero, “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: un economista transdisciplinar”, in: N.  Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, edited by Óscar Carpintero, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2007, pp. 7–30. 87  Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “The Worth of a Songbird: Ecological Economics as a Post-Normal Science”, Ecological Economics, 19, 1994, pp. 197–207. 84 85

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framework” has prevailed in economics, which has meant “methodological poverty”.88 Norgaard believes that, as the coexistence of alternative methodologies has been beneficial for the development of ecology, it will have a similar effect on ecological economics.89 He further maintains that “the greater methodological diversity of ecology has helped it be more scientific than economics”.90 Ecological economics should therefore appropriate as many methodologies as possible among those available in ecology and economics, without limiting itself to those methods that both disciplines may have in common. In this regard, in full awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods, Norgaard argued in favor of a tolerant methodological pluralism in ecological economics. In support of this approach he offered not only epistemological but also social, political, and institutional reasons. Some of these are listed below: i. Methodological variety and cognitive loss. Should ecological economics be tied to a single method, it would lose access to much of ecology, since the epistemological success of the latter is based precisely on the use of a great variety of methods, and even on the coexistence of reciprocally incongruous theories when it comes to specific topics. ii. Avoiding methodological poverty. The intersection of the methodologies shared by ecology and economics is not sufficient to generate scientific results of interest. Therefore the situation must be avoided in which ecological economics is reduced to the lowest common denominator between the two disciplines. iii. Prevention. As opposed to those who consider that there is only one correct way of thinking and that an excess of responses prevents a clear course of action, methodological pluralism has the advantage of preventing reckless decision-­ making that can bring unforeseen and unintended consequences. Furthermore, those who advocate a single methodology tend to bend the facts to fit their assumptions, and thus generate a misleading impression of certainty. “If we hold to the belief that knowledge is accumulating to one congruent understanding, we will miss the insights provided by incongruent ways of knowing”.91 iv. Indefiniteness. Wide-ranging but vaguely defined problems can only be addressed through multiple juxtaposed analyses. v. Open society. Methodological pluralism favors participation. “Openness to multiple frames of analysis is a prerequisite to democracy and decentralization”.92

 Norgaard, “The Case for Methodological Pluralism”, Ecological Economics, 1, 1989, pp. 38, 41, 49, and 53. 89  “Ecologists have also expanded their theories to explain larger phenomena, perhaps even more aggressively than economists (Ehrlich, 1968; Odum, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972). At the same time, ecology consists of diverse, incongruous theories about population dynamics, energetics, food webs, coevolution, communities, succession, etc.”. Ibid., p. 49. 90  Ibid. 91  Ibid., pp. 52–53. 92  Ibid. 88

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Norgaard concludes, in sum, that ecological economics is much more likely to become a useful discipline if it keeps its methodological base as broad as possible, in such a way that it can incorporate not only ecology and economics, but also the methodologies of other disciplines. In my opinion, Norgaard raises the question of methodological pluralism from a transcendental epistemological perspective. Inspired by a peculiar interpretation of logical positivism  – vehemently criticized by Spash –93 he supports a normative methodological pluralism in ecological economics, according to which the best of each approach can be selected without restrictions. He warns, however, that “the case for methodological pluralism is not an argument for using just any framework of analysis. For narrow, well-defined questions, the most suitable framework is somewhat predetermined. Analysts, however, repeatedly ignore how the framework with which they are accustomed to using and supposedly most familiar contains assumptions which preclude pursuit of the question”.94 At the same time, Norgaard does not refrain from developing “a taxonomic framework for identifying different methodologies”.95 In this sense, his normative methodological pluralism is the antithesis of framework relativism, in that it could be described as a multiplicity of frameworks with no relativism. In a later work by Norgaard, in collaboration with Jessica J. Goddard and Giorgos Kallis, entitled “Keeping Multiple Antennae Up: Coevolutionary Foundations for Methodological Pluralism”, the authors distinguish between “framework” and “meta-framework”.96 In particular, they propose to base methodological pluralism on the “meta-framework of coevolution”,97 a theory developed by Norgaard in his book Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future (1994).98 They maintain that “a coevolutionary worldview offers a foundation for methodological pluralism through an openness to epistemological pluralism”.99 The coevolutionary foundations of ecological economics, they add, “extend beyond adherence to one meta-framework (e.g. critical realism) as a descriptor of reality and knowledge production”.100 In fact, “diversity in ways of knowing is part of reality”.101 The following are some of the strong points they identify in methodological pluralism as applied to ecological economics:  Spash, “New Foundations for Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 77, 2012, pp. 36–47. 94  Norgaard, “The Case for Methodological Pluralism”, op. cit., p. 53. 95  Ibid., pp. 38 and 44. 96  Jess Goddard, Giorgos Kallis and Richard B.  Norgaard, “Keeping Multiple Antennae Up: Coevolutionary Foundations for Methodological Pluralism”, Ecological Economics, 169, 2019, p. 7. 97  Ibid., p. 2. 98  Further nuanced in Giorgos Kallis and Richard B.  Norgaard, “Coevolutionary economics”, Ecological Economics, 69, 4, 2010, pp. 690-699. 99  Goddard et al. “Keeping Multiple Antennae Up”, p. 7. 100  Ibid. 101  Ibid., p. 6. 93

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i. Coevolutionism. In opposition to those who consider that methodological pluralism lacks a philosophical foundation, they propose that coevolutionary thinking can provide the necessary foundation, in that it recognizes the existence of different ways of knowing.102 ii. Open society. Pluralism fosters an open academic community. iii. Atrium gentium. Pluralism has allowed ecological economics to become a welcoming space for intellectual exchanges between ecologists, orthodox and heterodox economists, activists, and philosophers, all of them “using different frameworks”.103 iv. Fragmentary science and single framework. In view of the fragmentation of science, methodological pluralism is necessary to understand the complexity of socio-ecological systems. “Any single scientific framework for looking at the complexities of social systems or ecological systems, let alone their ecoevolutionary interactions, only allows the observer to see those parts and the interactions that the framework pre-identifies. […] Most ecologists are quite aware of the different implications of ecology’s different framework”.104 The situation is analogous in economics, although economists are less willing to “acknowledge the plurality of their ways of knowing”.105 v. Unique framework and cognitive loss. “Advocating a single correct framework for ecological economics would require ecological economists to ignore much of ecological and economic understanding”.106 vi. The factum of methodological pluralism. Although it is not ideal, science  – including ecological economics – is already immersed in methodological pluralism. This is how knowledge is actually produced.

4.2  Clive L. Spash and the Methodological Closure For his part, Clive L. Spash, known for his proposal for social ecological economics, has come up against the stance of methodological pluralism. In his opinion, the unlimited proliferation of approaches and points of view in ecological economics has not only caused confusion, incoherence, and interpretive chaos, but has also prevented the design of clear guidelines for intervention. For this reason, he proposes to reject the dogma of methodological pluralism that has circulated since the early days of the journal Ecological Economics and the publication of the famous article by Norgaard. The apology of methodological pluralism has, in his view, also

 Ibid., p. 1.  Ibid., p. 1. 104  Ibid., p. 2. 105  Ibid. 106  In addition: “Neither ecological nor economic theory is unified, and thus neither is our understanding of their interactions”. Ibid. 102 103

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staved off the incompatibility between different worldviews and the questions about their intrinsic validity. Furthermore, it has generated an irresolvable conflict between the old methodological approaches of neoclassical economics and the new vision on the relations between the biosphere and the economy as emerged in recent decades.107 Among all critical points raised by Spash concerning methodological pluralism, I would like to select the following ones: i. Incoherence. The plea for methodological pluralism and transdisciplinarity has caused considerable confusion, turning ecological economics into a superficial, amorphous, and contradictory literary corpus.108 ii. Big Tent. As a “big tent”109 in which anyone fits and in which anything goes, ecological economics has led to an uncritical and unstructured methodological eclecticism, which is the opposite of the production of knowledge and of a correct understanding.110 iii. Collective identity crisis and pluralism. Methodological pluralism has made it difficult to define a shared identity in ecological economics. Both the stabilization of a collective identity and the creation of environmental and social justice policies require methodological closure. Likewise, the dominant political economy is best challenged with a unified approach, and not with the epistemological vagaries of pluralism. iv. Foundation. The methodological pluralism advocated by Norgaard in his 1989 article lacks a convincing epistemological foundation; it does not adequately distinguish between ontology, epistemology, and methodology; and it legitimates the survival of neoclassical economics within ecological economics. v. Admission dilemma. Methodological pluralism keeps the doors open to approaches that should be banished. Our knowledge will not progress further if the approaches that we take as most appropriate to deal with environmental and socio-economic problems are contaminated by outdated and inconvenient approaches. One should also not disregard how divergent and conflicting some proposals can be. vi. Setting criteria. Methodological pluralism entails the problem of how to set evaluation criteria when there are incommensurable ways of knowing.111

 Spash, “New Foundations for Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 77, 2012, pp. 36–47. 108  Spash, “The Content, Direction and Philosophy of Ecological Economics”, in: Joan MartínezAlier and Roldan Muradian (eds.), Handbook of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, 2015, p. 32. 109  The expression comes from R. B. Howarth, “Editorial”, Ecological Economics, 64, 2008, p. 469. 110  Spash, “New Foundations for Ecological Economics”, op. cit., pp.  40 and 45. Spash, “The Shallow or the Deep Ecological Economics Movement?”, Ecological Economics, 93, 2013, p. 359. 111  “Here then is the conundrum for methodological pluralists. They must either indiscriminately accept everything, and so lose any meaning for the concept of knowledge, or accept some grounds for rejecting ideas and approaches which they find strongly objectionable”. Spash, “New Foundations for Ecological Economics”, op. cit., p. 41. 107

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vii. Methodological incommensurability and symmetry. Following Dow, Spash points out that if the multiplicity of methodologies does not end up collapsing into a single method, it is because they are incommensurable. Therefore, methodological pluralism that does not end in methodological closure is doomed to incommensurability. At the same time, if there is a multiplicity of incommensurable epistemologies and there is no single correct way of knowing, nothing can justify why one should be preferred over the other, or why one methodology in particular should be selected. No hierarchy can therefore exist in the range of possible methods to employ. “What is the aim of pluralism in ecological economics? A Tower of Babel where everybody has their own language and nobody understands anyone else?”112 In contrast, Spash argues for the need to impose strict standards on what ecological economics should be, beyond the anarchist epistemology of “anything goes”. In this sense, Spash supports Dow’s structured pluralism and Lawson’s critical realism, although it should be noted that he leaves out Dow’s theory of modes of thought in economics. The controversy between Spash and Norgaard et al. lays emphasis, in my opinion, on two extreme epistemological positions: non-framework-based methodological pluralism versus framework-based methodological pluralism. Of course, the controversy is by no means closed, and some authors have supported other intermediate positions.113 However, I would like to point out, by way of conclusion, that framework-based pluralism and non-framework-based pluralism, be it methodological or epistemological, are two extremes of a wide spectrum of possible positions. In this sense, pluralism in economics expands into a continuum along its epistemological, methodological, communicative, and even axiological dimensions.114  Spash, “Reflections on Pluralism in Ecological Economics”, March 2015, p. 4. (https://www.clivespash.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Spash-Reflections-on-Pluralism-inEcological-Economics.pdf). 113  The scholarly literature on pluralism is vast. Concerning in particular ecological economics, see, for example, the debate between Moritz C. Remig and Peter Söderbaum, in: Remig, “Structured Pluralism in Ecological Economics. A Reply to Peter Söderbaum’s Commentary”, Ecological Economics, 131, 2017, pp. 533–537; “Unraveling the Veil of Fuzziness: A Thick Description of Sustainability Economics”, Ecological Economics, 109, 2015, pp. 194–202. Söderbaum, “Varieties of Ecological Economics: Do We Need a More Open and Radical Version of Ecological Economics?”, Ecological Economics, 119, 2015, pp.  420–423; Understanding Sustainability Economics. Towards Pluralism in Economics, Earthscan, London, 2008. For their part, Batifoulier et al. have proposed to distinguish between “external pluralism” –“which does not recognize the full legitimacy of the other research programs” – and “pluralism à la mainstream” – “pluralism within the standard theory which does not affect its fundamental principles”. Philippe Batifoulier et al., “What Good are Economists if They All Say the Same Thing? Manifesto for Pluralist Economics”, Association française d’économie politique, 2015, p. 55. 114  For more on the issue of values, I refer the reader to Joan Martínez-Alier and Roldan Muradian (eds.), Handbook of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, 2015, pp. 26–47. John O’Neill, “Ecological Economics and the Politics of Knowledge: The Debate between Hayek and Neurath”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 28, 2004, pp.  431–447. John O’Neill and Thomas Uebel, “Analytical Philosophy and Ecological Economics”, in: Martínez112

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Similarly, non-framework-based reasoning styles and framework-based reasoning styles are the two epistemic extremes of a spectrum that goes from perspective transcendentalism to framework relativism.

Alier and Muradian (eds.), Handbook of Ecological Economics, op. cit., pp. 48–78. John O’Neill, Alan Holland and Andrew Light, Environmental Values, Routledge, London and New York, 2008.

Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics and Styles of Economic Reasoning

In this chapter, I present a historical answer to the question of why ecological economics fails to persuade many economists, even though, as a scientific discipline, it has been growing in importance for several decades now. In order to address this problem, I rely here on the so-called historical epistemology of economics. I will then investigate seven styles of economic reasoning, some of them conflicting, and thereby point to the occurrence of communication breakdowns in economics. My main claim is that the stabilization of a biophysical style of economic reasoning, in the period that goes from Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1925) to the publication of the famous report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972), was decisive for the emergence of ecological economics as a scientific discipline in the last third of the twentieth century. However, this biophysical style of reasoning is not necessarily shared by other economic disciplines. Recognizing multiple styles of economic reasoning and the features that distinguish them can finally serve to better understand the difficulties in convincing economists who do not belong to the same style of reasoning, and then try to overcome potential communication breakdowns.

1  Introduction In his contribution to the first issue of Ecological Economics, John L. R. Proops recalls the dictum uttered by Herman E. Daly on the occasion of an important congress held in Barcelona in 1987: “to be taken seriously, an area of research needs a society, a history and a journal”.1 Promoted by Joan Martínez-Alier, the Barcelona congress is often taken as the founding event of the International Society for Ecological Economics,2 the first issue of its journal appearing only two years later, in 1989. Martínez-Alier had been working on various historical reconstructions in

1  John L. R. Proops, “Ecological Economics: Rationale and Problem Areas”, Ecological Economics, 1, 1989, pp. 59–76. 2  Inge Røpke, “The Early History of Modern Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 50, 2004, p. 307.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Fragio, Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics, Contributions to Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2_3

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this field since 1984, culminating his historiographical work with the monograph Ecological Economics. Energy, Environment and Society, a book dated 1987. In this text, Martínez-Alier undertakes a review of a wide variety of economic doctrines stemming from a heterogeneous constellation of authors of the nineteenth century, such as the Ukrainian Sergei Podolinksy and the Austrians Eduard Sacher, Leopold Pfaundler, and Josef Popper; the American Henry Adams; and the British scientists Frederick Soddy and Patrick Geddes. Just about when the contemporary economic debate on the topic of energy is burgeoning, Martínez-Alier presents a fabulous gallery of nineteenth-century forerunners, with specific concerns such as the first estimates of agricultural energy balances, Rudolf Clausius’ attempts to bring the rising thermodynamics closer to the analysis of nature, and even ancient controversies of unexpected topicality such as Max Weber’s crematistic critique of Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetism, among many other issues. Thus, the erratic path toward ecological economics appears from the very beginning as the history of a non-reception, a corpus of knowledge negligently ignored by conventional economics. Moreover, Martínez-Alier shows how deep the historical roots of the communication difficulties in economics are. Ultimately, Martínez-Alier’s intellectual feat was not only to provide a historical account but to amend a kind of “received view” about the origins of ecological economics, moving it away from its more immediate antecedents such as Kenneth E. Boulding, Howard T. Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Herman E. Daly, among many others. From the point of view offered by his work, ecological economics is very far from being a true novelty. His historical inquiries, however, result in a series of questions difficult to answer: “why the recognition of the school of ecological economics which has objectively existed since the 1880s, is unacknowledged even by its own members?”; “why did ecological (or biophysical) economics, which has old traditions, appear in the 1970s as something new?”.3 These peculiar puzzles make Martínez-Alier’s pioneering work appear as the history of a non-­ discipline.4 With his remarkable work, he not only reveals a whole dimension of hidden meaning, a sort of historical unconscious of ecological economics, but also highlights the extent to which this new discipline has been characterized by a scandalous lack of historical transparency. To all this, we should add nowadays the difficulties in persuading the whole community of economists. I will call these perplexities the “paradoxes of ecological economics”. Some years later, in 1997, the first anthology accounting for the heterogeneous documentary basis of ecological economics is edited by Robert Costanza, Charles Perrings, and Cutler J. Cleveland, and published under the title The Development of Ecological Economics. Various compilations have since followed,5 accompanied by 3  Joan Martínez-Alier, Ecological Economics. Energy, Environment and Society, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1987, p. iii. 4  Jim Falk, “Joan Martínez-Alier, Ecological Economics. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987”, Book Review, 1987, pp. 119–120. 5  J. Martínez-Alier and I. Røpke (eds.), Recent Developments in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA., 2008. Charles Perrings (ed.), Ecological Economics,

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historical studies on specific authors and topics.6 Two articles by Inge Røpke, from 2004 to 2005, have come to cover the history of ecological economics in its most contemporary versions.7 However, the paradoxes revealed by Martínez-Alier and the difficulties in creating a universal consensus have remained without an effective response. Consequently, my purpose is to elucidate these problems, and offer a solution based on the so-called historical epistemology of economics. I will argue namely that a history and philosophy of economics accounting for the disunity of science can provide a suitable answer to the paradoxes raised by the history of ecological economics, and specifically to the problem of why ecological economics, as it seems, tends not to persuade many economists. From the point of view of the historical epistemology of sciences, I will suggest that a plurality of conflicting economic rationalities may be part of an explanation for the paradoxes of ecological economics. In addition, I will argue that only the consolidation of a biophysical style of economic reasoning, in the period that goes from Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1925) to the publication of the famous report of the Club of Rome The Limits to Growth (1972), created the cognitive conditions for the emergence of ecological economics in the last third of the twentieth century. Finally, the historiographic proposal for a historical epistemology of styles of economic reasoning will allow us to answer the question of why ecological economics does not persuade everyone.

2  A  Historical Epistemology of the Styles of Economic Reasoning Epistemological pluralism in economics is a factum. There is not one single way to produce economic knowledge, but many. It is within this context of disunity and conflicting rationalities that one can investigate the process of formation of ecological economics as a scientific discipline. In other words, a pluralistic history and philosophy of economics provides, in my opinion, the best framework for the study

4 vols., Sage Publications, London, 2008. Clive L. Spash (ed.), Ecological Economics, 4 vols., Routledge, London, 2009. 6  For instance, Clément Levallois, “Can De-growth be Considered a Policy Option? A Historical Note on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Club of Rome”, Ecological Economics, 69, 2010, pp. 2271–2278; Erik Gómez-Baggethun et al., “The History of Ecosystem Services in Economic Theory and Practice”, Ecological Economics, 69, 2010, pp. 1209–1218. 7  I.  Røpke, “The Early History of Modern Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 50, 2004, pp. 293–314; I. Røpke, “Trends in the Development of Ecological Economics from the Late 1980s to the Early 2000s”, Ecological Economics, 55, 2005, pp.  262–290. See also Marco P.  V. Franco, “Searching for a Scientific Paradigm in Ecological Economics: The History of Ecological Economic Thought, 1880s–1930s”, Ecological Economics, 153, 2018, pp. 195–203; Paul P. Christensen, “Historical Roots for Ecological Economics – Biophysical Versus Allocative Approaches”, Ecological Economics, 1, 1989, pp. 17–36.

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of the historical circumstances that marked the disciplinary formation of ecological economics. To this end, I will use the aforementioned historical epistemology of sciences, a historiographical approach that is characterized by its emphasis on the historicity of our epistemological categories such as “observation”, “objectivity”, “evidence”, “demonstration”, or “explanation”.8 Often considered a second historicist turn in history and philosophy of science,9 historical epistemology works on the assumption that any subject and any process of knowledge validation can be historicized. It is, therefore, well at home in a historical study on the formation of a scientific experience such as ecological economics and economics in general.10 In addition to pioneer books such as those by Mary Poovey,11 in recent years attempts have been made to explicitly develop a historical epistemology of economics.12 This has been surveyed by two special issues published in Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2014/2) and in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (2017/34A). To all this we could add other works close to this orientation.13 In some of its versions, historical epistemology has been organized around the concept of “style of scientific reasoning”, initially proposed in Ludwig Fleck’s book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact [Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache] (1935),14 and later in Alistair C.  Crombie’s 8  Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007. L. Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994. 9  Javier Moscoso, “Biographies of Scientific Objects”, Daimon, 24, 2001, p. 151. 10  Alberto Fragio, De Davos a Cerisy-La-Salle: La epistemología histórica en el contexto europeo, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, 2011, Chap. 1 “La epistemología histórica y la formación de la experiencia científica”, pp. 23–52. 11  Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998; M. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy. Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008. Mischa Suter and Caroline Arni, “A Science of the Specific. An Interview with Mary Poovey”, Historische Anthropologie, 24, 3, 2016, pp. 432–444. 12  Mislav Žitko, “Models, Fictions and Explanations: A Study in Historical Epistemology of Economics”, Filozofija i društvo (XXIV), 4, 2013, pp. 84–101. 13  Among others, Harro Maas and Mary S.  Morgan (eds.), Observing the Economy: Historical Perspectives, Duke University Press, Durham, 2012; William Deringer, Calculated Values. Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2018. 14  As already mentioned, Fleck’s work has been appropriated within the context of economic sciences in Philip E. Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009; and P.  E. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso, London, 2013. In the former, another famous concept formulated by Fleck in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), that of “thought collective” (Denkkollektiv), is retrieved and reformulated. In this respect, the authors postulate the existence of a “neoliberal thought collective” and provide an account of its formation starting with the foundation of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Differently, in the latter, Mirowski employs the notion of

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encyclopedic work Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (1994). This historiographical methodology, to the development of which several authors such as Ian Hacking15 and Arnold I. Davidson16 have also contributed, brought about a conception of styles of reasoning centered on the differential aspects in the production and validation of scientific knowledge.17

2.1  Antecedents Based on the previously outlined premises,18 I argue that the theoretical and historiographical approach that best suits a history and philosophy of ecological economics is the historical epistemology of economics, and more specifically, a historical epistemology of the styles of economic reasoning. Before presenting my heuristic taxonomy of styles of economic reasoning, it is important to review the notion of “style” in economics. To this aim, it is useful to keep in mind the distinction between “economy” and “economics”. While the former refers to the economic process as it happens in societies, the latter indicates the

“neoliberal thought collective” to analyze the financial crisis of 2008 and the specific role of the neoliberal doctrine in its gestation. It is there argued that the elusive character of the “neoliberal thought collective” explains why the neoliberal doctrine has survived, against all prediction, the invalidating trial of the financial crisis. One should also remark that in 2006 Mirowski received the prize of the Ludwik Fleck Society for his book The Effortless Economy of Science, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004. Furthermore, Karen Lovejoy Knight, A.C. Pigou and the ‘Marshallian’ Thought Style. A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics, Palgrave, Cham, 2018, relies on the notion of style of thought in order to provide a historical account of Pigou’s contributions in economics as opposed to Marshall’s work. 15  Ian Hacking, “Language, Truth and Reason”, in: M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1982, pp.  49–66; I.  Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2002; I. Hacking, “‘Language, Truth and Reason’ 30 Years Later”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 43, 2012, pp. 599–609; I. Hacking, “Probable Reasoning and Its Novelties”, in: Theodore Arabatzis, Jürgen Renn, Ana Simões (eds.), Relocating the History of Science. Essays in Honor of Kostas Gavroglu, Springer, Cham, 2015, pp. 177–192. 16  Arnold I. Davidson, “Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry”, in: Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 75–100; A. I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001. 17  I.  Hacking, “Language, Truth and Reason”, op. cit. I.  Hacking, Historical Ontology, op. cit., p. 175. The historiographical tradition of historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning has produced an abundant specialized literature. See, for instance, Luca Sciortino, “On Ian Hacking’s Notion of Style of Reasoning”, Erkenntnis, 82, 2017, pp. 243–264; Jach Ritchie et al., Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, special issue on styles of thinking, Part A, vol. 43, 4, 2012; Otávio Bueno, “Styles of Reasoning: A Pluralist View”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 43, 2012, pp. 657–665. 18  Further details on this point in Chaps. 1 and 2.

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discipline or disciplines that study that process. With regard to this distinction, two forerunning applications of the notion of “style” may also be distinguished. As far as style and economy are concerned, one should mention the Wirtschaftsstile of the German Historical School.19 Besides a few important precursors, the first articulation of the concept of “economic styles” is usually attributed to German economist Arthur Spiethoff (1873–1957). In the study Die allgemeine Volkswirtschaftslehre als geschichtliche Theorie: die Wirtschaftsstile (1932), he introduces this notion in order to indicate the global socio-economic form that identifies a specific period. In contrast to the category of “economic system” (Wirtschaftssystem) – introduced by Werner Sombart in the 1920s – Spiethoff relies on the notion of economic styles to elaborate a comparative economic history, featuring business cycles and crises as prominent.20 The notion of Wirtschaftsstile has been subsequently taken up and expanded upon by some of the leading ordoliberal economists, such as Walter Eucken and Alfred Müller-Armack. In the ordoliberal tradition, the relationship between economic styles and economic development is increasingly central. In the Genealogie der Wirtschaftsstile (1941), Müller-Armack claims, for instance, that “the problem of style is posed by history itself, not by science”, and adds that the styles “can not be ordered at will, because they are rather the expression of a certain stage of development”, since they express “the idea that human economic activity is carried out in essentially different historical forms”.21 Therefore, the styles are taken as the main tectonic lines along which economic history runs. According to Müller-Armack, political economy has appropriated the artistic concept of style, in order to express the internal constitution of history. Along these lines, he distinguishes the economic style of the Middle Ages and the Modern or European style, among others. Regarding the second sense of style, as economics, the work of Mary S. Morgan stands out. In her book The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (2012), Morgan traces the emergence of modeling as a reasoning style in economics. Here style does not identify so much epochs of economic history as the specific way of thinking of the contemporary economist. In a way that strongly approximates historical epistemology, in her work Morgan uncovers the historicity of economic models. Simultaneously empirical and theoretical, models are considered as the objects of economic research and as the basis of a new style of reasoning:

 Bertram Schefold, Wirtschaftsstile. Teil 1: Studien zum Verhältnis von Ökonomie und Kultur [1994], Fischer, Frankfurt am M., 2015; Wirtschaftsstile. Teil 2: Studien zur ökonomischen Theorie und zur Zukunft der Technik [1995], Fischer, Frankfurt am M., 2015. 20  Heinz D. Kurz, “The Beat of the Economic Heart: Joseph Schumpeter and Arthur Spiethoff on Business Cycles”, University of Granz, 2010, pp. 1–32. 21  Alfred Müller-Armack, Genealogie der Wirtschaftsstile. Die geistesgeschichtlichen Ursprünge der Staats- und Wirtschaftsformen bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts, W.  Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1941. Reedited as “Genealogie der Wirtschaftsstile” in: Religion und Wirtschaft, W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1959. Spanish trans. by Vicente Quintero, Genealogía de los estilos económicos, FCE, México, 1967, pp. 11, 19, and 36 (my transl.). 19

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modelling as a style of reasoning in economics works as a method of enquiry comprising probing questions, manipulations to provide demonstrations that are both deductive and experimental, and informal inference arguments involving elements of narrative that offer explanatory or interpretative services”; “reasoning with models enables economists to enquire directly into their theories or ideas about the world, and enables them to enquire indirectly into the nature of the economic world. They reason about the small world in the model and reason about the big economic world with the model; reasoning with economic models is like reasoning with astronomical models.22

According to Morgan, economics – originally understood as a kind of verbal science, a “sea of words” – has evolved from classical political economy into a social science based on mathematical models.23 The use of models not only launched a new type of object of scientific interest but also allowed the introduction of a new way of thinking about economy. Economists stopped conceiving economic knowledge in terms of a few general laws, in order to focus on the production of models as an instrument of economic analysis: “modelling had become the accepted mode of reasoning in economics”.24 This reappearance of the notion of style in Morgan’s work is also influenced by her referencing of Crombie’s and Hacking’s approaches. Morgan indeed reminds us that modeling is one of the six styles of scientific thinking distinguished by Crombie.25 She refers to them as the “epistemic genres of scientific reasoning”, and adds: “any scientist’s ability to reason in a chosen style is thus clearly dependent on the contingent history of that discipline, and whether that method is accepted within it”.26 She also points out, to be precise, that neither Crombie nor Hacking included economics in their discussion on styles. Morgan’s main claim, according to which the incorporation of models as a new object of interest involves a new style of reasoning in economics, is clearly a continuation of Crombie’s project. However, at least two aspects of this position deserve close assessment. First, it seems that Morgan tends to reduce the epistemological pluralism of economics to the question of the historicity of its models. Although she might accept that various styles of economic reasoning are possible, she never specifies them. Second, models are an integral part of epistemic cultures and they can be shared by various styles of economic reasoning, without requiring the formation of a new exclusive style. For all these reasons, in my opinion, Morgan has not come as far as to fully recognize the phenomena of internal disunity in economics.

 Mary S.  Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, p. 37. 23  Ibid., p. 8. 24  Ibid., p. 14. 25  Morgan also refers to other contributions to the theory of styles in The World in the Model, op. cit., p. 15, fn. 18. 26  Ibid., p. 17. 22

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2.2  Seven Styles of Economic Reasoning In order to elucidate the history of ecological economics, I would like to present a rough but useful taxonomy of five basic styles of economic reasoning, and two derived or transitional styles: 1. Historical style 2. Neoclassical style 3. Biophysical style 3.1 Thermodynamic style 3.2 Entropic style 4. Stochastic style 5. Computational style Each of these styles implies a very different perspective on how to analyze the economy and its problems. I offer this detailed classificatory scheme based on their respective phenomenologies (Table 1). Historical Style What identifies the historical style of economic reasoning is the presence of history in the economic analysis. What is mainly at stake is the scrutiny of the economy from a historical perspective or, alternatively, the scrutiny of history from an economic perspective. The historical style starts from the analytical primacy of time as the ultimate hermeneutical key to the understanding of economic phenomena. Economic history is therefore for economic thought the most important object of consideration, since historicity affects all determinations of both economy and economics. The strength of the historical style lies in its ability to put the current economic doctrines into perspective and question their universalist ambitions. The historical style starts indeed from the basic insight that time ends up eroding even the best synchronous analyses. As Geoffrey M.  Hodgson shows in his book How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (2001), this way of thinking had its peak in the nineteenth century, both with the German Historical School and with Marxism. Schumpeter can be taken as a representative of the historical style, inasmuch as his theory of business cycles, creative destruction, and entrepreneurship implies economic history and an assessment of the Marxist macrodynamics of capitalism.27

27

 Further details on this point in Chap. 4.

Market, Prices

Ecosystems and Economic systems

2. Neoclassical

3. Biophysical

Systems theory, Thermodynamics

Categories Macrodynamics of capitalism Equilibrium

Equilibrium, principle of 3.1. Thermodynamic Market, Prices, matter and mass and energy conservation energy flows (first law of thermodynamics) 3.2. Entropic Flows-fund Principle of mass and energy conservation, entropy (first and second laws of thermodynamics) 4. Stochastic Financial capital, Probability Portfolio risk, Brownian motion 5. Computational Market Digital economy simulation

Objects Business cycle

Style 1. Historical

Table 1  Taxonomy of basic styles of economic reasoning

Mechanism, nineteenth-century physics

Nineteenth century physics

Stochastic calculus

Digital culture

Matter and energy, Linear flows, pollution

Random walks

Big data

Epistemic cultures Critics and interpretation Mechanism, Infinitesimal calculus, Geometric analysis, Welfare economics I-O models, Diagrammatic representations, Biophysical metrics

Matter and energy, pollution

Ecology of the economic process, Environmental degradation

Equilibrium price, circular flows

Evidence and observational regimes Economic crises

Ecological, thermodynamic, systemic

Natural capital, Ecosystem services, Socioeconomic metabolism Mechanical, metabolic

Digital

Random

Metabolic, Entropic

Mechanical

Mechanical

Computational

Probabilistic

Thermodynamic

Mechanical, thermodynamic

Explanations Historical

Metaphors Evolutionary

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Neoclassical Style The neoclassical style dates back to the marginalist revolution of the last third of the nineteenth century, and results largely from the transfer of methods and categories from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics and mathematics to political economy.28 The distinctive feature of the neoclassical style consists in assuming a kind of market mechanics, in which any economic process is ultimately a concrete case of application of a general equilibrium principle, typically featuring the adjusting of supply and demand through price. The following remark by Paul A. Samuelson is illustrative: Léon Walras, yes, I must agree with Joseph Schumpeter, is the greatest of our great economists. Paraphrasing what Lagrange wrote about Newton, I have expressed Schumpeter’s case thus: Walras is the greatest of the economists and also the luckiest, for he discovered the (general equilibrium) system of the world and, alas, there is only one system of the world to be discovered.29

Mechanistic epistemology finds expression in the geometric analysis of supply and demand curves inscribed in a Cartesian coordinate system, typical, for example, of the Pigouvian welfare economics. A full-blown outcome of the neoclassical style can be seen at work in the emergence of mathematical economics in the first half of the twentieth century. In this respect, I consider Paul A. Samuelson as one of the best representatives of this style of reasoning in economics.30 Biophysical Style While the relations between economists embracing the historical style and those of the neoclassical style may be characterized as a relative mutual indifference, most of the authors advocating the biophysical style were openly opposed to the neoclassical style of economic reasoning.31 Although it had important antecedents in the

 Philip E. Mirowski, More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics [1989], 2nd. ed., Cambridge University Press, 1995. Further discussion in David Colander, “The Death of Neoclassical Economics”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 22, 2, 2000, pp. 127–143. 29  Paul A. Samuelson, “Conversations with my History-of-Economics Critics”, in: Graham Keith Shaw (ed.), Economics, Culture, and Education: Essays in Honour of Mark Blaug, Edward Elgar, 1991, p. 4. 30  Further details on this point in Chap. 4. 31  See, for instance, Charles Hall, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kümmel, Timm Kroeger, and Wolfgang Eichhorn, “The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics”, BioScience, vol. 51, n.° 8, 2001, pp. 663–73. John Gowdy, Charles Hall, Kent Klitgaard, and Lisi Krall, “The End of Faith-Based Economics”, The Corporate Examiner, 37, 2010, pp. 5–11. It is quite instructive to compare these contributions with D. Colander, “The Death of Neoclassical Economics”, op. cit., and John B.  Davis, “The Turn in Economics: Neoclassical Dominance to Mainstream Pluralism?”, Journal of Institutional Economics, 2, 2006, pp. 1–20. 28

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nineteenth century,32 the biophysical style came into its own in the 1920s with Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1925). It underwent a complex process of formation culminating in the last third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the emergence of ecological economics, industrial ecology, political economy of degrowth, and biophysical economics. Two clear precursors to the biophysical style should be distinguished here for reasons of analytical clarity: (i) the thermodynamic style and (ii) the entropic style. In a way, these two styles may be considered as transitional styles. As to the first one, the thermodynamic style was initially based on the application of the law of conservation of mass to the study of the interrelations between the economy and the environment.33 In particular, Robert U. Ayres and Allen V. Kneese’s early works on environmental pollution provide a far-reaching application of this style.34 Their approach culminated in the book Economics and the Environment: A Materials Balance Approach (1970), with the collaboration of Ralph C. d’Arge. This series of research studies introduces a thermodynamic interpretation of the neoclassical anomaly of externalities, using both Walras-Cassel’s general equilibrium theory and Leontief’s input-output model. From this perspective, externalities, and environmental pollution in particular, appear as an inherent and inevitable dimension of the production and consumption process, understood as a material process of transformation. In simple words, the use of natural resources and the emission of pollutants are presented as two sides of the same coin. According to these authors, goods and utility flows in any economic system are always undergirded by some kind of materiality, which either increases the available stock of physical capital or ends up being discharged into the environment. Together with Daly’s article (1968),35 Ayres’, Kneese’s, and d’Arge’s work revives the old physiocratic – metabolic – image of the economic process, in what some years later would

 Joan Martínez-Alier, Ecological Economics. Energy, Environment and Society, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1987. Marco P.  V. Franco, “Searching for a Scientific Paradigm in Ecological Economics: The History of Ecological Economic Thought, 1880s–1930s”, Ecological Economics, 153, 2018, pp. 195–203. 33  See Stefan Baumgärtner, “Thermodynamic Models”, in: John L. R. Proops and Paul Safonov (eds.). Modelling in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004, pp.  102–129. Shmuel Amir, “The Role of Thermodynamics in the Study of Economics and Ecological Systems”, Ecological Economics, 10, 2, 1994, pp. 125–142. 34  The following article is usually considered the first one in economics to make reference to climate change, as an inference, precisely, from the application of the laws of thermodynamics to the economy: Robert U. Ayres and Allen V. Kneese, “Production, Consumption, and Externalities”, American Economic Review, 59, 3, 1969, pp. 182–197. Further details on this issue in Antonin Pottier, Comment les économistes réchauffent la planète, Seuil, Paris, 2016, p. 290. An early version may also be found in Robert U. Ayres and Allen V. Kneese, “Environmental Pollution”, in: U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee (ed.), Federal Programs for the Development of Human Resources, vol. 2, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, Washington, DC, 1968. 35  Herman E. Daly, “On Economics as a Life Science”, Journal of Political Economy, 76, 3, 1968, pp. 392–406. 32

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become widely known as material flow analysis36 and industrial ecology, in the development of which Ayres also played a key role. These early contributions were soon joined by those of Reiner Kümmel37 and Matthias Ruth,38 among many others, in which the use of the laws of thermodynamics was extended to the analysis of various economic issues such as the relationship between energy and economic growth and the criticism of the neoclassical production function. Nevertheless, the thermodynamic style is often mixed with the neoclassical style.39 As to the second law of thermodynamics, due to the sui generis nature of his contributions and to the specific importance these had in the subsequent formation of ecological economics – especially through Herman E. Daly, one of his former students – I refer to Georgescu-Roegen’s approach as the most representative example of the entropic style of economic reasoning. The second law of thermodynamics – the law of entropy – is here featured both to carry out the critique of neoclassical economics and to attempt a profound remodeling of the foundations of economic thought, as showcased in Georgescu-Roegen’s famous book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971).40 Both the thermodynamic and the entropic style can be taken as antecedents to the consolidation of the biophysical style of economic reasoning, which in addition to the reception of classical thermodynamics includes new contributions in ecology and environmental sciences. In this respect, the school created around Howard T. Odum has been especially important. According to the biophysical style, economy is a subsystem embedded in the biosphere. Economic processes can therefore be conceived as a specific kind of natural process, notably in terms of materials and energy flows. In this regard, the search for “the biophysical foundations of economics”41 was linked to a peculiar “ecological” reworking of the notion of economic equilibrium, which subsequently resulted in the replacement of the

36  Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “Society’s Metabolism. The Intellectual History of Material Flow Analysis, Part I, 1860–1970”, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2, 1, 1998, pp. 61–78; M. FischerKowalski and Walter Hüttler, “Society’s Metabolism. The Intellectual History of Material Flow Analysis, Part II, 1970–1998”, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2, 4, 1999, pp. 107–136. Further details on this issue in Chap. 6. 37  Reiner Kümmel, “Energie und Wirtschaftswachstum”, Konjunkturpolitik, 23, 1977, pp. 152–173; R. Kümmel, Growth Dynamics of the Energy Dependent Economy, Verlag A. Hain, Königstein/ Ts., Oeigeschlager, Gunn & Hain, Cambridge, MA., 1980. 38  Matthias Ruth, Integrating Economics, Ecology and Thermodynamics, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1993. 39   See, for instance, Stuart Burness, Ronald Cummings, Glenn Morris and Inja Paik, “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use-Policies”, Land Economics, vol. 56, n.° 1, February 1980, pp. 1–9, and Jeffrey T. Young, “Is the Entropy Law Relevant to the Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity?”, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 21, 1991, pp. 169–179. Further details on this point in Chap. 5. 40  Further details on this point in Chaps. 4 and 5. 41  Alfred James Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, 1925, p. 139. Reprinted as Elements of Mathematical Biology. A Classic Work on the Application of Mathematics to Aspects of the Biological and Social Sciences, Dover Publications, New York, 1956.

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neoclassical production function by the metaphor of socioeconomic metabolism.42 Among the most outstanding features of the biophysical style one can list the following: i. The incorporation of the general systems theory,43 especially through Kenneth E. Boulding’s pioneering contributions and the strong influence of the systems ecology of the Odumian school ii. The “socioeconomic metabolism” as an amendment to the neoclassical production function, with special emphasis on matter and energy flows (relationship between stocks and flows) iii. The diagrammatic representation of flows, both in the Odumian sense and in terms of Leontief’s input–output model iv. “Biophysical equilibrium” instead of “economic equilibrium” v. The use of environmental metaphors such as “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprint”, “natural capital”, or “ecosystem services”44 vi. An interdisciplinary approach (ecology, biology, environmental science, physics, and economics, among others) Stochastic Style The stochastic style may be considered as an endogenous evolution of the neoclassical style, in response to the challenges arising from the conceptualization of financial economics, in particular, with regard to the progressive erosion of the determinism of neoclassical economics, caused by the technical problems of pricing risk assets, i.e., derivatives. While authors such as Georgescu-Roegen rehabilitate nineteenth-century thermodynamics in order to rethink the economic process, the reception of another classic topic of nineteenth-century physics, that is to say, the Brownian motion – especially as presented in Bachelier’s Théorie de la speculation (1900) –45 produced a new style of reasoning, stemming from the very core of neoclassical economics. With the emergence of the stochastic style, mathematical economics became mathematical finance.46 The subsequent alliance between stochastic

 Further details on this point in Chap. 5.  Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications [1968], revised edition, George Braziller, New York, 1976. 44  Further details on this point in Chap. 5. 45  Louis Bachelier, Théorie de la speculation, Thèsis de Docteur Sciences Mathématiques, Université Paris Sorbonne, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1900. English translation with commentary by Mark H. A. Davis and Alison Etheridge, and Foreword by Paul A. Samuelson, Louis Bachelier’s Theory of Speculation. The Origins of Modern Finance, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2006. 46  Mark H.  A. Davis, Mathematical Finance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019. Kevin R. Brine and Mary Poovey, Finance in America. An Unfinished Story, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2017. 42 43

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calculus and computer science – the very substance of finance capitalism– gave rise to the computational style of economic reasoning. Computational Style This style arises from the automated trading system, as the recent sociology of financial markets has shown.47 It is not a challenge to the stochastic style since the latter constitutes its cognitive foundations. It is the world of market simulation, big data, information economics and experimental economics, studied notably by Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah in their book The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics (2017).48

3  S  peciation of Scientific Disciplines and Communication Breakdowns The outlined taxonomy of styles of reasoning aims not only to account for a context of epistemological pluralism, but also to elucidate the basis of conflict between economic rationalities and how this latter leads to communication breakdowns in economics.49 In concrete terms, while the formulation of ecological economics as a scientific discipline mainly relies on a biophysical style of economic reasoning, the prevailing understanding of contemporary financial markets stems directly from a neoclassical style. In order to further clarify ecological economics’ communicative difficulties, and its lack of universal recognition and late consolidation, it is useful to review the debate between the historians of science Mario Biagioli and Thomas S. Kuhn on the topic of speciation, in which the issues of incommensurability and incommunicability found a new meaning, particularly relevant, in my view, for the history of ecological economics. In an article entitled “The Anthropology of Incommensurability” (1990),50 Mario Biagioli referred to the “Darwinian metaphor” of speciation in order to recap the classic Kuhnian arguments on incommensurability, comparability, and

 Karin Knorr-Cetina and Alex Preda (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera. How Financial Models Shape Markets, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 2006. 48  Further details also in Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams. Economics becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 49  On how the academic institutional structure influences the disagreement among economists see David Colander, “Vision, Judgment, and Disagreement among Economists”, Journal of Economic Methodology, 1, 1, 1994, pp. 43–56. Further details on this issue in Chap. 5. 50  Further developed in Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993. 47

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communicability.51 Biagioli’s contribution rests on reading the paradigm shift in the light of the Darwinian metaphor of speciation; in other words, the emergence of a new paradigm would be analogous to the evolutionary process of the appearance of a new biological species.52 As Darwin himself has pointed out, once the speciation process is completed, the new species can no longer reproduce with another species, and a barrier of sterility is established. Biagioli then considers Kuhnian incommensurability between competing paradigms as in a way similar to sterility between species. From this perspective, incommensurability is a form of intellectual sterility, and what characterizes the paradigm shift is a breakdown in communication that isolates the defenders of the new paradigm. In sociological terms, Mario Biagioli sees an inevitable communication breakdown in the emergence of differentiated socio-professional identities that do not maintain interlocution outside their field of specialization, either because of their lack of interest or simply because of their inability to communicate with other groups. In this train of thought, incommensurability as incommunicability is the inevitable price to pay in order to enable a scientific change, since the isolation is a necessary condition for the new community to coalesce and stabilize a new lexicon after speciation.53 For his part, Kuhn has had approving words for Biagioli’s paper (1990), not without remarking that he himself had mentioned the parallelism between scientific development and biological development at the end of the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). While underestimating the challenge posed by the metaphor of speciation to his old notion of “scientific revolution”, Kuhn rather focuses on its usefulness for understanding the process of scientific discipline formation. To this aim, Kuhn coins a new metaphor, the “speciation of disciplines”: “revolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation”.54 He also added: “I take them [the crises] to be the crucial s­ ymptoms  Thomas S.  Kuhn, “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability”, Proceedings of the 1982 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1982, pp. 669–688; T. S. Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, eds. James Conant and John Haugeland, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000. 52  Mario Biagioli, “The Anthropology of Incommensurability”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21, 1990, p. 185. 53  M. Biagioli, “From Relativism to Contingentism”, in: Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 196. 54  T. S. Kuhn, The Road since Structure, op. cit., p. 98. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen has analyzed the similarities and differences between the notions of speciation and scientific revolution in Kuhn. He identifies the following features: no holism, no gestalt switch, gradualism and continuity. Lexical change could also be added, with the subsequent reformulation of the problem of incommensurability. Further details on this issue in J.-M. Kuukkanen, “Revolution as Evolution: The Concept of Evolution in Kuhn’s Philosophy”, in: Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited, Routledge, London, pp.  134–152. See also T.  S. Kuhn, Desarrollo científico y cambio de léxico. Conferencias Thalheimer, Universidad Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland, Estados Unidos de América, 12 al 19 de noviembre de 1984, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, Montevideo, 2017. 51

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of the speciation-like process through which new disciplines emerge”.55 “Speciation” as a metaphor for scientific change also includes a “pattern of development by proliferation [that] raises the problem […] what is the process by which proliferation and lexical change take place, and to what extent can it be said to be governed by rational considerations?”56 Speciation of disciplines, in fact, splits up science, but it also creates the conditions of possibility for knowledge growth, as it enables not only the refinement of tools and the detailed treatment of problems, but also the emergence of new communities and institutions. In this way, Kuhn’s work casts new light on the problem of the disunity of science and epistemological pluralism. After disciplinary speciation, the new community aims to increase the coherence of its new field of research, but simultaneously it must address its most problematic and specialized issues, with a subsequent increase in dispersion and heterogeneity.57 Consequently, the claim to unity may jeopardize the consolidation of the new scientific field. Finally, Kuhn relies on Biagioli’s proposal to see incommensurability in terms of Darwinian speciation and advocates the “speciation of disciplines”, where a communication breakdown is taken as a sign of the disciplinary speciation process.58 Additional elements are then made available to understand the relationship between epistemological pluralism and scientific discipline formation, which can be fruitfully applied to the case of the history of ecological economics. The question of why ecological economics does not persuade the whole community of economists can be answered in reference to the doctrine of styles of economic reasoning and the speciation of scientific disciplines. This approach emphasizes how different types of economic rationality came into conflict in the second half of the twentieth century, as we will see in the next chapters. It is in this context of epistemological pluralism that the process of disciplinary speciation of ecological economics can be assumed to have taken place. The consolidation of a biophysical style of economic reasoning, as opposed to the neoclassical one, was decisive for the emergence of ecological economics as a scientific discipline in the last third of the twentieth century. However, its disciplinary speciation process could not prevent a communication breakdown in economics, and perhaps even aggravated it.

 T. S. Kuhn, The Road since Structure, op. cit., p. 100.  T. S. Kuhn, “Afterword”, in: Paul Horwich, World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1993, p. 337. 57  J.-M. Kuukkanen, “Revolution as Evolution”, op cit., p. 141. 58  T. S. Kuhn, “The Road since Structure”, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1990, p. 9. 55 56

The Crisis of the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-­Roegen, and Paul A. Samuelson In this chapter, I pay attention to the decline of the historical style of economic ­reasoning with reference to Joseph A.  Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Paul A. Samuelson. I will present two main claims. The first one argues that Schumpeter’s theory of business cycles stems from a historical understanding of economic crises and, consequently, it can be conceived as an instance of the historical style of economic reasoning. The second point argues that the decline of this historical style of economic reasoning can be linked to the growing success of Keynesianism, to the detriment of Schumpeter’s work. The decline of the historical style clearly revealed an irreconcilable conflict among different economic rationalities during the second half of the twentieth century, and brought into question the epistemological legitimacy of economic history with respect to synchronic analysis.

1  Introduction In this chapter, I will focus on the differences in reasoning style among three leading twentieth-century economists: Joseph A.  Schumpeter (1883–1950), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906–1994), and Paul A.  Samuelson (1915–2009). These authors can be taken as eminent representatives of three different and conflicting styles of economic reasoning, respectively, the historical, entropic, and neoclassical style. While Joseph A. Schumpeter is known for his theory of business cycles, materialized in his monumental work Business Cycles (1923–1939), Nicholas Georgescu-­ Roegen, a former collaborator of Schumpeter at Harvard University, published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), where he tried to establish the foundations for an analysis of the economy based on the application of the laws of thermodynamics, namely the law of entropy. Finally, Paul A.  Samuelson, also a former student of Schumpeter, is considered one of the main representatives of neoclassical economics, and was the author of an epoch-making textbook: Economics: An Introduction (1948). The intellectual trajectories of Schumpeter, Georgescu-Roegen, and Samuelson show a decisive parting of ways in economic thought taking place post-World War II, the consequences of which are still noticeable . Despite being just three

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individuals, these three economists can be taken as the representatives of much broader and complex traditions. Schumpeter was not only an important theorist of business cycles, of capitalist enterprise, and of innovation, but also one of the greatest essayists in the field of economics. Schumpeter’s position is unique in the context of the history of economic thought, mediating between four of the most outstanding schools of economics of his time, some of them animated by strong antagonisms: the Austrian School – he had studied in Vienna with famous economists such as Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk – the German Historical School – he attended the courses of Gustav von Schmoller in Berlin and was a professor at the University of Bonn – the Marginalist School – he was indeed an admirer of Léon Walras – and, in a way, also the Marxist School, to whose criticism he devoted some of his best-known works, such as Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Strictly speaking, Schumpeter was not a mere follower of any of these schools, although he had a close relationship with all of them.1 From this rich framework of approaches and orientations, Schumpeter put together his own economic doctrine, mixing theoretical-­ formal approaches with empirical, statistical, and historical ones. Fascinated by the application of mathematical methods to economics, but unable to take this kind of analysis very far, he planned a larger work in collaboration with Georgescu-Roegen, which never saw the light of day. This was supposed to be a great treatise combining business cycle theory with the then emerging mathematical economics. In my argument, I will consider Schumpeter as a conspicuous representative of the historical style of economic reasoning, insofar as his theory of business cycles and the innovative entrepreneur is based upon economic history. Schumpeter considered economics embedded in history, as shown by his doctrine of creative destruction and his intense study of the historical sources of classical economic thought.2 For his part, Georgescu-Roegen described himself as a “disenchanted neoclassical economist”.3 Initially trained as a mathematician – not very sensitive to the historical orientation of his mentor Schumpeter – he carried out the unusual intellectual feat of practicing an internal transition between the neoclassical style and the entropic style of economic reasoning. With the ambitious purpose of reestablishing economics on new epistemological premises, he amended the neoclassical conception that saw in the economy a mechanism governed by the principles of balance and

1  Mark Perlman, “Schumpeter and Schools of Economic Thought”, in: Jürgen G. Backhaus (ed.), Joseph Alois Schumpeter: Entrepreneurship, Style and Vision [2003], Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 2010, pp. 163–178. 2  Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis [1954], edited from manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, Routledge, London, 1986. 3  Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, “Georgescu-Roegen about himself”, in: Michael Szenberg (ed.), The Life Philosophies of Eminent Economist, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 133.

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conservation.4 He suggested instead an entropic image of the economic process, characterized by irreversibility and inexorable exhaustion. Drawing inspiration from scientists such as Sadi Carnot, Erwin Schrödinger, and Alfred Lotka, Georgescu-Roegen reformulated Schumpeter’s evolutionism in order to analyze the economic process as an immense metabolism that incessantly absorbs materials and energy, and expels them into the environment in a degraded form. He called this newly reestablished economics “bioeconomics”. Finally, Paul A.  Samuelson is one of the most outstanding economists of the North American Neoclassical School, famous for combining this tradition with Keynesianism, in what he himself called the “neoclassical synthesis”. His famous textbook, Economics: An Introduction (1948), established the economic orthodoxy for decades. Samuelson may be considered as one of the great representatives of the neoclassical style of economic reasoning. What identifies this style is the intensive use of mathematics in the elaboration of economic theory, and Samuelson was indeed a great mathematical economist. At the same time, the emphasis on the universal schemes of mathematical reasoning made him an antagonist of the historical style. Neoclassical economics notably advocates an economic rationality that transcends historical circumstances.5 As it relies on deductive logic based on economic universals, the neoclassical style tends to consider economic history as absolutely secondary. However, quite ironically, in response to the issue of assigning prices to high-risk financial assets, Samuelson was forced to give way to a fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics and break the old alliance between mechanism and determinism. Samuelson denied in practice what he had claimed in theory, ending up being a key agent in the erosion of economic determinism as it occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. This process culminated in the disciplinary formation of mathematical finance, where the combination of stochastic calculus and computer science – the very substance of financial capitalism – occurred.6 In short, Schumpeter, Georgescu-Roegen, and Samuelson are three giants of twentieth-century economic thought, and through their contributions one can follow the historical configuration of some of the main contemporary debates in the economic sciences. The choice of these three authors is justified both by their intrinsic representativeness and by their significance for a historical epistemology of the styles of economic reasoning. In what follows, I will try to show how the historical style of economic reasoning inevitably conflicted with the entropic and neoclassical styles, and how the decline of the historical style was linked to the fate of Schumpeter’s economic doctrine.

4  Philip E.  Mirowski, More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, 2nd. ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. 5  Ibid., p. 390. 6  Mark H. A. Davis, Mathematical Finance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019.

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2  J oseph A. Schumpeter and the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning In his contribution to a volume honoring Schumpeter, Samuelson described him in the following terms: There were many Schumpeters: the brilliant enfant terrible of the Austrian School who before the age of thirty had written two great books; the young Cairo lawyer with a stable of horses; the Austrian Finance-Minister; the social philosopher and prophet of capitalist development; the historian of economic doctrine; the economic theorist espousing use of more exact methods and tools of reasoning; the teacher of economics.7

Samuelson described Schumpeter as “the alienated stranger”,8 the survivor of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a sort of vestige of its last glorious era. Besides Samuelson’s characterization, it is worth emphasizing the importance that the successive economic crises witnessed and suffered by Schumpeter might have had in the gestation of his work, and of his economic doctrine. In this regard, I am inclined to argue that the theory of business cycles can be taken as a response in historical terms to the need for a new understanding of economic crises. Likewise, I will argue that the decline of the historical style of economic reasoning can be linked to the new hegemony of Keynesianism, entailing the discrediting of Schumpeter’s work.

2.1  Economic Crises in Historical Perspective The historians Backhouse and Boianovsky have pointed out that the decades of the 1920s and 1930s of the last century define a period of singular creativity in economic thought, having come to terms with serious problems such as the German hyperinflation and the Great American Depression.9 It is within this context that Schumpeter’s contributions to economic theory are better understood. Erik S. Reinert, a well-known Norwegian economist, refers to Business Cycles as “Schumpeter’s unsuccessful work in the spirit of the German Historical School”.10 It should also be added that, perfectly in line with one of the distinctive marks of the German Historical School and its interpretation of economic crises, Schumpeter’s

7  Samuelson, “Schumpeter as a Teacher and Economic Theorist”, in: Seymour E.  Harris (ed.). Schumpeter, Social Scientist, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1951, p. 48. 8  Ibid., p. 48. 9  Roger E. Backhouse and Mauro Boianovsky, Transforming Modern Macroeconomics. Exploring Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956–2003, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 10  Erik S. Reinert, “Steeped in Two Mind-Sets: Schumpeter in the Context of the Two Canons of Economics”, in: Jürgen G. Backhaus (ed.). Joseph Alois Schumpeter: Entrepreneurship, Style and Vision [2003], Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2010, pp. 286–288.

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text aimed at explaining the recurring crises of capitalism. In so doing, he is following in the steps of Arthur Spiethoff (1873–1957). One should also note that in one of his early works, Economic Doctrine and Method (1912), Schumpeter delves into the history of the Historical School as distinct from that, for instance, of marginalism.11 This latter ultimately turns out to be the winning doctrine after the consolidated success of both Keynesian macroeconomics and neoclassical economics. Marginalism is akin to the mathematization of economic thought, and it neutralizes the importance of economic history. Before Keynes’ work, it was not easy to get a glimpse of the macrodynamics of capitalism from the epistemological assumptions of the marginalist tenets.12 In contrast with the apparent insufficiency of marginalism to explain capitalist macrodynamics, the Historical School proposed different versions of the theory of business cycles – in which, incidentally, it showed a peculiar affinity with Marxist economic views. Distinctive features define how the historical style of economic reasoning is developed by Schumpeter, and these emphasize its contrast with the styles embraced by Georgescu-Roegen and Samuelson. According to Samuelson, in one of Schumpeter’s last lectures held in 1949 at the National Bureau, he stated that if he had to choose between mastering mathematical methods or economic history, he would prefer the historical approach.13 However, Schumpeter himself had clarified some years earlier: “I want to make it quite clear right away that I have no wish to advocate the historical approach to business cycles at the expense, still less to the exclusion, of theoretical or statistical work”.14 While Schumpeter’s work cannot be reduced to a simple variant of the German Historical School,15 it shares with this latter the basic tenet that history provides intelligibility to the economy. This is precisely the distinctive feature of the historical style of economic reasoning. In Schumpeter’s work, the historical style of reasoning is placed at the forefront in at least two main respects. As to the first, from an epistemological point of view,  Joseph. A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method. An Historical Sketch, Oxford University Press, Nueva York, 1954, chap. IV. 12  Further details in Stefano Zamagni, “Georgescu-Roegen on Consumer Theory: An Assessment”, in: Kozo Mayumi and John M. Gowdy (eds.), Bioeconomics and Sustainability. Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 1999, pp. 103–124. 13  Paul A. Samuelson, “My Life Philosophy” [1983], American Economist, Mar. 2016, p. 66; Roger E.  Backhouse, Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A.  Samuelson, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 148. 14  Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History”, The Journal of Economic History, vol. VII, 2, 1947, pp.  149–159. According to Samuelson, “only in the last year of his life did Schumpeter express before the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Business Cycles the view that mathematical models in business cycle research had been relatively sterile: that as between the alternative methods of cycle research, (1) theoretical, (2) statistical, and (3) historical, the last was by far the most important”. “Schumpeter as a Teacher and Economic Theorist”, op. cit., pp. 49–50. 15  Yuichi Schionoya, The Soul of the German Historical School. Methodological Essays on Schmoller, Weber and Schumpeter, Springer Science and Business Media, Inc., Boston, 2005; Schionoya (ed.), The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics, Routledge, London, 2001. 11

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economic history is trusted to show the dynamics of capitalism, and more specifically support the analysis of business cycles and crises, where the vicissitudes of the innovative entrepreneur and creative destruction articulate the historicity of the economic process. As to the second, the historical style of reasoning can be seen at work in the minute reconstruction of classical economic doctrines, a research area in which Schumpeter achieved great mastery and where he kept looking for elements which would advance his own theory. Indeed his conceptual contributions often result from the investigation and interpretation of the history of economic doctrines. While in the first case his theory of business cycles inevitably brings him closer to the perspective of economic history, in the second case he tries again and again to make his own contributions from the subtle interpretation of past economic thought.

2.2  S  chumpeter’s Evolutionism and the Macrodynamics of Capitalism From historicism to evolutionism only one step is required, and Schumpeter takes it. One might even claim, then, that evolutionism constitutes a central and defining aspect of the historical style of economic reasoning. Indeed, in his enumeration of the basic tenets of the Historical School, Schumpeter pointed to the evolutionary perspective, which would also be a prevalent feature in Marxism and in his own theory of business cycles. Under this light, the economy appeared as a unitary process that unfolds over time. The importance of economic history as a tool for analysis is thereby also reinforced. In this sense, evolutionism qualifies as a basic assumption of the historical style of economic reasoning, and its absence can be considered as an indicator of divergence between styles of reasoning. The key tenets of Schumpeter’s economic doctrine are well known: the macrodynamics of capitalism is ultimately based on competition among companies. The fundamental economic agent would be the innovative entrepreneur, a decisive figure who ends up destroying the existing economic structures to produce new, more competitive ones, in a kind of productive nihilism, which Schumpeter called “creative destruction”. In this respect, and in a controversial way, Schumpeter considered the formation of monopolies not only as a necessary consequence of economic activity, but as the opportunity for innovation, helping to overcome the conjunctural crises of capitalism. Based on this philosophy of history applied to the economy, capitalism would be intrinsically disruptive, and its endogenous decline would be offset by a certain capacity for self-restoration through business innovation, which ultimately produces the great march of economic cycles. In this way, and unlike classical political economy, Schumpeter integrates the analysis of the normal functioning of capitalism with episodes of economic crisis. Unlike what maintained by the Marxist doctrine, capitalism would not be contradictory per se, even despite its monopolistic tendencies inherent to the organization of

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competition. As Foucault has explained in his comment on Schumpeter’s work, the dynamics of competition generates centralization, with the subsequent “tendency to an incorporation of the economy in increasingly closely connected decision making centers of the administration and the state. This, then, is the historical condemnation of capitalism. But it is not a condemnation in terms of contradiction; it is condemnation in terms of historical inevitability”.16 Schumpeter’s ultimate diagnosis would be that the dynamics of capitalism is leading to an increasingly planned economy, with the subsequent loss of freedom. Foucault has labeled this as “Schumpeter’s pessimism”. However, and as we will see later on, Schumpeter also propounds a singular vision concerning economic progress based on qualitative leaps.

2.3  Business Cycle Theory Schumpeter credits Clément Juglar with “the decisive discovery [...] of a wave-like movement of alternating periods of prosperity and depression, which have pervaded economic life ever since the capitalist era began”.17 Schumpeter also frequently cites Arthur Spiethoff  – former assistant to Schmoller, a member of the German Historical School – and Marx as the great theorists of the business cycle. In particular, he finds in Spiethoff and Juglar an explanation of the crises in “the overproduction of capital goods relative on the one hand to the existing capital and on the other hand to the effective demand”.18 Finally, he also refers to the literature on the periodic crises of overproduction, where Aftalion and Marx himself find their place.19 Despite their rich network of references, and despite the later fortune of business cycles theories as an object of study,20 it is true that Schumpeter’s contributions tend to receive little attention or to be even openly undervalued.21 It is not my intention to address this complex issue here. I will limit myself to recalling in a concise way Schumpeter’s theory of the economic cycle in order to show the abrupt change in objects, concepts, statements, explanations, evidences, observational regimes, and epistemic cultures with respect to those involved in the entropic and neoclassical styles of reasoning, at least as they appear in Georgescu-Roegen’s and Samuelson’s texts.  Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Engl. trans. by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008, p. 177. 17  Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 1934, 3rd edition 1949, p. 223. 18  Ibid., p. 215. 19  Ibid., pp. 239–240. 20  Mary S.  Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas [1990], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996; Kim Kyun, Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. 21  Philip E. Mirowski, The Birth of the Business Cycle [1985], Routledge, London and New York, 2015, p. 279. 16

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Schumpeter was 29 years old when he published his second book, Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1912), where he already mentions the Konjunkturzyklus, usually translated as “business cycle”, “economic cycle”, or “trade cycle”. His theory of crises is then outlined in an early article entitled “Die Wellenbewegungen des Wirtschaftslebens” (1914). Schumpeter’s magnum opus is nevertheless the aforementioned Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, a two-volume work – the first volume appearing in 1923 and the second one in 1939. Extensive reference to business cycles can also be found in his later Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). In all these texts Schumpeter describes business cycles as the result of innovation and its effects on the productive structure: “Each of [these waves] consists of an ‘industrial revolution’ and the absorption of its effects”:22 These revolutions periodically reshape the existing structure of industry by introducing new methods of production […]. This process of industrial change provides the ground swell that gives the general tone to business: while these things are being initiated we have brisk expenditure and predominating ‘prosperity’ – interrupted, no doubt, by the negative phases of the shorter cycles that are superimposed on that ground swell – and while those things are being completed and their results pour forth we have elimination of antiquated elements of the industrial structure and predominating ‘depression’”.23

According to Schumpeter, the different economic cycles produce rises and falls in prices, interest, or employment, culminating in a “process of recurrent rejuvenation of the productive apparatus”.24 In this way, business cycles would alternate exceptional benefits with recessions and crises, and would explain how “it is possible for so large a section of the capitalist world to work for nothing”; “situations emerge […] in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm”.25 All this leads to his theory of the innovative entrepreneur as the main agent of economic change and creative destruction.

2.4  C  harismatic Innovation, Creative Destruction, and Economic Progress The Schumpeterian entrepreneur has been frequently considered a variation on the political-religious charism described by Max Weber. Thus, for example, Foucault refers to the “ethical-psychological characteristic of capitalism, or as an ethical-­ economic-­ psychological characteristic of capitalism, as Schumpeter did in a

 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper, New York & London, 1942. I quote from the Taylor & Francis edition, 2003, p. 67. 23  Ibid., p. 68. 24  Ibid. 25  Ibid., p. 90. 22

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problematic which was not so far from Max Weber’s”.26 Needless to say, Schumpeter did not have the same sociological sensitivity or historical finesse as Weber. Yet his style of reasoning, the kind of explanations he offers, and the description of the distinctive features of the innovative entrepreneur are inevitably historical. It is also interesting to remark that in Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1912), in the chapter “The Fundamental Phenomenon of Economic Development”, as Schumpeter outlines the leadership of the capitalist entrepreneur, he refers precisely to Max Weber. In these respects the Schumpeterian capitalist entrepreneur may be seen as a reoccupation of Weberian charism, although the innovative entrepreneurs have completely lost their connection with a transcendent, supernatural principle, to become rather the prophets of the immanent development of capitalism, as indeed Schumpeter himself has often been described.27 Schumpeter develops a theory of the creative entrepreneur as the genuine primum mobile of economic development in the context of the tradition of business cycles. Neither of these two aspects was new in itself, although their conjunction is specific to Schumpeter. From his point of view, the entrepreneur is one of the original factors of production – along with land, capital, and labor – and, therefore, the entrepreneurs are creators of value, precisely because of their innovations: “Leader and means of production are equally necessary, and the whole surplus value of the new products depends upon the cooperation of both of them”.28 In a peculiar inversion of the Marxist doctrine of surplus value, Schumpeter refers to the entrepreneurs as creators of value and, therefore, deserving of receiving the “entrepreneurial profit” or “monopoly revenue”: “The carrying out of the monopolistic organization is an entrepreneurial act and its ‘product’ is expressed in profit”.29 According to Schumpeter, economic development takes place endogenously through innovations promoted by entrepreneurs, as they produce added value with their inventions, and therefore they must be considered an original factor of production, also worthy of a specific remuneration. The entrepreneurs’ visionary leadership creates value and it is because of their disruptive innovations that capitalism renews its momentum. In this way, the cycles are for Schumpeter the expression of an alternation between innovation and adaptation: “there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles”.30 Capitalism needs this inventive activity to be able to sustain itself over time. It requires the sui generis psychology of the innovative entrepreneur, “the most rational and the most egotistical of all”.31 Also, in  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 231.  Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation. Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. 28  Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, op. cit., p. 143. 29  “Since the entrepreneur has no competitors when the new products first appear, the determination of their price proceeds wholly, or within certain limits, according to the principles of monopoly price. Thus there is a monopoly element in profit in a capitalist economy”, Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, op. cit., p. 152. 30  Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, op. cit., p. 83, fn. 2. 31  Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, op. cit., p. 91. 26 27

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Schumpeter’s opinion, the most precarious: “when his economic success raises him socially he has no cultural tradition or attitude to fall back upon, but moves about in society as an upstart, whose ways are readily laughed at, and we shall understand why this type has never been popular”.32 In the Weberian way, the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is devoted to the theodicy of suffering: “a typical entrepreneur is more self-centered than others types, because he relies less than other do on tradition and connection and because his characteristic task [ …] consists precisely in breaking up old, and creating new, tradition”.33 To the extent that innovations affect the productive structure “from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”, creative destruction appears as “the essential fact about capitalism”, a “perennial gale” that pushes it ahead.34 And here we come to the last aspect of the Schumpeterian economic doctrine that I would like to emphasize, that is to say, its notion of economic progress, based on the distinction between growth and development. By economic growth Schumpeter understands the gradual and cumulative increases characteristic of the normal phases of economic activity. He reserves instead the notion of economic development for internal changes, of a disruptive nature, derived from business innovations that modify the production structure. Development requires shocks in economic activity in order to undergo a substantial change aimed at improving productivity and increasing total wealth. This discontinuous progress, with qualitative leaps through crises, is what ultimately singles out Schumpeter’s understanding of the macrodynamics of capitalism as “a history of revolutions”.35 In other words, the cyclical disruptions of capitalism are, according to Schumpeter, the condition of possibility for the conversion of economic growth into economic development.

3  P  arting Ways: Georgescu-Roegen and the Entropic Style of Economic Reasoning While Schumpeter tries to explain the origin and overcoming of crises, the leitmotiv of Georgescu-Roegen’s work can be identified in the following question: Why is Romania poor? According to Georgescu-Roegen, the best answer to this question may be found in the economic implications of the laws of thermodynamics, in particular in the application of the law of entropy to Romanian agriculture.36  Ibid., p. 90.  Ibid., pp. 91–92. 34  Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, op. cit., p. 83. 35  Ibid. 36  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths. Institutional and Analytical Essays, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1976. Franck-Dominique Vivien, “From Agrarianism to Entropy: GeorgescuRoegen’s Bioeconomics from a Malthusian Viewpoint”, in: Kozo Mayumi and John M. Gowdy (eds.), Bioeconomics and Sustainability. Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 1999, pp. 155–172. 32 33

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Georgescu-­Roegen himself offers elements of the genealogy of this question in two important autobiographical articles published in 1989 and 1993, under the title “An Emigrant from a Developing Country. Notes I and II”. Since then, important studies have reconstructed in detail both his biographical career and his intellectual contributions.37 Surviving four dictatorships in Romania and three wars, GeorgescuRoegen met Schumpeter after having trained in France and England with some of the most prominent mathematicians of his time, such as Émile Borel and Karl Pearson. Thanks to his scientific expertise, Georgescu-Roegen was able to go beyond both the Schumpeterian heritage and the neoclassical economics propounded at Harvard. None of them, in his opinion, gave a satisfactory answer to the question about the poverty of the Romanian nation. Georgescu-Roegen’s decisive contribution to the emergence of the entropic style of economic reasoning is the idea to consider economic activity from a purely physical point of view.

3.1  Georgescu-Roegen Meets Schumpeter Schumpeter is a key figure in Georgescu-Roegen’s peculiar path to the entropic style of economic reasoning. Schumpeter first visited the United States between 1913 and 1914, as an exchange professor at Columbia University, and during 1927, 1928 and 1930 as visiting professor at Harvard University, settling there definitively from 1932.38 Two years later, in 1934, Georgescu-Roegen would come to the United States thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, with the initial intention of joining the Harvard Economic Barometer. As Georgescu-­ Roegen himself recounts, this plan was soon frustrated because “the organization petered out soon after the 1929 Black Tuesday because just the week before it predicted that all was in perfect order”.39 Due to this setback, Georgescu-Roegen joined the academic circle around Schumpeter, then head of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.40 Having just published the English version (1934) of his Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1912), Schumpeter was embarking on the writing of the second volume of his Business Cycles (1939): “This is how by mere chance I met the man who was to have the most decisive influence on my

 See Josif C. Dragan and Mihai C. Demestrescu, Entropy and Bioeconomics: The New Paradigm of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen [1986], Nagard Srl Editrice, Milan, 1991. Óscar Carpintero, La bioeconomía de Georgescu-Roegen, Montesinos, Ediciones de Intervención Cultural, Barcelona, 2006. Antoine Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, pour une révolution bioéconomique, ENS Éditions, Lyon, 2013. 38  Schionoya, The Soul of the German Historical School, op. cit. 39  Georgescu-Roegen, “An Emigrant From a Developing Country: Autobiographical Notes I”, Quarterly Review, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, 164, 1988, p. 21. Reedited in J. A. Kregel (ed.). Recollections of Eminent Economists, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 99–127. 40  Jacques Grinevald, “Prólogo”, in: N.  Georgescu-Roegen, La ley de la entropía y el proceso económico, Visor – Fundación Argentaria, Madrid, 1996, p. 30. 37

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further thinking, Joseph A. Schumpeter, whose name I did not even know at first how to pronounce correctly”.41 This chance encounter with Schumpeter had a transformative effect on Georgescu-Roegen. It was under his tutelage that the young Romanian mathematician became an economist, one trained at the Universitas Schumpeteriana, as he liked to say.42 Georgescu-Roegen had dedicated his doctoral thesis, defended at the Sorbonne in 1930, to the problem of finding the cyclical components of a phenomenon by means of statistical methods, and Schumpeter considered his studies beneficial to the analysis of business cycles. Belatedly, Georgescu-Roegen would remember: “At that time (1930), I was reluctant to apply my method to an economic series, because I already felt that economic data cannot satisfy the conditions of the ordinary statistical theorems”.43 Georgescu-Roegen appreciated Schumpeter for his erudition and mastery of economic doctrines, while Schumpeter admired the young Georgescu-Roegen for his unequivocal talent for mathematics, “the one field in which [Schumpeter] did show real humility”.44 In Samuelson’s words: [Schumpeter] waited eagerly (the uncharitable might almost say credulously) for some new mathematical method to turn up that would solve the mysteries of the ages: the tensor calculus, linear operators, symbolic logic, etc. Moreover, it was his conviction that mathematics itself had grown up as a servant of physics and was not adapted to economics; so that real progress in economic theory would require new methods tailor-made to economics.45

The interest in Georgescu-Roegen’s mathematical potential service can be interpreted as an indication of Schumpeter’s discomfort with his own historical style of economic reasoning, or in any case a certain sensitivity about its insufficiency. Samuelson recalls that Schumpeter was not particularly good at mathematics. However, he retained a taste for it throughout his life. Samuelson conjectured in this regard “that he ever crossed the Atlantic without spoiling the trip by taking along a book on tensor calculus or partial differential equations, which inevitably he succeeded neither in reading nor ignoring”.46 By then, mathematical economics had begun to flourish and Georgescu-Roegen met at Harvard important colleagues and friends such as Oskar Lange and Wassily Leontief, who made very significant contributions to this area and encouraged him to publish his early works in the neoclassical style of mathematical economics, which earned him academic prestige.

 Georgescu-Roegen, “Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1906–1994)”, in: Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (eds.), A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists [1992], 2nd edition, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2000, p. 221; Carpintero, La bioeconomía, op. cit., p. 38. 42  Georgescu-Roegen, “Georgescu-Roegen”, op. cit., p. 221. 43  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., p. xxi. 44  “[…] He was quite aware of his own lack of facility with mathematics and cheerfully admitted the difficulties he had in mastering and retaining mathematical techniques”. Samuelson, “Schumpeter as a Teacher and Economic Theorist”, op. cit., p. 49. 45  Ibid., p. 49. Backhouse, Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson, op. cit., p. 144. 46  Samuelson, “Schumpeter as a Teacher and Economic Theorist”, op. cit., p. 49. 41

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3.2  Rejection of a Position at Harvard and Return to Romania In 1937, three years after the first meeting with Schumpeter at Harvard, a memorable episode followed, which, although later regretted by Georgescu-Roegen, would clearly become the turning point for the elaboration of his main work The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), and the emergence of the entropic style of economic reasoning. “When the doors of the first university of the world were opened to him and a brilliant professional career in the United States became possible, Georgescu-Roegen decided to return to Romania to help his land out of the economic and social prostration, to compensate, to a certain extent, the collective effort that paid for all his training abroad”.47 In view of the quality of his academic articles, Schumpeter saw Georgescu-Roegen as promising and offered him a teaching position, as well as the coauthorship of an extensive treatise on economic analysis. “But incredible as it must seem, I declined”, recalls Georgescu-Roegen.48 Schumpeter tried all means to have him change his mind, and even went to New York on the eve of his departure to try to convince him to stay. He invited Georgescu-­Roegen and his wife to dinner at the Waldorf Astoria – “still in splendor then”– 49 with the intention of persuading him. He did not succeed: Georgescu-Roegen “gave up a comfortable and brilliant scientific career in the United States in exchange for an uncertain and hard future in his homeland”.50 According to Samuelson, “Schumpeter himself lacked the power base to procure for Georgescu-Roegen the tenure chair dangled before him as bait”.51 And in relation to the coauthored treaty, he maintains: It was a regret of the great Joseph Schumpeter, a regret that he carried to his grave, that his proposed collaboration with the young Georgescu-Roegen on a definitive economic treatise could not take place because of Nicholas’s patriotic urge to return to the pre-war Romania that had nursed his genius. It was not only Schumpeter’s loss, it was a loss to the budding science of political economy.52

  Óscar Carpintero, “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: un economista transdisciplinar”, in: N.  Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, edited by Óscar Carpintero, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2007, p. 11 (my transl.). 48  Georgescu-Roegen, “An Emigrant From a Developing Country”, op. cit., p. 29. 49  Ibid. 50  Carpintero, La bioeconomía, op. cit., p. 52 (my transl.). 51  “Alas, a Balkan patriot could not be lured away from the Motherland that was soon to implode”. Samuelson, “Foreword”, in: Kozo Mayumi and John M.  Gowdy (eds.). Bioeconomics and Sustainability. Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 1999, p. xiii. 52   Samuelson, “Tribute to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen on his 85th Birthday”, Libertas Mathematica, vol. 10, 1990, p. 1. 47

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One can now conjecture that the great coauthored treatise simply could not be written; the time for its possibility had not yet come. Instead it took the entire tragic Romanian journey for Georgescu-Roegen to be able to practice that tour de force that would lead him to his great work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. The declined offer was clearly unfavorable for Georgescu-Roegen, but not for the history of economic thought. Otherwise, it is hard to imagine how he could have come up with his bioeconomics and the subsequent formulation of the entropic style of economic reasoning, a crucial aspect of the subsequent emergence of ecological economics.

3.3  Schumpeter’s Influences on Georgescu-Roegen Georgescu-Roegen always had laudatory words concerning Schumpeter, and considered himself his best disciple. In this respect, the criticism of the Schumpeterian economic doctrine is rather elusive and implicit in his texts. However, already concerning the input coming from his mentor, it is worth noting the divergence in their styles of reasoning. Without a doubt, Schumpeter’s first major influence on Georgescu-Roegen lies in his evolutionary understanding of the economic process. Analogies with the history of evolution and biological mutation phenomena have a fundamental bearing on Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomic view. However, Schumpeterian evolutionism is by him interpreted in light of the law of entropy. In analogy with living beings, the economic process is seen as consuming low-entropy resources and returning them to the environment in degraded form. Consequently, the economic process is taken as an irreversible process that continues to increase the total entropy of the system. This plainly contradicts the theory of business cycles in that this latter assumes a structure of repetition, characterized by the ability to self-restore to an equilibrium position. Georgescu-Roegen deems this feature of Schumpeter’s theory too indebted to the old mechanism: “Everything now turns out to be just a pendulum movement. One business ‘cycle’ follows another”.53 Differently, the application of the law of entropy to economic evolutionism not only has the ensuing effect of debunking the Schumpeterian theory of business cycles, but also calls into question the macrodynamics of capitalism. A long-term cyclical conception is presented as simply incompatible with the laws of thermodynamics. As a result, Georgescu-Roegen inverts Schumpeter’s argument: what is truly disruptive of capitalism is not so much the innovative entrepreneur, but the entropic condition of the economic process, which instead of producing value indefinitely is the ultimate source of scarcity. Consequently, the observational regime based on the charismatic figure of the innovative entrepreneur is replaced by a different one focused on nineteenth-century thermodynamics and the well-known repertoire of physical evidence.

53

 Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., p. 4.

4  Final Remarks: Schumpeter and the Decline of the Historical Style of Economic...

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4  F  inal Remarks: Schumpeter and the Decline of the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning While the application of the laws of thermodynamics to economic analysis deeply challenges Schumpeter’s doctrine of business cycles, its effective decline is rather linked to the triumph of Keynesianism. Schumpeter’s magnum opus, Business Cycles, could not counteract the growing influence of Keynes’s book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is how Erik S.  Reinert explains the crossroads of the moment: “Simply put, it may be said that Schumpeter gave us the explanation of the Great Depression – the key mechanisms that brought it about – while Keynes already three years earlier had the medicine. As long as the medicine worked, not enough people cared about fully understanding the complex mechanisms behind the illness itself”.54 Keynes indeed introduces a series of economic concepts that prove to be very useful in designing and applying government policies with which to control inflation, mitigate mass unemployment, and improve the economic performance of a country.55 With his distinctive lucidity, Foucault has put it in these terms: Let’s say that following the great crisis of the 1930s, all in all, every government of whatever type knew that the economic elements which they had to take into consideration  – whatever the nature of their options, whatever their choices and objectives  – were full employment, stable prices, equilibrium of the balance of payments, growth of the GNP, the redistribution of income and wealth, and the provision of social services. Roughly speaking, this constitutes the list of what Bentham would have called, in his terms, the economic agenda of government, the things it must concern itself with, whatever the way it may choose to do so.56

Unlike Schumpeter’s doctrine of business cycles, Keynesianism provides precise tools of public intervention with which to tackle crisis situations.57 Thus, the old macrodynamics of capitalism, inspired by the philosophy of history, is replaced by the new Keynesian macroeconomics.58 The protracted economic boom after World War II, the generalization of Keynesianism first, and monetarism later, made Schumpeter’s work soon fall into oblivion. Although the complexity of the historical style of economic reasoning cannot be reduced to the specific case of Schumpeter, the decline of this style coincided with the loss of centrality of the economic doctrine that he endorsed. Schumpeter’s

 Erik S. Reinert, “Steeped in Two Mind-Sets”, op. cit.  Further details in Paul A.  Samuelson and William D.  Nordhaus, Economics, McGraw-Hill, Irwin, 2010, Chap. 19. 56  Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., pp. 194–195. 57  Muriel Dal Pont Legrand and Harald Hagemann, “Business Circles, Growth, and Economic Policy: Schumpeter and the Great Depression”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2016, pp. 1–15. 58  Roger E. Backhouse and Mauro Boianovsky, Transforming Modern Macroeconomics, op. cit. 54 55

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intellectual eclipse also affected the historical style of economic reasoning altogether, which soon came to be seen as a mere repository of anecdotes and chronology. When Samuelson, one of the main disseminators of Keynesianism in the United States, refers to the theory of business cycles in his famous Economics: An Introduction (1948), he makes little reference to Schumpeter as a central author. A footnote in the 1951 edition reads: “An industrious student could easily compile a list of separate theories of the business cycle which would run into the dozens”.59 Some of these theories, he continues, are based on climate and crops, as in Jevons or Moore; on credit and overinvestment, as in Hayek or Mises; on psychology, as in Pigou and Begehot; or on innovation, as in Schumpeter and Hansen, among many others. In his famous textbook, Samuelson considers business cycles more on Keynes’ side than on that of his teacher Schumpeter: “Modern business-cycle theories rely primarily on the Keynesian approach. This analysis shows the impact of financial shocks and changes in investment, government spending and taxation, and foreign trade”.60 It is Keynes who has correctly explained the “business-cycle drama”, that is, the successive “irregular expansions and contractions in economic activity”,61 and all without requiring the details of an economic history. Finally, the loss of the epistemological role of history in the elaboration of economic doctrines can be linked to the new hegemony of Keynesianism, clearly at the expense of Schumpeterian contributions, and determining the decline of the historical style of economic reasoning.

 Samuelson, Economics. An Introduction [1948], New  York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951, p. 385. 60  Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, op. cit., p. 424. 61  Ibid., p. 429. 59

Fundamental Disagreements in the Origin of Ecological Economics

The symmetric analysis of scientific controversies, even if conducted from a position of neutrality, had the overall effect of strengthening the losing side by taking its arguments far more seriously than reigning scientific orthodoxy would. Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science”, 2009.

An episode of special importance in the recent history of ecological economics is the convergence between Roegenians and Odumites.1 Regarding the process of disciplinary speciation of ecological economics, Herman Daly and Robert Costanza stand out, the former as a conspicuous representative of the Georgescu-Roegen school, the latter as a member of the Howard Odum school. Undoubtedly, the alliance between Roegenians and Odumites was decisive in the emergence of ecological economics and in its subsequent institutionalization. In this chapter I will review some of the most significant polemics with neoclassical economists in which the Roegenians, i.e., Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly, were involved. In this regard, I will study several cases of conflict between the entropic style and the neoclassical style, whose diatribes often ended in communicative breakdown.2 As a recurring thread, I will follow the dispute over the relevance of thermodynamic concepts in the analysis of economics. While Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly argued that the entropic explanation of the economic process is the correct explanation, neoclassical economists argued on the contrary that it was irrelevant.

1  I borrow this last expression from Charles A.  S. Hall, (ed.): Maximum Power: The Ideas and Applications of H.T. Odum, University Press of Colorado, 1995, p. x. 2  For a philosophical analysis of fundamental epistemic disagreement I refer to Katherina Kinzel and Martin Kusch, “De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 26, 1, 2018, pp.  40–71. On disagreement in economics, see the issue “Symposium: Disagreement among Economists”, Journal of Economic Methodology, 1, 1, 1994, pp. 1–64.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Fragio, Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics, Contributions to Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2_5

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For Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly, the neoclassical explanation – based on equilibrium prices, efficient markets, and externalities – is manifestly inadequate. In contrast, neoclassical economists such as Robert Solow and Joseph E. Stiglitz considered the entropic explanation to be inaccurate, unable to produce technically sound models3 and loaded with grandiloquent pronouncements. That kind of analysis would be, to use W. J. Baumol’s expression, “vague and impressionistic”.4 As previously anticipated, a style of reasoning is singularized by a type of explanation that is specific to it  – i.e., a style of explanation  – and involves different conditions of possibility for observation, the gathering of evidence, the introduction of concepts and objects, the validation of statements, or the use of epistemic cultures. In this sense, the communicative breakdowns between Roegenians and Neoclassicals can be understood as an effect of the conflict between the neoclassical style of explanation and the entropic style of explanation, since both styles impose serious restrictions on the type of economic explanations that are acceptable. Unlike the psychologistic claims of authors such as Lee Iglesias,5 who have argued that the flaws in the reception of Georgescu-Roegen’s economic thought were primarily due to his difficult temperament, I will argue that the communicative breakdowns between neoclassical and Roegenian economists can be understood as an effect of the fundamental epistemic conflict between the two styles of explanations and their respective phenomenologies: not only did they explain the economic process differently, but they also focused on different aspects of it. In some cases, a partial communication was possible, but in others there was a complete communicative breakdown, sometimes aggravated by a striking unwillingness to dialogue on the side of the neoclassical economists. The application of thermodynamics to

3  Further attempts to address this issue in Stefan Baumgärtner, “Thermodynamic Models”, in: John L.  R. Proops and Paul Safonov (eds.), Modelling in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004, pp. 102–129. Marc Germain, “Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz: Back to a Controversy”, Ecological Economics, 160, 2019, pp.  168–182. Quentin Couix, “Natural Resources in the Theory of Production: the Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Controversy”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019, pp.  2–38; Q.  Couix, “Georgescu-Roegen’s Flow-Fund Theory of Production in Retrospect”, Ecological Economics, 176, 2020, pp.  1–10; Q.  Couix, “Models as ‘Analytical Similes’: on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s Contribution to Economic Methodology”, Journal of Economic Methodology, 28, 2, 2021, pp. 165–185. 4  W. J. Baumol, Economic Dynamics, 3rd ed., Macmillan, New York, 1970, p. 351. It is an expression that Georgescu-Roegen himself liked to quote; see, for instance, his Ensayos bioeconómicos, edited by Óscar Carpintero, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2007, pp. 143–4 and GeorgescuRoegen, “De la science économique à la bioéconomie”, Revue d’économie politique, vol. 88, 3, 1978, pp. 337–82, reprinted in Antoine Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, pour une révolution bioéconomique, ENS Éditions, Lyon, 2013, pp. 87–128, see in particular p. 101, footnote 11. Baumol, together with Wallace E. Oates, is the coauthor of a classic study in environmental economics on externalities, The Theory of Environmental Policy [1975], second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 5  Samuel Lee Iglesias, The Miscommunications and Misunderstandings of Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen, Honors Thesis in Economics (E.  Roy Weintraub, Faculty Advisor), Trinity College of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 2009.

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economic analysis produced, in short, an entropic style of explanation not shared by the neoclassical economists. Eventually, the position that the entropic style of explanation is the correct explanation of the economic process will be replaced by the ethos that ecological economics is the correct view of the relationship between the economy and the biosphere. This ethos shapes the ultimate sense of the disciplinary speciation process of ecological economics, its struggle for conceptual hegemony in economics, and its criticism of neoclassical economics. In this regard, it is possible to assume that the Roegenian communicative breakdowns favored the speciation of ecological economics. Some of the assaults on neoclassical economics that will be considered in the present chapter entailed an “erosion” of the entropic style of economic reasoning, and highlighted the semi-technical character of the Roegenian approach, its flawed understandings of thermodynamics, and the spurious nature of the fourth law of material entropy proposed by the Romanian economist.6 All this made clear that a modification or extension of the entropic style of explanation was needed. In a certain sense, it was the Odumian school – burdened with its own polemics, such as the energy theory of value – that in part came to remedy these deficiencies within the entropic style of explanation. The synthesis of the two approaches can be found in the biophysical style of explanation of the economic process, which incorporates systems ecology and various elements from environmental sciences.7 The Roegenian assaults to neoclassical economics then facilitated the transition toward ecological economics. The irony, however, is that the Odumian school, especially with Robert Costanza, was not hostile to neoclassical economics, quite the contrary, and in a way encouraged the return to neoclassical approaches from within ecological economics itself, something to which Herman Daly would eventually also contribute.8 The siege of the neoclassical citadel certainly did not have the expected results.

6  The bibliography on this subject is extensive. See, for example, R. U. Ayres, “The Second Law, the Fourth Law, Recycling and the Limits to Growth”, Ecological Economics, 29, 1999, pp. 473–483; Quentin Couix, “Natural Resources in the Theory of Production”, op. cit., pp. 20–21. 7  For reasons of space, I will not deal here with the disciplinary speciation of biophysical economics promoted by Charles A. S. Hall, also a disciple of Howard Odum. On this issue I refer the reader to Charles A. S. Hall and Kent Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations. An Introduction to Biophysical Economics [2012], second edition, Springer, 2018. 8  This has been shown by Elke Pirgmaier, “The Neoclassical Trojan Horse of Steady-State Economics”, Ecological Economics, 133, 2017, pp.  52–61. A reply in Joshua Farley, Haydn Washington, “Circular Firing Squads: A Response to ‘The Neoclassical Trojan Horse of SteadyState Economics’ by Pirgmaier”, Ecological Economics, 147, 2018, pp. 442–449. See also, Robert Costanza and Herman Daly, “Natural Capital as Sustainable Development”, Conservation Biology, 6 (1), 1992, pp. 1–15. Paper prepared for the CEARC Workshop on Natural Capital, Vancouver, BC, March 15–16, 1990, Canadian Environmental Assessment Research Council, Ottawa. Robert Costanza et alii., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital”, Nature, vol. 387, 1997, pp. 253–260.

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1  Five Assaults to Neoclassical Economics Some of Georgescu-Roegen’s and Herman Daly’s pioneering criticism of neoclassical economics have become commonplaces in contemporary ecological economics. Thus, for example, the discussion on the limits to substitutability between different types of capital, the doubts about the capacity of technology to solve sustainability problems, or the problematic relationship between economic growth and the environment.9 In the following sections I will deal with five episodes of singular importance in which the entropic style of economic reasoning came into conflict with the neoclassical style. The first of these, of a more general nature, is Georgescu-­ Roegen’s critique to mathematical economics on the basis of the mechanistic epistemology internalized in it. In this first assault, Georgescu-Roegen questioned the neoclassical faith in mathematics to reveal the secrets of the economy, the touchstone of the neoclassical style of economic reasoning. He argued that the early mathematization of economics was based on a problematic analogy with the mechanism of modern physics, which had the additional effect of obscuring the relationship between the economy and the environment, preventing a proper understanding of it. The second assault was triggered by the publication of the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth (1972) and the debates it provoked, in which several neoclassical economists, such as Samuelson, Nordhaus, and Solow, took part. In this context, Georgescu-Roegen proposed his minimal bioeconomic program as an alternative path between the Club of Rome’s catastrophism and the skepticism of neoclassical economists. The third assault came in the wake of a sequel to Harold J.  Barnett and Chandler Morse’s book, Scarcity and Growth (1963), edited by V.  Kerry Smith under the title Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979). There Georgescu-Roegen and Daly formulated some of their best-known criticisms of the production function and the neoclassical response to the problem of natural resource scarcity. The fourth assault was featured by Daly, who in 1986 came out in defense of Georgescu-Roegen on the occasion of an article by Stuart Burness, Ronald Cummings, Glenn Morris, and Inja Paik, “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use-Policies”, published six years before in Land Economics. In that article, the authors tried to combine neoclassical environmental economics with some thermodynamic concepts and wondered about the real relevance of this approach when defining intervention policies aimed at creating efficient markets. Finally, the fifth assault took place in 1997 on the occasion of a special issue of Ecological Economics, edited by Daly in homage to Georgescu-Roegen (who died in 1994), in which not only the most important contributions of the Romanian economist were systematically presented, but also some of his old polemics with Solow and Stiglitz were revived. These five assaults on neoclassical economics will serve, in short, to show the strong antagonism between the entropic style and the

9  I. Røpke, “Trends in the Development of Ecological Economics from the Late 1980s to the Early 2000s”, Ecological Economics, 55, 2005, p. 275.

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neoclassical style, while allowing us to glimpse how a biophysical explanation of the economic process began to make its way.

1.1  F  irst Round: The Double Critique to Mathematical Reason and Mechanistic Epistemology But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope. (Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1953)

As opposed to the neoclassical epistemic culture, built on the motto “shut up and calculate”,10 Georgescu-Roegen formulated a critique of mathematical reason11 at a time when mathematical economics was developing with particular intensity. Indeed, Georgescu-Roegen had acquired academic prestige for his youthful contributions to mathematical economics, so his criticisms were not of an outsider to the discipline; quite the contrary. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the authors of marginalism had sought to elevate the scientific status of economics through its mathematization. Thus, questioning the epistemological validity of mathematical economics was tantamount to casting doubt on the scientificity of economics as a whole. Georgescu-Roegen believed that he had overcome this stumbling block by basing the scientific validity of economics on classical thermodynamics and evolutionary biology, brought together in a radical project of re-foundation that he called “bioeconomics”. The inadequacy of neoclassical economics to fully explain the reality of the economic process was due, in his view, to its faith in the capacity of mathematics to reveal the arcanum of the economic process. This excessive confidence in mathematics, in “arithmomorphism”, to use his preferred term,12 had led economic thought astray. Starting from the firm basis of the laws of thermodynamics, and in particular the law

 Alan Freeman, “Schumpeter’s Theory of Self-Restoration: A Casualty of Samuelson’s Whig Historiography of Science”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2014, 39, p. 668. 11  See especially the second and third chapters of Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 87–108, and pp. 109–146. 12  Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, op. cit. Georgescu-Roegen makes a play on words between “arithmetic” and “morphism” to designate the belief that mathematics expresses an isomorphic relationship with reality, as a sort of mystical numerology, “arithmomania” (Ó. Carpintero, La bioeconomía de Georgescu-Roegen, Ediciones de Intervención Cultural-Montesinos, Barcelona, 2006, p. 111). Georgescu-Roegen considers that arithmomorphic concepts are those concepts that are clear and well defined, similar to mathematical symbols (e.g., “circle”, “electron”, etc.), and fulfill the property of “discrete differentiation”, that is, they are clearly defined and have their limits well traced with respect to the rest of the symbols. Dialectical concepts, on the other hand, are those that are not easily trapped by logical and mathematical symbols. Further details in Carpintero, La bioeconomía, op. cit., pp. 107–108. 10

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of entropy, he believed it may be possible to correct this misguidance, while hoping to reinforce the scientific status of economic analysis.13 In Georgescu-Roegen’s opinion, the turning point in the misguidance of conventional economics occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century, with the pioneering economists of the neoclassical school, such as Jevons, Walras, Edgeworth, and Pareto. These economists adopted a mechanistic epistemology with the aim of being able to transfer the mathematical methods of modern physics to classical political economy, and eventually even to provide an axiomatic structure.14 In particular, W. Stanley Jevons introduced the idea of economics as a “sister science of mechanics”,15 conceived in terms of a “mechanics of utility and self-interest”.16 Economics, built on the mechanical model of Newtonian physics, was precisely what had allowed – in Georgescu-Roegen’s view – its mathematical elevation, and the intended strengthening of its scientific status. However, the thermodynamics of the nineteenth century came independently to call into question the old mechanism of modern physics, at least as Newton had understood it. In this sense, Georgescu-­ Roegen’s position was that the subsumption of the economic process under the laws of thermodynamics should remove the old mechanistic conception internalized in neoclassical economics, instituting a more solid epistemological basis different from a mere rational market mechanics based on the universalization of Newtonian logic.17 All in all, what Georgescu-Roegen called the “mechanistic dogma”18 was a condition of possibility for the mathematization of economics. According to him, this

 According to Quentin Couix, in Georgescu-Roegen “thermodynamics is used as a source of conceptual inspiration in order to reform the foundations of economics. The implicit idea behind this kind of interdisciplinarity is that thermodynamics is a mature and reliable science, whereas economics is an unsatisfying intellectual edifice”, Couix, “Natural Resources in the Theory of Production”, op. cit., p.  18. See also Q.  Couix, “From Methodology to Practice (and Back): Georgescu-Roegen’s Philosophy of Economics and the Flow-Fund Model”, Documents de travail du Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, 2018. On the mechanistic models of neoclassical economics I refer the reader to Mary S.  Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012, pp. 18–19. 14  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths. Institutional and Analytical Essays, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1976, p. x. Further details in Malte Faber and John L. R. Proops, “Interdisciplinary Research between Economists and Physical Scientists: Retrospect and Prospect”, Kyklos, 38, 4, 1985, pp. 599–616. 15  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., p. 4. 16  Ibid., p. 3. In particular, Georgescu-Roegen refers to W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2ª ed., Macmillan, London, 1879, p. 21; Vilfredo Pareto, Manuale di economia politica, Societá Editrice Libraria, Milan, 1906, chapters 3 and 4. 17  Antoine Missemer has correctly summed up this point: “if the world operates according to laws that are not uniquely Newtonian, economic science cannot be based solely on the Newtonian framework”, Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, pour une révolution bioéconomique, Lyon, ENS Éditions, 2013, p. 19. My translation. 18  Georgescu-Roegen, “Mechanistic Dogma and Economics”, Methodology and Science, 7, 3, Sept. 1974, pp. 174-84, reedited in British Review of Economic Issues, 2, 1978, pp. 1–10. See also Georgescu-Roegen, “De la science économique à la bioéconomie”, Revue d’économie politique, 13

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economic-conceptual construction, in open analogy with classical mechanics and its principles of equilibrium and conservation,19 should be corrected, since it was not only challenged by the law of entropy, but its high degree of idealization also entailed a kind of oblivion of nature. Neoclassical economics  – with its circular flows of exchange value, its frictionless pendulum movements between production and consumption, its marginal utilities, its equilibrium prices or its efficient markets – was a mathematical fiction in which the economy as a whole was reduced to a self-sustaining, reversible, timeless kinematics, alien to the biosphere.20 In this way, any exogenous disturbance – such as the disaster caused by a drought, a stock market collapse, or hyperinflation – would be solved in the medium or long term in the free play of economic forces, since once these events subside the economic mechanism is supposed to return to its initial condition without leaving any trace on the economy. Based on this epistemological critique, Gergescu-Roegen proposed to replace the mechanical-Newtonian model with a thermodynamic model, in which the new foundation would be provided by the law of entropy, with its implications of irreversibility and inevitable deterioration.21 The subtle mathematical formalisms of neoclassical economics hid, in short, serious defects of conceptualization.22 Consequently, the bad habit of analyzing economic phenomena based on the principles of classical mechanics had to be corrected by using the law of entropy. This is why Georgescu-Roegen attempted to study the economic process from the point of view of thermodynamics. As a result, Georgescu-Roegen replaced the neoclassical faith in mathematics with some kind of economic physicalism. However, it seems that this first effort to besiege the neoclassical citadel remained, at least at first, a preaching in the wilderness.

vol. 88, n.° 3, 1978, pp.  337–382, reedited in Antoine Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, pour une révolution bioéconomique, ENS Éditions, Lyon, 2013, pp.  87–128, in particular pp. 96–100. 19  This argument was the subject of Philip Mirowski’s famous book More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics [1989], Cambridge University Press, 1995. See additionally Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock. A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2016. 20  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., pp. 3–4 and 326. 21  Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, op. cit., p. 64. 22  The topic of mathematical formalism with little or no economic significance was symbolized in the Novick affair, to which Georgescu-Roegen referred in his article “Methods in Economic Science”, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. XIII, 2, 1979, pp. 317–328. This paper also referred to an article by Paul A. Samuelson et al., “Mathematics in Economics: Discussion on Mr. Novick’s Article”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 36, November 1954, pp.  359–386, quoted in Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, op. cit., p. 130, footnote 3. The brief dossier on the subject includes David Novick’s article and the rejoinder of several economists, including Samuelson and Solow.

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1.2  S  econd Round: The Debate on The Limits to Growth (1972) Whereas the neoclassical economists could afford to ignore the sharp criticism of an obscure professor at Vanderbilt University, they were not in a position to overlook the enormous media impact of the Club of Rome’s report, The Limits to Growth (1972), whose central claim partly resembled Georgescu-Roegen’s: there are insurmountable physical limits to economic growth. Undoubtedly, one of the distinctive features of the neoclassical style is its Apollonian character. Its design did not allow one to think of apocalypse. With no small amount of malice, Solow referred to the “doomsday models” mobilized in The Limits to Growth.23 Certainly, neoclassical economists had lost their fear of doomsday forecasts since Jevons’ famous unfulfilled prophecy of coal depletion. For the neoclassical style of economic reasoning, the theory of general equilibrium was the katechon of any catastrophist prognosis. In this sense, the response to the challenges raised by the Club of Rome report24 by some of the most prominent neoclassical economists, such as Samuelson, Nordhaus, and Solow, was quite convergent: the phenomena of resource depletion will be mitigated either by technological advances – which will make it possible to produce more with fewer resources – or by an adaptation mechanism via prices.25 Consequently, they came to distinguish between physical scarcity and economic scarcity, and considered only the latter to

 Robert M. Solow, “Is the End of the World at Hand?”, Challenge, 16 (1), 1973, pp. 39–50. See also Patrick Kupper and Elke Seefried, “‘A Computer’s Vision of Doomsday’. On the History of the 1972 Study The Limits to Growth”, in: Frank Uekötter (ed.), Exploring Apocalyptica. Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2018, pp. 49–74. It should also be noted that in 1968 Paul R. Ehrlich had published The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York), usually considered one of the great catastrophist manifestos. Some years later, together with Anne H. Ehrlich, he published the sequel, The Population Explosion. 24   Óscar Carpintero, “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: un economista transdisciplinar”, in: N. Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, edited by Ó. Carpintero, Los libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2007, pp. 25–26. 25  An important compilation on the reception of the Club of Rome report can be found in Willem Oltmans (ed.), On Growth [1973], Capricorn Books, New York, 1974, which not only includes contributions from neoclassical economists such as Samuelson and Nordhaus, but also from authors such as Boulding, Lévi-Strauss, Marcuse, Toynbee, Chomsky, and McLuhan, among many others. For Samuelson and Nordhaus, living standards are determined by economic growth  – expressed in the increase in GDP – and this in turn depends on aggregate supply, i.e., on the productivity of the country. See Paul A.  Samuelson and William D.  Nordhaus, Economics with Applications to Latin America, translated from the nineteenth edition of Economics, Mexico, McGraw-Hill, 2010, p. 515. In their opinion, the basic difference between a rich and a poor country consists in its productive capacity. At variance with this idea, Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics claimed that the economic process would not cease to increase the entropy of the system, i.e., the greater the productivity, the greater the entropy. Further details about Nordhaus’s position in relation to the Club of Rome report in Antonin Pottier, Comment les économistes réchauffent la planète, Seuil, Paris, 2016, p.  114. See also W.  D. Nordhaus, “World Dynamics  – Measurement Without Data”, Economic Journal, vol. 82, no. 332, December 1973, pp. 115–183. 23

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be truly relevant. Economic scarcity, however, could be mitigated by the readaptation of productive capacity, demand, and the price mechanism, as well as by the incorporation of more efficient production techniques.26 Moreover, the exhaustibility of natural resources would not pose a serious problem provided that the reproducible capital was sufficiently substitutable, or at any rate provided substitution could alleviate the pressure caused by the scarcity of some natural resources.27 As is well known, the debate on The Limits to Growth has produced many comments.28 Here I will only refer very briefly to the positions of Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly. As for Georgecu-Roegen, his relationship with the Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth was quite ambiguous, as Clément Levallois has shown.29 The core of his position is expressed in an article published in 1975, “Energy and Economic Myths”,30 which would also give the title to an important anthology that appeared the following year,31 in which Georgescu-Roegen criticized the reception of the Club of Rome report by Samuelson, Nordhaus, and Solow.32 In Georgescu-­ Roegen’s view, the great flaw of The Limits to Growth was to focus – in a Malthusian fashion – on what might be called the “exponentials of catastrophe”.33 Faced with this representation of the coming disaster by means of exponential growth curves, Georgescu-Roegen came to suggest that the law of entropy showed a much deeper vision, capable of establishing a sort of political economy that he identified with his

 Anthony C. Fisher, “Measures of Natural Resource Scarcity”, en: V. Kerry Smith (ed.): Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered [1979], RFF Press, Washington, DC – London, 2011, p. 249. 27  Peter A. Victor, “Indicators of Sustainable Development: Some Lessons from Capital Theory”, Ecological Economics, 4, 1991, pp. 191–213. See also R. Solow “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics”, American Economic Review, 64, 1974, pp. 1–14. Lecture by Richard T. Ely. Further details on the neoclassical position about scarcity in the special issue “Symposium on the Economics of Exhaustible Resources”, The Review of Economic Studies, vol. 41, 1974, with contributions from leading economists such as Geoffrey Heal, Partha Dasgupta, Robert M. Solow, and Joseph Stiglitz. 28  For the general context see, for instance, Matthias Schmelzer, “The Growth Paradigm: History, Hegemony, and the Contested Making of Economic Growthmanship”, Ecological Economics, 118, 2015, pp.  262–271. Iris Borowy and Matthias Schmelzer (eds.), History of the Future of Economic Growth. Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth, Routledge, London, 2017. See also Ugo Bardi, The Limits to Growth Revisited, Springer, New York, 2011. 29  Clément Levallois, “Can De-growth be Considered a Policy Option? A Historical Note on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Club of Rome”, Ecological Economics, 69, 2010, pp. 2271–2278. 30  Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths”, Southern Economic Journal, 41, 1975, pp. 347–381. Lecture delivered on November 8, 1972, at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, in the Series “Limits to Growth: The Equilibrium State and Human Society”, reedited in Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., pp. 3–36. 31  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit. 32  For further details I refer the reader to Ó. Carpintero, “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: un economista transdisciplinar”, op. cit., pp. 25–26. 33  Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., p. 21. 26

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famous “minimal bioeconomic program”.34 This minimal program can be understood as Georgescu-Roegen’s response to the debate on the biophysical limits of economic growth, that is to say, as an alternative between the more or less imminent catastrophism envisioned by the Club of Rome and the reassuring response of the neoclassical economists. The minimum bioeconomic program would be the solution proposed by Georgescu-Roegen to the environmental problem derived from economic growth, which could be summarized in the following points: 1 . To prohibit any type of weapons of war 2. To release productive capacity for international aid 3. To favor the decrease of the population, and to feed the population through sustainable agriculture 4. To decrease energy waste 5. To eliminate extravagant consumption behaviors 6. To avoid superfluous consumption associated with fashion and planned obsolescence 7. To design goods to be as durable as possible 8. To improve work/life balance Although the authors of the Club of Rome report did not expressly mention Georgescu-Roegen, they learned about his ideas through Daly’s work. In particular, they referred to one of Daly’s foundational texts where he proposed a steady-state economy, entitled “Toward a Stationary-State Economy” (1971).35 In this work, Daly reproduced and reinterpreted some of the central theses of his teacher. In particular, he considered pollution as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics: since matter and energy cannot be destroyed, the same amount of them must return to the environment as waste. He referred to this as “the after-use ‘corpse’ of a commodity”.36 Consequently, higher transfer rates of energy and materials involve higher levels of pollution and lower availability of the resource: “the limits regarding what rates of depletion and pollution are tolerable must be supplied by ecology. A definitive limit to the size of maintenance flows of matter and energy is set by ecological thresholds which if exceeded cause a breakdown of the system”.37 Thus, Daly proposed an explanation of the environmental effects of economic activity from the entropic style of economic reasoning, and instead of appealing to equilibrium prices or efficient markets, he referred to style evidence such as waste heat or the flows of matter and energy.38  A synthesis and commentary on Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomic program, as well as his 1978 reworking, is available in A. Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, op. cit. See also GeorgescuRoegen, “De la science économique à la bioéconomie”, op. cit., especially the section “L’ABC bioéconomique”, pp. 114–122. 35  Herman E.  Daly, “Toward a Stationary-State Economy”, in: John Harte and Robert Socolow (eds.), The Patient Earth, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1971, pp. 236–237. 36  Daly, “Toward a Stationary-State Economy”, op. cit., p. 232. 37  Ibid. 38  Ibid. 34

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While Georgescu-Roegen had derived a minimal bioeconomic program from the entropic style, Daly recommended a political economy based on the steady state, in which both wealth and population should be held constant.39 Consequently, Daly made an explicit plea against economic growth, so it is not surprising that the authors of the Club of Rome report considered him an intellectual ally. In a later work, Daly describes his reaction to the report in this way: “Forty years ago when I read The Limits to Growth I already believed that growth in total resource use (population times per capita resource use) would stop within the next forty years. The modeling analysis of the Meadows’ team was a strong confirmation of that common-sense belief based on first principles going back at least to Malthus and earlier classical economists”.40 In this respect, it is worth keeping in mind that Daly strongly attacked what he called the “growthmania”, since the criticism of economic growth was a key aspect of his proposal of a steady-state economy. Clearly, the responses of Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, and the neoclassical economists to The Limits to Growth could not have been more different. While Georgescu-­ Roegen and Daly made use of the speculative output of the entropic style of economic reasoning to recommend their respective political economies, the neoclassical economists tended to downplay the disruptive character of the Club of Rome report.

1.3  Third Round: Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979) The third assault took place on the occasion of the publication of Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979),41 a sequel to Scarcity and Growth (1963),42 on which Stiglitz, Georgescu-Roegen, and Daly, among other economists, collaborated. It may be said that this assault focused on the critique of the elasticity of substitution of natural resources and, by extension, on the neoclassical production function. By then, both Georgescu-Roegen and Daly had already published some of their most important works, such as The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) and Steady-State Economics (1977), respectively, although the institutional moment  Ibid., pp. 234–235. Already in his 1968 article, he made reference to “the steady-state analogy”, Daly, “On Economics as a Life Science”, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 76, n.° 3, 1968, pp. 392–406. 40  Daly, “Limits to Growth – 40 More Years?” [2011], reedited in: Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2014, p. 138. In this short text, he develops again his notion of “uneconomic growth” in relation to The Limits to Growth. Daly also reviews the debate about The Limits to Growth in “The Economic Growth Debate: What Some Economists Have Learned But Many Have Not”, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 14, 1987, pp. 323–336. 41  The conference was held in 1978. Further details in I. Røpke, “The Early History of Modern Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 50, 2004, pp. 305–306. 42  Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth. The Economics of Natural Resource Availability, The John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1963. 39

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of ecological economics had not yet arrived. Georgescu-Roegen was trying to promote the disciplinary speciation of his bioeconomics – which would later prove to be a failed speciation  – while Daly was trying the same with his proposal of a steady-state economics. Since the first half of the twentieth century, neoclassical economists had been studying the capacity of the environment to provide the necessary resources to sustain economic activity. Thus, for example, in the contribution of authors such as Harold Hotelling and Alan Kneese the market was seen as a great mechanism for the efficient distribution of natural resources. However, from the 1960s onwards, interest shifted to the study of market failures, that is to say, to investigate the conditions that prevented the efficient allocation of natural resources through the market mechanism.43 The neoclassical style of economic reasoning, which had not been conceived to explain the relationship between the economy and the environment, now attempted to respond to the new concerns associated with the emergence of ecological awareness and environmentalism. It is in the context of these environmental concerns that Scarcity and Growth was published in 1963.44 In this famous book, Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse tried to establish, in the most orthodox and impeccable neoclassical way – and making use of the production function  – the analytical models of the increase in the scarcity of natural resources which went back to Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill. They also compared them with the available empirical information, with the aim of verifying whether or not there was indeed an increase in the scarcity of natural resources associated with economic growth. The authors concluded: Our empirical test has not supported the hypothesis – let us call it the ‘strong hypothesis’ – that economic scarcity of natural resources, as measured by the trend of real cost of extractive output, will increase over time in a growing economy. Observing the extractive sector in the United States from 1870 to 1957, we have found that the trend in the unit cost of extractive goods as a whole has been down – not up.45

Consequently, their key claim was that the scarcity of natural resources was not an impediment to economic growth.46 In doing so, they not only established the  Peter A. Victor, “Indicators of Sustainable Development”, op. cit., p. 193.  This is how Røpke describes the situation: “after the Second World War the American government focused on the issue of natural resource scarcity and initiated studies in this field. In 1952, the President’s Materials Policy Commission published the Paley Report, which expressed concern with the soaring demand for materials, and in 1955 a transdisciplinary conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas, 1956) provided a broad documentation of environmental problems with a focus on the possible exhaustion of mineral resources (Fischer-Kowalski, 1998). In response to these concerns, the independent research organization Resources for the Future published the much cited Scarcity and Growth (Barnett and Morse, 1963) [...]”. Røpke, “The Early History of Modern Ecological Economics”, op. cit., pp. 299–300. 45  Barnett and Morse, Scarcity and Growth, op. cit., p. 199. 46  Peter A.  Victor summarizes Barnett and Morse’s book in these terms: “Scarcity and Growth confirmed for many that the scarcity of natural resources was not a constraint on economic growth. Barnett and Morse reached their paradigmatic conclusion through a detailed analysis of U.S. prices and production costs for a wide variety resources from about 1870 to 1957. They showed that, with 43 44

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neoclassical model of natural resource scarcity but also mitigated the reputation of economics as a dismal science. In their view, “nature imposes particular scarcities, not an inescapable general scarcity”.47 As a result, Scarcity and Growth showed the neoclassical style at its best: clear, rigorous, and with empirical support. In short, it offered the canonical response of neoclassical economics to the problem of the scarcity of natural resources, which would later be echoed by numerous economists close to this tradition, such as Stiglitz and Nordhaus. At the same time, it involved an apology for economic growth, in which it was argued, in an extremely persuasive manner, that economic activity had no real significant environmental impacts, or at least these were not reflected in the price of most natural resources. Although Barnett and Morse brought the neoclassical style of economic reasoning to perfection, their refutation of the hypothesis of increasing scarcity of natural resources was completely unacceptable to many economists, and in particular to the forerunners of ecological economics. In this sense, however, for the famous book by Barnett and Morse to be refuted, it was necessary to leave outside the neoclassical conceptual framework, otherwise it could hardly be overcome. Thus, the distinctive feature of Georgescu-Roegen’s and Herman Daly’s positions was their radical modification of the starting assumptions of the analysis. Prices could not be good indicators of the impact of the economy on the environment. Neoclassical style evidence had to be replaced by entropic style evidence. The criticism of Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly found its way into the aforementioned sequel to Scarcity and Growth, edited by V. Kerry Smith under the title Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered (1979).48 The positions of Stiglitz, Georgescu-Roegen, and Daly were summarized in the following terms: Joseph Stiglitz presents an overview of the neoclassical perspective on the contribution of natural resources and stresses that for the most part natural resources are not sufficiently different from other inputs to production activities to require amendments in this type of analysis. Herman Daly and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen disagree completely with Stiglitz. They maintain that physical laws imply that natural resources are essential for the

few exceptions, real prices and real costs of natural resources traded in the United States had declined. By these economic measures, resources had not become scarce during a period in which the U.S. population increased more than fourfold and economic output expanded roughly 20 times”. Peter A. Victor, “Book Reviews. Scarcity and Growth Revisited. Natural Resources and the Environment in the New Millennium”, Ecological Economics, 64, 2008, pp. 673. 47  Barnett and Morse, Scarcity and Growth, op. cit., p. 11. 48  A further sequel to this sequel was the monograph edited by R.  David Simpson, Michael A. Toman, and Robert U. Ayres (eds.), Scarcity and Growth Revisited. Natural Resources and the Environment in the New Millennium, Resources for the Future, Washington, 2005. A critical review is available in Peter A. Victor, “Book Reviews. Scarcity and Growth Revisited”, op. cit., p. 673–677. It should be recalled that John V.  Krutilla had published an important article entitled precisely “Conservation Reconsidered”, The American Economic Review, vol. 57, no. 4, Sep. 1967, pp. 777–786.

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Stiglitz had also been the coauthor, together with Robert Solow, of an early equilibrium model,50 although the contributions that would bring him international fame came a few years later, on the occasion of his work on markets with asymmetric information. His main claim there was that, in the presence of information problems, markets would not behave like the perfectly competitive markets envisaged by neoclassical economic theory.51 In Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, Stiglitz’s contribution, however, consisted of an impeccable and orthodox neoclassical analysis of the economics of natural resources, in which he alluded to Georgescu-Roegen in these terms: “The nineteenth century concern about the implications of the second law of thermodynamics, as represented, for instance, in the work of Henry Adams, has its twentieth century counterpart in Georgescu-Roegen, and Malthus’s worry about food scarcity has its twentieth century counterpart in Meadows and Forrester”.52 He also added that, according to the point of view provided by these authors, neoclassical economists would be the substitutes for the nineteenth-century ideologists of progress, skeptical of dire predictions of imminent collapse. In this regard, he declared: “I am not concerned with long-run problems arising from the laws of thermodynamics. I am concerned here with the more immediate future”.53 Particularly relevant to his confrontation with Daly and Georgescu-Roegen, Stiglitz also formulated the following controversial claim: “natural resources are basically no different from other factors of production. There are presently extensive possibilities of substitution between resources and other factors (capital) and, with further research, there are likely to be further ways of substituting other factors

 Walter O. Spofford, “Foreword”, in: V. Kerry Smith (ed.): Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered [1979], RFF Press, Washington, DC – London, 2011, p. xii. 50  R. M. Solow and J. E. Stiglitz, “Output, Employment and Wages in the Short Run”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 82 (4), 1968, pp. 537–560. This article is often considered a classic in the history of macroeconomics. Stiglitz wrote his doctoral dissertation under Solow’s supervision, and he was a close collaborator of Paul A.  Samuelson, for whom he edited several volumes of his Collected Scientific Papers. It should be noted, however, that Stiglitz also later became quite critical of neoclassical economics, although he never entirely abandoned the neoclassical style. In this sense, he could be considered more a reformer than a revolutionary. 51  Stiglitz proposed that in the presence of information problems, markets would not behave like the perfectly competitive markets of economic theory. In this sense, he developed a general theory of equilibrium with asymmetric information, Roger E.  Backhouse and Mauro Boianovsky, Transforming Modern Macroeconomics. Exploring Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956-2003, Cambridge University Press, 2013. Firms, for example, can continue to pay high wages when unemployment is high, or maintain prices and output when sales are falling. These would all be cases of market inefficiencies associated with information problems. 52  J.  E. Stiglitz, “A Neoclassical Analysis of the Economics of Natural Resources”, in: Kerry, Scarcity, op. cit., p. 36. He added: “the forecasts of the future are supposed to provide us with some information. The more popular versions focus on some cataclysm; the economy, in any form similar to that which we presently know, is not viable”, ibid., p. 39. 53  Ibid., p. 37. 49

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for natural resources and making what resources we use go further”.54 Consequently, “a small input of natural resource can be compensated for by a sufficiently large input of capital”.55 Thus, by virtue of the neoclassical production function, the problem of the physical scarcity of natural resources was converted into a solvable problem of capital scarcity. In this way, the basic position associated with the entropic style of economic reasoning was that neoclassical economics obscured, rather than clarified, the biophysical dimension of the economic process, which is closely related to the criticism concerning the doctrine of economic growth and the neoclassical production function. Georgescu-Roegen and Daly argued that the formalisms of mathematical economics concealed the physical reality of economic activity, and that it is necessary to give epistemological legitimacy to the laws of thermodynamics, especially the law of entropy. While the mathematics of neoclassical economics hid the biophysical reality of the economic process, the laws of thermodynamics applied to economic analysis made it fully manifest. In particular, the critique of neoclassical natural resource economics converged with Georgescu-Roegen’s and Daly’s critique of the production function, which affected the very core of neoclassical modeling. By questioning the thesis of substitutability between different forms of capital and the adequacy of mathematical formalisms, Georgescu-Roegen and Daly took the discussion to a new dimension, which neoclassical economists were unwilling to enter. From the point of view of the entropic style of economic reasoning, the criticism of substitutability and the production function became “self-evident”. In this sense, Georgescu-Roegen and Daly produced both style evidence and style explanations that clearly neoclassical economists like Stiglitz were unwilling to accept. As for Daly’s challenge to neoclassical economics, the historian Matt Price has described it in these unsympathetic terms: Daly articulated this challenge to neoclassicism both explicitly and polemically in a series of publications in the early 1970s, pirating basic concepts from heterodox economists (especially Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen) and prophets of doom such as Paul Ehrlich. During the 1970s Daly was one part of the diverse challenge to economic orthodoxy to which E. F. Schumacher (small is beautiful) and Garrett Hardin (tragedy of the commons) also belonged. Like these somewhat better-known figures, Daly harried his economist colleagues largely from the sidelines, publishing mostly semitechnical and popular works, often in a millenarian cast.56

Daly had already addressed the issue of natural resource scarcity and criticized Barnett and Morse’s Scarcity and Growth in “The Economics of the Steady State”

 Ibid., p. 64.  Ibid., p. 43. 56  Matt Price, “Economics, Ecology, and the Value of Nature”, in: Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature, The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 191. He adds: “But in the 1980s, this situation changed”. Price mentions when Daly and Robert Costanza met, an important episode for the institutionalization of ecological economics. 54 55

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(1974) and “Steady-State Economics Versus Growthmania” (1974).57 In these works, Daly countered Barnett and Morse’s conclusion that nature imposes particular scarcities, not an inescapable general scarcity. In his view, since there is no substitute for low-entropy resources, these are inherently scarce. The economy then needs to come to terms with a “limited low entropy budget”,58 and sooner or later there will be an inescapable general scarcity. In his contribution to Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, Daly took up this argument by pointing out that Barnett and Morse assumed a uniformity between different forms of matter and energy, and thus failed to identify the problem of entropic degradation of natural resources, which ultimately leads to the conclusion that “nature really does impose ‘an inescapable general scarcity’, and it is a serious delusion to believe otherwise”.59 Thus, Daly’s central objection is that neoclassical growth-oriented economics does indeed recognize that some natural resources are limited, but it is wrong in denying that there may be a generalized scarcity of all resources, and in asserting that technology will always allow unlimited substitution of new resources for old ones.60 As an exemplary case of this position, he cited Robert Solow’s well-known article “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics” (1974),61 where it is argued that, thanks to the increasing productivity of natural resources, it is to be expected that “the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources”.62 Evoking both Frederick Soddy and Georgescu-Roegen, Daly argued that from the point of view of the laws of thermodynamics this is simply impossible. Not only do the flows of matter and energy required by economic activity increase entropy levels, but the depletion of natural resources and subsequent pollution have an ecological impact on the rest of the biosphere.63 Neoclassical natural resource economics actually ignores biophysical limits. Hence his critique of “growthmania” and his

 Daly, “The Economics of the Steady State”, American Economic Review, vol. LXIV, May 1974, pp.  15–21, reprinted in: Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2014, pp.  12  ff. Daly, “Steady-State Economics Versus Growthmania: A Critique of the Orthodox Conceptions of Growth, Wants, Scarcity, and Efficiency”, Policy Sciences, 5, 2, June 1974, pp. 149–167. 58  Daly, “The Economics of the Steady State”, op. cit., p. 12. 59  Daly, “Entropy, Growth, and the Political Economy of Scarcity”, in: Kerry, Scarcity, op. cit., p. 69. 60  Ibid., p. 71. 61  Robert M. Solow, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics”, Am. Econ. Rev., 64, 1974, pp. 1–14. Richard T. Ely Lecture. 62  Daly, “Entropy, Growth, and the Political Economy of Scarcity”, op. cit., p. 68. 63  Ibid., p. 76. 57

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proposal of a steady-state economy inspired by John Stuart Mill,64 which in turn will be vehemently criticized by Georgescu-Roegen.65 Georgescu-Roegen, for his part, began his response to the articles by Stiglitz and Daly with these words: “The two papers presented at this session are so opposed in outlook that a commentator could not possibly find himself in sympathy, even partially, with both of them”.66 And he added: “Yet I deem it necessary to state from the outset that I am entirely out of sympathy with the manner in which J. E. Stiglitz dealt with his topic”.67 As Stiglitz had presented an impeccably neoclassical text, this already revealed a conflict between styles of economic reasoning.68 Georgescu-Roegen accused neoclassical economists of ignoring the laws of thermodynamics and considering them irrelevant to the understanding of economics and, in particular, of natural resources: By now it is fashionable among standard economists to say high and loud that one does not need to invoke thermodynamic laws in order to realize that exponential growth must eventually run into physical barriers. Stiglitz does not want to be an exception. Like all the others, he also ignores the question that now cries for an answer: Why have we then labored for years to fabricate and sell a theory of economic development based on exponential growth?69

With Stiglitz having stated that he was not concerned with the long-term problems arising from the laws of thermodynamics, for Georgescu-Roegen the question of resources is not restricted “to the ‘foreseeable future’, as many other writers also insist, but concerns the entire future”.70 In a similar vein, for Georgescu-Roegen the real problem is not so much the question of the elasticities of substitution between the factors of production that make up the Cobb-Douglas function, but rather the physical finiteness and irreversible exhaustion of natural resources:  “The basic concepts used to elaborate this alternate paradigm are set forth, drawing on the work of Mill, Irving Fisher, Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Policies for a noncatastrohic transition from a growth economy to a Steady-State Economics are suggested, including a prescriptive institutional model for the social rationing of low entropy”. Ibid., p. 69. 65   See, in particular, Georgescu-Roegen, “The Steady State and Ecological Salvation: A Thermodynamic Analysis”, Bioscience, 27, 4, April 1977, pp. 266–270. 66  Georgescu-Roegen, “Comments on the Papers by Daly and Stiglitz”, in: V. Kerry Smith (ed.): Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered [1979], op. cit., p. 95. 67  Ibid. 68  Georgescu-Roegen adds: “Neoclassical economics – or standard economics, as I prefer to call the discipline as practiced for the past fifty years  – has paid practically no attention to natural resources. To be sure, legions of production functions in the neoclassical literature contain the factor land, by which is meant, however, only Ricardian land. But Ricardian land raises no issue for the intergenerational allocation of resources. This is the problem of natural resources”. GeorgescuRoegen, “Comments on the Papers by Daly and Stiglitz”, op. cit., p.  95. However, GeorgescuRoegen does not seem to be aware that in those same years environmental and natural resource economics was emerging, which is precisely the analytical understanding of these problems from the viewpoint of neoclassical economics. 69  Ibid., p 96. This statement follows an invocation of Malthus. His observation that the standard theory of economic growth assumes a continuous, exponential type of growth is also worth mentioning. 70  Ibid. 64

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“Stiglitz, however, even raises the question of ‘how essential’ natural resources are. Apparently, like Robert M.  Solow (whom he cites in this respect), Stiglitz believes that physical production can be maintained at the same level if capital (or some other factor) is continually substituted for natural resources. [...] Exclusive preoccupation with paper-and-pencil exercises habit has led to accepting these exercises without any concern for their relation to facts”.71In this sense, Georgescu-­ Roegen continued to criticize the neoclassical production function, in that from Stiglitz’ and Solow’s version of the function “we can obtain a constant annual product indefinitely even from a very small stock of resources”.72 However, Georgescu-­ Roegen argues that the increase of capital implies an additional depletion of resources. Consequently, if capital tends to infinity  – as seems to be assumed in neoclassical models of economic growth, such as in Solow’s case –73 natural resources will rapidly be exhausted by the production of capital. Therefore, Solow and Stiglitz could not have come out with their conjuring trick had they borne in mind, first, that any material process consists in the transformation of some materials into others (the flow elements) by some agents (the fund elements),74 and second, that natural resources are the very sap of the economic process. They are not just like any other production factor.75

In addition, Georgescu-Roegen also criticized the neoclassical assumption that the market can solve everything if the right price is set.76 The controversy around Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered came to a false close, and Daly’s and Georgescu-Roegen’s approaches did not prevail.77 Nevertheless, in their final summary, Kerry and Krutilla tried to mediate the conflict. In a Solomonic attempt to bring closure to the dispute, they considered the conciliation between  Ibid., p. 97.  Ibid., p. 98. 73  Further details in Robert M.  Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 70, 1956, pp. 65–94; and Solow, Growth Theory: An Exposition [1970], second edition, Oxford University Press, 2000. 74  Georgescu-Roegen refers to his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press, 1971, chapter 9, and to Economic Myths, chapters 2, 4, and 5, where he proposes his alternative view to the neoclassical production function. 75  Georgescu-Roegen, “Comments on the Papers by Daly and Stiglitz”, op. cit., p. 98. He continues with a clear application of the law of conservation of thermodynamics: “A change in capital and labor can only diminish the amount of waste in the production of a commodity; no agent can create the material on which it works. Nor can capital create the stuff out of which it is made. In some cases, it may also be that the same service can be provided by a design that requires less matter or energy. But even in this direction there exists a limit, unless we believe that the ultimate fate of the economic process is an earthly Garden of Eden”. Ibid., p. 98. 76  Ibid., p. 99: “those who share Stiglitz’s position also argue that although markets admittedly have serious failures, if prices were right everything else -depletion and pollution- would also be right. But no one has yet defined ‘right’ prices”. 77  Quentin Couix concludes that “the controversy went only in one direction: Georgescu-Roegen and Daly criticised Solow and Stiglitz, without any real answer”. Q. Couix, “Natural Resources in the Theory of Production: the Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Controversy”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019, p. 22. 71 72

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economic models and the restrictions imposed by physical laws as a desideratum. They indeed acknowledged that physical laws not only restrict productive activity, but also limit “substitution possibilities in response to increasing scarcity of materials. Moreover, they can place direct limits on the absorptive capacity of environmental systems”.78 Quite contrary to Barnett and Morse, who seemed totally disinterested in environmental science, Kerry and Krutilla took into account the need to collaborate with natural scientists in order to elucidate the relationships between the economic process and the environment.79

1.4  Fourth Round: Land Economics (1986) The fourth assault took place on the pages of the journal Land Economics on the occasion of the publication, in 1980, of Stuart Burness, Ronald Cummings, Glenn Morris, and Inja Paik’s article titled “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use-Policies”.80 Six years after the publication of this article, a reply by Daly appeared in the same journal, together with a brief commentary by Richard B. Norgaard and a response by the authors.81 My interpretation is that in this dispute the entropic style and what I called the “thermodynamic style” came into play, with the peculiarity that some sort of symbiosis had developed between the latter and the neoclassical style. The authors of the 1980 paper tried to combine neoclassical environmental economics with some thermodynamic concepts, and wondered about the relevance of this approach in defining policies aimed at

78  V. Kerry Smith and John V. Krutilla, “Summary and Research Issues”, in: Kerry, Scarcity, op. cit., p. 288. 79  Ibid., p. 289. 80  Stuart Burness, Ronald Cummings, Glenn Morris, and Inja Paik, “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use-Policies”, Land Economics, vol. 56, n.° 1, February 1980, pp. 1–9. 81  Daly, “Comment”, and Richard B. Norgaard, “Synthesis”, in Land Economics, vol. 62, no. 3, August 1986, pp. 319–322 and pp. 325–328, respectively. Stuart Burness and Ronald Cummings, “Reply”, Land Economics, vol. 62, no. 3, August 1986, pp.  323–324. A further sequel to this debate can be found in Jeffrey T. Young’s article “Is the Entropy Law Relevant to the Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity?”, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 21, 1991, pp. 169–179, and the reply drafted by Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, “Yes, of course” and “A Comment”, in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 23, pp.  91–95, and pp. 96–100, respectively. See also Jeffrey T. Young, “Entropy and Natural Resource Scarcity: A Reply to the Critics”, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 26, 1994, pp. 210–213. Young suggested that if markets are efficient and perfectly competitive, prices are a good indicator of relative scarcity, so entropic considerations would already be included in the models, which would make the entropy law irrelevant to economic analysis. Young’s claim was inspired by Kenneth E.  Boulding’s interpretation that the Ricardian law of diminishing returns included in nuce the law of entropy. On this latter issue, see K. E. Boulding, “Equilibrium, Entropy, Development, and Autopoiesis: Towards a Disequilibrium Economics”, Eastern Economic Journal, 6, 3/4, 1980, pp. 179–188.

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promoting efficient markets. It is a remarkable episode because it appears to involve only a case of minor disagreement on the basis of several common assumptions, but it is in fact a genuine communication breakdown, which highlighted a deep conflict between the neoclassical and entropic frameworks. The controversy arose from the question of the relevance of the thermodynamic approach in the analysis of the economic process, especially with regard to the design of policies for the conservation of exhaustible resources. The authors discussed the first and second laws of thermodynamics from the perspective of neoclassical environmental economics, with the aim of evaluating whether or not thermodynamic concepts could help to improve public policies: “Can one define in some precise way those dimensions of First and Second laws which are not reflected in markets? If so, what then is the rationale for arguing that they should be reflected?”82 The path chosen by the authors to solve this problem was the conventional neoclassical framework that considers market prices as signals of value. If energy or entropic degradation had some intrinsic economic value, this would be reflected in the price through the scarcity value of the resource, provided that markets were efficient and there were no distortions associated with government intervention. In other words, as long as the laws of thermodynamics are already reflected in competitive markets through price, the question would be not so much to venture into audacious approaches that aspire to give thermodynamics more economic significance, but rather to ensure that these efficient markets can in fact exist and may provide the correct prices of exhaustible resources. Consequently, the laws of thermodynamics would be irrelevant for economic analysis since what is really important is to establish the equilibrium prices that reflect scarcity. These prices would allow the emergence of patterns of resource conservation, and the low-entropy stocks would be used for higher-value use purposes. Thus, the authors defended the position of Ayres and d’Arge, who “in a different context, [they] suggest that a ‘proper’ conservation policy conserves energy quality (low entropy)”.83 Thus, thermodynamic analyses would simply be irrelevant and would add nothing of their own to the design of policies for the conservation of exhaustible natural resources. In conclusion, thermodynamic concepts would not contribute to solving the problem of equilibrium price formation, and they would not provide a solution to social inequalities, or correct the distortions caused by government intervention in markets. Therefore, neoclassical economists can and should ignore the laws of thermodynamics in favor of market solutions. Moreover, instead of expecting economists to assimilate the rudiments of the physical sciences, natural scientists should learn some economics, and thermodynamic jargon may be an appropriate vehicle to convey basic economic principles to the scientific community, since “the

82 83

 Burness et al., “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts”, op. cit., p. 8.  Ibid., p. 7.

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economist’s concern with exhaustible resources is the flip-side of the physical scientist’s concern with finite sources for low entropy”.84 In his reply, Daly summarized the controversy in these terms: the entropy law should be viewed as a constraint, not as an independent, sufficient explanation of value. It is somewhat surprising therefore, that, as the authors proceed to argue in favor of neoclassical business as usual and against any special role for entropy, they should do so on the grounds that entropy does not provide an alternative, independent explanation of value. [...] Proponents of the view that entropy is relevant are invited to answer a number of questions concerning the mechanism by which energy (or entropy) is supposed to determine prices.85

The authors of the 1980 paper would, in short, be looking for the economic relevance of thermodynamic concepts in the wrong place. According to Daly, while placing the problem of value and price formation at the center of the politics of conservation of exhaustible resources, the authors would have mistakenly attributed to Georgescu-Roegen an alleged entropic theory of value: In fairness it must be admitted that some ecologists (Odum 1971; Costanza 1981) have proposed just such an energy-based substitute for market valuation as the authors attack, and I share their skepticism regarding this claim, even while valuing the work of these ecologists for other reasons. But to include Georgescu-Roegen in this school, as the authors do, is quite wrong and leads to much confusion.86

In this sense, Daly recalls that Georgescu-Roegen expressly rejected the energy theory of value, and in no way proposed an entropy theory of value.87 Consequently, the authors misunderstand how the entropy law is relevant to economics.88 As for the specific case of the relationship between thermodynamic concepts and price, Daly considers that some collectively agreed constraint must be previously put in place for market prices to adequately reflect both the sustainability value and the inherent restrictions on the added physical scale. Thus, he suggests that limits of desirable flows of matter and energy between the ecosystem and the economy should be established. These limits should not be determined based on prices but rather on sustainability criteria. In this way, the market would show a different price level that would reflect the social value of sustainability, and the environment would no longer be considered as a free good exploitable at will. Since the physical scale of the economy cannot be increased unlimitedly, Daly rhetorically asks: “[...] If the qualitative difference between equal quantities of raw material and waste material is not relevant to economics, then what is? Entropy is the measure of that qualitative  Ibid., p. 6.  Daly, “Comment”, Land Economics, vol. 62, no. 3, August 1986, p. 319. 86  Daly, “Comment”, op. cit., p. 319. It is worth noting this explicit distinction between the Odumite school and the Roegenian school. 87  Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy, Matter, and Economic Valuation: Where Do We Stand?”, in: H. E. Daly and A. F. Umaña (eds.), Energy, Economics, and the Environment: Conflicting Views of an Essential Interrelationship, AAAS Selected Symposium 64, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1981, pp. 43–79. 88  Daly, “Comment”, op. cit., p. 319. 84 85

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difference. […] The market is sensitive to scale issues at the micro level, but is insensitive to the macro level scale of the whole economy relative to the ecosystem”.89 In later works, Daly will often repeat that the optimal scale of the economy is not reflected in the market, and it must be determined in relation to the biosphere: What is not reflected in the market is the value of the optimal sustainable physical scale of the economy relative to the ecosystem. The market does not distinguish an ecologically sustainable scale of matter-energy throughput from an unsustainable scale, just as it does not distinguish between ethically just and unjust distributions of income. Sustainability, like justice, is a value not achievable by purely individualistic market processes. Yet these values can be reflected back into market prices when the market operates under collectively instituted macro constraints designed to protect these values to which the purely individualistic market is blind. […] These ecological and ethical decisions are price-determining, not price-determined.90

Consequently, Daly’s position is that pricing with sustainability constraints should be instituted by collective decisions, rather than left to the spontaneous “mechanism” of the market. He concluded flatly: “The entropy law helps us to understand the nature and necessity of this constraint on scale and growth. But it offers no alternative principle of evaluation that substitutes for markets. […] There is no ‘energy counterpart to market-related mechanisms’ in correcting for the market’s failure to respect the constraint on scale and the value of sustainability”.91 After all, market prices do not adequately reflect what happens in the environment. This was certainly a major objection to the hope that Cummings and collaborators had placed in efficient markets as the solution to the environmental problem. The brief response to Daly’s rejoinder by Burness and Cummings includes occasional outbursts – “extraterrestrial in character”; “steady state [is] a return to a regulated caveman culture”.92 The authors expressed satisfaction with Daly’s remark that “individual preferences obviously ‘count’”.93 They argued that “Daly’s notion of ‘sustainability’ is extraordinarily vague and ill-defined. [...] If Professor Daly cannot give substance to the notion of, and criteria related to, ‘sustainability’ the appeal to collective action in these regards may appear as vacuous”.94 They also transform the problem of the physical scale of the economy in relation to the biosphere into a question of common property conflicts, and the problems associated with increasing entropy are “‘inescapable’ when viewed in terms of millenniums. [...] Some may see society’s doom on shorter scales than Professor Daly’s: extinction (nonsustainability) by ‘the [population] bomb’ or from other forms of

 Ibid., p. 320.  Ibid., pp. 319–321. 91  Ibid. 92  Stuart Burness and Ronald Cummings, “Reply”, Land Economics, vol. 62, n.° 3, August 1986, p. 323. 93  Ibid. 94  Ibid. 89 90

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pestilence”.95 Accordingly, entropic explanations would be neutralized by their temporal irrelevance. The authors insisted that entropy effects are not reflected in markets, and therefore rhetorically wondered whether the entropic observations are related to neglected dynamic considerations or whether they are rather consistent with the market failures. They claimed that Daly had missed this point. According to them, Daly would overlook whether or not thermodynamic considerations shed light on the understanding of market failures. Thus, Daly would not have properly understood what was at stake in their 1980 article, namely the problem of the allocative efficiency of markets, and not so much the ethical issues. Instead, “Daly addresses a different set of issues; his concern is with the imposition of constraints on economic behavior and resource use, so as to force that steady-state solution which satisfies his view of an ethically just pattern of resource use”.96 It is worth noting that the latter is a misinterpretation, because in his reply Daly had not ventured into a defense of his proposal for a steady-state economy. While the authors expected a “neoclassical” answer to their questions, Daly proposed an alternative way of posing the relevance of thermodynamic concepts. That is to say, while the authors wanted an answer to the question of the relevance of thermodynamic concepts to the problem of the allocative efficiency of markets, Daly rather explained what the alternative approach inspired by Georgescu-Roegen’s work consisted of. In my opinion, this episode of communicative breakdown occurred because of a problem between the phenomenologies of the respective styles of economic reasoning involved, specifically affecting observational regimes, evidence, and explanations of style. While the authors of the 1980 article focused on the question of value and market price, Daly, in his defense of Georgescu-Roegen’s view, focused on the biophysical evidence of the flow of materials and energy, and its relevance to a physicalist understanding of the economic process.

1.5  Fifth Round: Ecological Economics (1997) One may reject sustainability (‘après moi le déluge’), but that does not abolish the entropy law. (Herman E. Daly, “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts”, 1986)

The fifth and last assault to which I would like to refer took place in 1997 on the occasion of a special issue of Ecological Economics, edited by Daly in homage to Georgescu-Roegen – who died in 1994 – and in which not only the most important contributions of the Romanian economist were systematically presented, but also some of his old polemics with Solow and Stiglitz were revived. Again, this dispute could be characterized as a conflict between the phenomenologies of the 95 96

 Ibid.  Ibid.

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neoclassical style and the entropic style, and in particular between their respective styles of explanation. With reference to the theory of the three styles attributed to Pietro Bembo,97 it could be said that Solow and Stiglitz considered neoclassical economics as a sort of “high” style,98 capable of constructing precise and rigorous mathematical models with which to understand the secrets of the economy. From their point of view, Georgescu-Roegen’s and Herman Daly’s criticisms are flawed, lacking the necessary analytical rigor, and showing deficiencies in the understanding of neoclassical analytical models. On the opposite side, Daly, in his defense of Georgescu-Roegen’s contributions, would argue that neoclassical economists start from premises that are wrong, and build their economic models on the back of the laws of thermodynamics. The aim of Daly’s contribution to this special issue of Ecological Economics is to revive his teacher’s criticisms of Solow and Stigliz, in the belief that these fundamental disagreements may be resolved by wider discussion with the ecological economists. He added, however, “when a fundamental critique from a very prominent economist goes for 20 years without a reply, we should worry about the health of our discipline!”.99 In this sense, Daly reconstructed with remarkable clarity Georgescu-Roegen’s criticism of the neoclassical production function, in Solow and Stiglitz’s version. Daly’s central point is that the production function contradicts physical laws, in particular the laws of thermodynamics. In contrast, he argued that the alternative flow-fund model proposed by Georgescu-Roegen is superior to the neoclassical production function.100 For instance, the flow-fund model does not imply the categorical error of believing that we are dealing with “production” in the physical sense, but with a transformation of natural resources into commodities and waste. In his opinion, once we recognize the reality of inputs from nature then we must inquire about their scarcity and about the ecological processes that regenerate them. Once we recognize the necessity of returning waste outputs to nature then we must inquire about the capacities of ecosystems to absorb those wastes. We will no longer be able to avoid the ecological economist’s vision of the economy as an open subsystem of a complex ecosystem that is finite, nongrowing, and materially closed. In effect, neoclassical economists will become ecological economists!101

As on so many other occasions, Daly quoted Solow’s unfortunate statement that the world can get along without natural resources. In this regard, Daly argued that natural resources and capital are generally not mutually substitutable, but complementary, and therefore criticized the Solow-Stiglitz variant of the Cobb-Douglas  Peter Burke, The European Renaissance. Centres and Peripheries, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1998, chap. 3. 98  The curious reader will find a possible example of “low” style in Peter. A.  Victor, Pollution. Economy and Environment [1972], Routledge, London and New York, 2018, pp. 102–118. 99  Daly, “Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz”, Ecological Economics, 22, 1997, p. 264. 100  For a detailed analysis of this model see Q. Couix, “Georgescu-Roegen’s Flow-Fund Theory of Production in Retrospect”, Ecological Economics, 176, 2020, pp. 1–10. 101  Daly, “Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz”, op. cit., p. 265. 97

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function, in which natural resources can be reduced to almost zero. Daly emphasized that Solow’s growth theory presupposes an aggregate production function dependent on capital and labor, without explicitly considering natural resources. Thus, the neoclassical production function would simply be a brilliant mathematical expression of the prejudice that the world can indeed manage without natural resources. Accordingly, Daly urged Solow and Stiglitz to stop “conjuring tricks”, and proposed to reissue Georgescu-Roegen’s invitation to Solow/Stiglitz, and the whole community of neoclassical economists for whom they are distinguished spokesmen, to put an end to ‘conjuring tricks’ – to mathematical fun and games with infinity in the Garden of Eden – and to devote their impressive analytical powers to helping develop serious ecological economics for the real world.102

In a delightful footnote, Daly added the following battery of questions: A perceptive reviewer suggested that the best way to get an answer to Georgescu-Roegen’s critique is probably not to raise it again with the same people that have ignored it for twenty years, but rather to somehow get 10 000 students to ask their economics professors the following questions in class: (1) Do you believe that economic activities must satisfy mass balance? (2) Why is it that neoclassical production functions do no not satisfy the condition of mass balance? (3) Do you believe that Georgescu-Roegen’s interpretation of production as physical transformation is correct? (4) Do you agree that the economic system is embedded in the larger environmental system, and totally dependent on it as both source and sink for the matter/energy transformed by economic activity? (5) Do you believe that the matter/ energy transformations required by economic activity are constrained by the entropy law? Ten thousand students, please take note!103

For their part, Solow and Stiglitz did not respond to the technical objections raised by Georgescu-Roegen  – and repeated again by Daly  – regarding the conceptual shortcomings of the neoclassical production function. In a way, Solow’s and Stiglitz’s replies were convergent: to accuse Daly and Georgescu-Roegen of not understanding well the neoclassical analytical models or making the effort to catch up with the advances occurring in the macroeconomics of natural resources, and to recognize the restrictions that the laws of thermodynamics impose on the economy in the long run, but minimizing their practical scope in the short and medium term. Regarding Solow’s reply, he clarified that his concerns had been different from those imagined by Daly. In particular, the central problem he had sought to elucidate was the possible effects on future economic growth of the limited availability of natural resources. Moreover, contrary to Daly’s belief, the heart of the matter is the substitution between renewable and non-renewable resources, and he accused him of not properly understanding what economists mean when they refer to complementary and substitute resources.104 In particular, the use of renewable resources can be maintained indefinitely at a constant positive level. In this regard, Solow favored the development of green national accounting techniques based on the  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 265, note 5. 104  Solow, “Reply”, Ecological Economics, 22, 1997, p. 267. 102 103

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concept of “natural capital”, something to which Daly himself had contributed significantly.105 Solow also emphasized the consideration of neoclassical economics as a sort of “high” style: “the role of economic theory is to explore ways of making these statements more precise [...]. Precise statements, best cast (I think) in the form of transparent models, are better than grand, heartfelt pronouncements about these issues”.106 Georgescu-Roegen’s and Daly’s critiques were simply not up to this high style of neoclassical economics. Regarding the battery of questions collected by Daly in the aforementioned footnote, these are Solow’s laconic answers: Here are telegraphic answers to the questions for which Dr. Daly proposes to raise an army of students (whom I would welcome with open arms if they are willing to learn some economics): 1: Yes. 2. Because up until now, and at the level of aggregation, geographic scope and temporal extent considered, mass balance has not been a controlling factor in the growth of industrial economies. 3. This is, no doubt, one aspect of production. 4. Certainly, and I welcome any attempts to model the dependence in a transparent way, so that it can be incorporated into aggregative economics. 5. No doubt everything is subject to the entropy law, but this is of no immediate practical importance for modeling what is, after all, a brief instant of time in a small corner of the universe.107

On the other hand, regarding Stiglitz’s very brief reply, he argued that “Daly’s tirade concerning our work seems motivated by two concerns: a lack of consistency with basic laws of physics, and the alleged implication that growth can continue unabated, without eventually facing constraints imposed by the limited supply of natural resources”.108 Stiglitz also accused Daly of misunderstanding neoclassical analytical models.109 He added that these models are aimed at providing a precise answer as to whether or not economic growth is sustainable. He also alluded to market failures and externalities, and expressed the neoclassical tenet: “resources are scarce, and markets, when they function well, reflect that scarcity, economizing on 105  Robert Costanza and Herman Daly, “Natural Capital as Sustainable Development”, Conservation Biology, 6 (1), 1992, pp. 1–15. Many ecological economists have criticized the notion of “natural capital” as a way of commodifying ecosystems and favoring the return of neoclassical analyses. Hence, for example, Charles A. S. Hall and collaborators’ criticism of this notion and their distancing from ecological economics. 106  Solow, “Reply”, op. cit. As an example of “high” style, Solow refers to Jeffrey A. Krautkraemer’s article “Optimal Growth, Resource Amenities and the Preservation of Natural Environments”, Review of Economic Studies, 52, 1, 1985, pp. 153–170. It should be noted that from GeorgescuRoegen’s perspective these high-style mathematical productions would be mere pencil-and-paper exercises: “... as Georgescu-Roegen put it, this become a ‘mere paper-and-pencil operation’ (PAP was his acronym)”. Daly 1997, op. cit., p. 265. 107  Solow, “Reply”, op. cit., p. 268. 108  Stiglitz, “Reply”, Ecological Economics, 22, 1997, p. 269. 109  “Part of the problem arises from a lack of understanding of the role of the kind of analytic models that we (an others) have formulated”. Ibid.

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the use of resources”.110 And he added: “no one, to our knowledge, is proposing repealing the laws of thermodynamics”.111 He clarified that although his models do not have an infinite horizon, they are at least useful for the economic analysis of the next fifty years. Since the limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics only have economic significance in the very long term, his models provide an adequate estimate of economic growth in the short and medium term. Solow’s and Stiglitz’s answers in no way convinced Daly.112 In his brief counter-­ reply, Daly noted that Solow and Stiglitz did not even mention Georgescu-Roegen, and in fact avoided his criticisms altogether. Rather, they merely repeated “their well-known position”.113 Daly also added that the neoclassical misunderstanding of the production process does not exactly help to meet the challenges of the energy transition. Since dialogue seemed impossible, Daly prepared a kind of quiz with Solow’s responses accompanied by his own critical comments,114 and he concluded that the answers provided by Solow and Stiglitz were unsatisfactory, and did not respond at all to the criticisms formulated by Georgescu-Roegen. Since the neoclassical production function ignores material flows, it also fails to consider the material balance: “that is why Georgescu-Roegen criticized Solow for analyzing ‘the Garden of Eden’ rather than the real world. The criticism remains unanswered”.115 Daly also suggested that ecological economists “would welcome any attempts by Solow to model the limit to growth resulting from optimal scale of the macroeconomy”.116 In his opinion, Solow failed to see the immediate consequences of the law of entropy, and considered its implications irrelevant and distant in time, associating it with “heat death” and the “cosmic bye bye”.117 He was unaware of its importance in relation to various issues of economic relevance such as the degradation of energy quality or recycling. In sum, “Solow’s statement that entropy is ‘of no immediate practical importance’ to economic life is evidence in support of Georgescu-Roegen’s indictment that Solow ‘must have a very erroneous view of the economic process as a whole’. In any event Georgescu-Roegen’s criticisms remain unanswered”.118 Therefore, the communicative breakdown persisted. In my view, Georgescu-Roegen’s critique of mathematical reason, assimilated by Daly, and the subsequent loss of neoclassical faith in mathematical representation made both scholars reluctant to accept epistemological justification from mathematical models. Instead they did so from thermodynamic approaches, i.e., adopting an  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 270. 112  Some later commentators on the controversy have referred to a “dialogue of the deaf”. See Marc Germain, “Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz: Back to a Controversy”, Ecological Economics, 160, 2019, p. 169. 113  Daly, “Reply to Solow/Stiglitz”, Ecological Economics, 22, 1997, p. 271. 114  Ibid. pp. 272–273. 115  Ibid., p. 272. 116  Ibid. pp. 272–273. 117  Ibid., p. 273. 118  Ibid. 110 111

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explanation of entropic style. Despite the important differences, both Georgescu-­ Roegen and Daly represent cases of “conversion”, that is to say, abandoning the epistemological justification based on mathematics for the new faith in thermodynamics. This “conversion” affected the validation procedures of economic statements, and it is the basis of the emergence of a different kind of explanation than the neoclassical one. In his exhaustive review of the debate, Quentin Couix has suggested that the basis of the controversy lies in the confrontation of two antithetical economic methodologies: while Solow’s and Stiglitz’s analyses would be based on abstract economic-­mathematical models, Georgescu-Roegen and Daly would rather seek an “interdisciplinary consistency”,119 centered above all on the conceptual integration of the laws of thermodynamics and the principles of biology in the economic sciences. In this sense, Couix considers that the conceptual and design problems inherent in the Solow/Stiglitz approaches stem from a methodology in which the model precedes the theoretical structure: “The theory does not rely on a self-supporting understanding of the production process and concepts are instead primarily forged as descriptions of the properties of the model. These concepts rely on mechanisms that are not explicitly represented in the model and [...] they tend to overlap”.120 In this respect, Couix concludes that “in the ‘model-based’ methodology of Solow and Stiglitz, the preference for a specific representation is not grounded into a conceptual appreciation of the nature of the production process. Instead, it is determined by modelling practices and mathematical concerns”.121 In contrast, Georgescu-­ Roegen’s criticisms of neoclassical natural resource economics – at least as conceived by Solow and Stiglitz – were based on the underlying idea that the laws of thermodynamics impose insurmountable constraints on the use of natural resources.122 As Couix has shown, from Solow’s and Stiglitz’s mathematical models are inferred – as a sort of necessary logical consequence – the controversial assertions on the substitutability between factors of production and the consideration of technological progress as a compensator for the decreasing flow of natural resources.123 One could summarize Solow and Stiglitz’s style of explanation with the following chiasmus: “my nonsense is dictated by the model, if you don’t understand the model, you don’t understand my nonsense”.

 Quentin Couix, “Natural Resources in the Theory of Production: the Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Controversy”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019, pp. 2–38. 120  Ibid., p. 8. 121  Ibid., p. 12. 122  Ibid., p. 17. 123  “In analytical contributions (Solow 1974; Stiglitz 1974), these notions primarily appear as mathematical properties of production functions”. Couix, op. cit., p.  7. A little further on he adds: “technical progress plays a central role in escaping the scarcity of resources in this model [...]. Its determinants are not specified and it is assumed to be independent of the factors of production”. Ibid. p 7, footnote 13, and p. 8. 119

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In the long-standing debate between Georgescu-Roegen/Daly and Solow/ Stiglitz, as well as in the other fundamental disagreements I have examined throughout this chapter, the disputes did not resolve in consensus and conclusions shared by both parties. In the interim, however, neoclassical economics has ceased to coincide with mainstream economics. With this, the natural enemy of ecological economics has also been blurred.

Environmental Metaphors of Scarcity

Perhaps, despair is the origin of the metaphor: the consequence of the lack of resources, the sudden evidence of inadequacy. Chus Fernández, Cuadernos, 2018, p. 79. Its wild rotting is source of capital. Reincidentes, “El sur”, 1998.

In this chapter, I will retrieve Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology in order to apply it to the history of ecological economics. In so doing, I will undertake a case study on the epistemological constructive and destructive functions that some metaphors played in the development of ecological economics as a scientific discipline. In particular, I will investigate the “environmental metaphors of scarcity”, under which I include the metaphors of “economic metabolism”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprint”, and “natural capital”. Some of these metaphors were expressly aimed against the conceptual hegemony of neoclassical economics, and all of them were linked to biophysical indicators addressed at measuring sustainability and environmental impact. Thus, these metaphors can be also taken as “metric metaphors”. In this regard, I will outline a metaphorological paradigm of metrization, namely, metaphors that are terminologized through a measurement methodology. I will then argue that these metric metaphors – especially that of “natural capital” – despite their initial destructive epistemological function, provided the ground for a revival of neoclassical economics within ecological economics itself. The metric metaphors of ecological economics carried the neoclassical Trojan horses, as response to the problem of environmental accounting for the so-called natural assets and ecosystem services.

1  Introduction In his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1960), Blumenberg remains quite faithful to the classical linguistic notion of “paradigm”, understood as a “formal scheme in which the words that admit flexible or derivative modifications are

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Fragio, Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics, Contributions to Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94586-2_6

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organized”.1 With the particularity, however, that declension is made, in Blumenberg’s text, not of words but of a specific type of trope, the metaphor, and the additional assumption that derivative modifications occur historically. Blumenberg notably envisions a set of basic metaphorological paradigms, including “terminologization” and “metaphorization”, that is, metaphors that become concepts and concepts that become metaphors. Likewise, he also introduces the “absolute metaphors”, in reference to those metaphors which are supposed to convey the phenomena of inconceptuability. The formal scheme proposed by Blumenberg in his early work is aimed mainly at the historical investigation of metaphors in line with the German tradition of conceptual history.2 Moreover, his proposal for a metaphorology articulated by historically declined paradigms is complemented with Ludwig Landgrebe’s phenomenology of history.3 Already in his 1950 habilitation work, Die ontologische Distanz, Blumenberg refers to “the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning”.4 This formula is then taken up in his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1960), where the metakinetics of the horizons of meaning is investigated through the lens of historical changes in the use of metaphors.5 These early ideas undergo various transformations throughout Blumenberg’s work, to the point that it is now possible to talk about the several “epochs of metaphorology”. For example, a shift of metaphorology toward a theory of experience is clear in Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (1981).6 One could also add that, in an administrative document connected to his research activity in the Philosophisches Seminar of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster,7 corresponding to the 1979–1983 period, Blumenberg describes the evolution of his metaphorology as the transition from the early theory on the formation of concepts in philosophy8 and history of

1  RAE, Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española, online dictionary, 2021 (my transl.). 2  Margarita Kranz, “Begriffsgeschichte institutionell. Teil I und II”, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 53, 2011, pp. 153–226; ibid., vol. 54, 2012, pp. 119–194. 3  See Hans Blumenberg, Phänomenologische Schriften 1981–1988, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2018. 4  H. Blumenberg, Die ontologische Distanz. Eine Untersuchung über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1950, p. 104: “Metakinesen des geschichtlichen Sinnhorizontes”. 5  “der historische Wandel einer Metapher bringt die Metakinetik geschichtlicher Sinnhorizonte”. See H. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie [1960], Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998, pp.  13 and 50. Engl. transl. by Robert Savage, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New  York. A summary of Blumenberg’s early works in Kurt Flasch, Hans Blumenberg. Philosoph in Deutschland: Die Jahre 1945 bis 1966 [2017], Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 2019. 6  H. Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1981 (my transl.). He considers the book as a metaphor for the totality of the experienceable. 7  H. Blumenberg, WWU 4468 (DLA Marbach). 8   H.  Blumenberg, “Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit. Im Vorfeld der philosophischen Begriffsbildung”, Studium Generale, 10, 7, 1957, pp. 432–47.

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science9 to a “metaphorics of experience”.10 Curiously, in this context, he also places his Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (1979), where a new paradigm is introduced, that is to say, the “paradigm of a metaphor for existence” (Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher).11 To this sequence of transformations of his metaphorology, other posthumously published texts such as Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge (2012) and Die nackte Wahrheit (2019)12 should be added. In Blumenberg’s late production, metaphorology becomes then a hermeneutics of the lifeworld, closely related to the chronicle of anecdotes, digressions, and Umwege. While in its historiographic version metaphorology is aimed at preventing the definitive collapse of the past horizons of meaning, in its hermeneutical version, it is also credited as a memory of concrete human existence. In the first instance, metaphorology proves useful in reconstructing epochal changes through the historical transformations of particularly prominent metaphors. As a game of mirrors, the history of metaphors reflects the metakinesis of the historical horizons of meaning and their corresponding thresholds. However, in its hermeneutic version, metaphorology anchors in existence itself, granting therefore a philosophical and historical recognition to digressions or misunderstandings as a common fact of culture. Both as a phenomenology of history and as hermeneutics of the lifeworld, metaphorology has never lost its epistemological function. In this chapter, I will try to restore the ground of the epistemological functions of the metaphors applied to scientific culture, that is, as epistemic metaphors. In complement to Blumenberg’s insight, I will argue that metaphors not only have constructive-­figurative functions, opening the way to new conceptualizations, but they can also have a critical-destructive role against old conceptual systems. From the viewpoint of the history of ecological economics, I will point to a series of cases in which metaphors are mainly aimed against a certain conceptual hegemony. Some scientific metaphors find indeed their epistemological legitimacy in their ability to suspend a given categorical order and make a new conceptualization possible. The provisional character and lack of definition of metaphors are expected to open the door to a new categorial order, which often never arrives but nevertheless undermines the existing conceptual structures.

 H. Blumenberg, Paradigmen, op. cit.  H. Blumenberg, WWU 4468 (DLA Marbach): “Metaphorik der Erfahrung”. For the experience matter, see also his Metaphorologica minora (DLA Marbach). 11  Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1979; Engl. transl. by Steven Rendall, Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1997 12  H.  Blumenberg, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge. Beobachtungen an Metaphern. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2012; Die nackte Wahrheit, herausgegen von Rüdiger Zill, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2019. 9

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2  T  he Metrization Paradigm and the Environmental Metaphors of Ecological Economics The topic of metaphors has not gone unnoticed in the history of economic thought. Independent from Blumenberg’s work, various historians of economic thought such as Philip E. Mirowski13 and Geoffrey M. Hodgson14 carried out important studies on the usage of mechanical and biological metaphors in economics. This kind of specialized literature has grown significantly in recent decades. Here, mention should be made of some particularly influential works, such as those by Deirdre McCloskey, who addresses the issue from the viewpoint of the so-called literary studies, in particular with his work  – clearly a reference book in the field  – The Rhetoric of Economics (1985).15 These pioneering contributions have been continued also within the context of the history of ecological economics, for example, by Fred Luks16 and Richard B. Norgaard.17 More recently, Mary S. Morgan has resumed the historical study of economic metaphors in relation to modeling, especially in her important book The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (2012).18 In what follows, I will connect this specific tradition of the history of economic metaphors with Blumenberg’s metaphorology, from the standpoint of what might be called a “historical epistemology of economic metaphors”, aimed at the study of the constructive and destructive epistemological functions that certain metaphors have within scientific culture. In particular, I intend to investigate the metaphors of ecological economics and the possibility to gather them under the label of “environmental metaphors of scarcity”.19 As examples of this metaphorics of scarcity, I include also the concurrent metaphors of “economic metabolism”, “carrying  Philip E. Mirowski, More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics [1989], 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1995. Philip E. Mirowski (ed.) Natural Images in Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 14  Geoffrey M.  Hodgson, “Biological and Physical Metaphors in Economics”, in: S.  Maasen, E.  Mendelsohn, and P.  Weingart (eds), Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors. Sociology of the Sciences (A Yearbook  — 1994), vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht, 1995. Geoffrey M. Hodgson (ed.), Economics and Biology, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1995, pp. xiii-xxiv. 15  Deirdre N.  McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics [1985], 2nd, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 16  Fred Luks, “The Rhetorics of Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, 26, 1998, pp. 139–49. 17  Richard B.  Norgaard, “Metaphors We Might Survive By”, Ecological Economics, 15, 1995, pp. 129–31. R. B. Norgaard, “Ecosystem Services: From Eye-Opening Metaphor to Complexity Blinder”, Ecological Economics, 69, 2010, pp. 1219–1227. 18  Mary S.  Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012, Chap. 5. 19  I borrow here the expression “environmental metaphors” from the historian of science Mario Biagioli, who used it on the subject of intellectual property history in his “Nature and the Commons: The Vegetable Roots of Intellectual Property”, Preprint 293, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 2009, p.  243. He also presented a similar argument in the conference “The Author as Vegetable: Problems with Environmental Metaphors of the Knowledge Commons”, 13

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capacity”, “ecological footprint”, and “natural capital”. All of them, together with the metaphor of the “spaceship Earth” popularized by Kenneth E. Boulding,20 have a decisive role in the representation of a coming shortage, and in this sense, they all entail a strong figurative epistemological function in relation to both the hermeneutics of the present and the future. The environmental metaphorics of scarcity is clearly connected to catastrophic prognosis. However, and unlike the metaphor of the “spaceship Earth”, which in Blumenberg’s terms would be an example of metaphor for existence – aimed at offering an image of the human condition – the metaphors of “economic metabolism”, the “carrying capacity”, the “ecological footprint”, and the “natural capital” are rather special cases of the terminologization paradigm – metaphors that become concepts. These four metaphors have been linked to biophysical measurements of scarcity, where a measurement methodology, also known as “biophysical metrics”, produces the reification of metaphors.21 One should make clear that the paradigm of terminologization of metaphors through measurements, or simply “paradigm of metrization”, was as such unnoticed by Blumenberg. Of the four mentioned metric metaphors, two of them, the “economic metabolism” and the “ecological footprint”, in addition to a figurative epistemological function, also play a critical-destructive role against the conceptual structures of neoclassical economics. The first one contradicts the neoclassical production function and provides an alternative to it. The second one hits the core of the Ricardian theory of the comparative advantage of international trade. Both metaphors undermine then the conceptual architecture of neoclassical economics. However, the dispute generated around a third metaphor, that of natural capital, shows that the metric metaphors are not immune to neoclassical Trojan horses.22 While dealing with the issue of measuring environmental goods and ecosystem services, they indeed provided the occasion for the return of the neoclassical economics from within the ecological economics itself. In this regard, I am inclined to conclude that the critical-­ destructive epistemological function of the environmental metaphors of scarcity turned against the ecological economics itself while serving as a gateway for the neoclassical economics.

Zavtra Club Moscow, September 9, 2013. A precedent for this expression can also be found in Richard B. Norgaard, “Metaphors We Might Survive By”, op. cit, p. 129. 20  Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”, in: Henry Jarrett (ed.), Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1966. 21  See, for example, Deepak Malghan, “A Dimensionally Consistent Aggregation Framework for Biophysical Metrics”, Ecological Economics, 70, 2011, pp. 900–909. 22  I borrow this expression from Elke Pirgmaier, “The Neoclassical Trojan Horse of Steady-State Economics”, Ecological Economics, 133, 2017, pp. 52–61.

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2.1  T  he Replacement of the Neoclassical Function of Production by Economic Metabolism According to the seminal article by Charles W. Cobb and Paul H. Douglas, entitled “A Theory of Production” (1928),23 the production function allows to determine the quantity of manufactured goods based on three original factors – land, capital, and labor – and assuming a certain interchangeability between these factors. This production function, frequently associated with a theory of economic growth, soon became one of the cornerstones of neoclassical economics, in close connection with a certain idea of economic efficiency, which states that none of the originating factors must be remunerated more than their own marginal productivity. Over the years, and after multiple conceptual and mathematical improvements, the neoclassical production function appeared as one of the greatest intellectual achievements in economics, to the point of believing that the ultimate secret of the economy had been raised to appropriate theoretical expression. However, at the end of the last century, the metaphor of “economic metabolism”, also known as “social metabolism” and “socioeconomic metabolism”24, brought the principles of neoclassical economics into question. This determined a transition from a fully conceptualized system, which came very close of achieving the ideal of analytical transparency, to the elusive and indefinite features of the old physiocratic metaphorics.25 This rehabilitation of the physiocratic metaphor constitutes a paradigmatic case of transposition which is not envisaged by Blumenberg’s initial approach. This amounts to reintroducing the ambiguity of the metaphor within an already fully theoreticized field, in order to undermine a certain well-established conceptual structure. The economist Óscar Carpintero has described such a shift in these terms: “Unlike the sixties and seventies, the nineties are defined by the retrieval of the metaphor of economic metabolism and the balance of materials, but now linked to the problem of the environmental sustainability of industrial economies”.26 Indeed the metaphor of economic metabolism reemerged in the incipient ecological economics, in order to offer an alternative to the neoclassical production function. The ultimate purpose of this replacement was to make the physical dimension of the  Charles W. Cobb and Paul H. Douglas, “A Theory of Production”, American Economic Review, 18, 1, 1928, pp. 139–65. A review in Jesús Felipe and F. Gerard Adams, “‘A Theory of Production’ The Estimation of the Cobb-Douglas Function: A Retrospective View”, Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 31, 3, 2005, pp. 427–445. 24  About the metaphor of economic metabolism, see Óscar Carpintero, El metabolismo de la economía española. Recursos naturales y huella ecológica (1955–2000), Fundación César Manrique, Lanzarote, 2005. Manuel González de Molina and Víctor M.  Toledo, The Social Metabolism. A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change, Springer Verlag, Cham, 2014. 25  Miguel Cuerdo Mir and José Luis Ramos Gorostiza, Economía y naturaleza. Una historia de las ideas, Editorial Síntesis, Madrid, 2000, pp. 31 ff. 26  Ó. Carpintero, Metabolismo, op. cit., p. 113; see also Chapter II, section “La recuperación de la ‘vieja metáfora’ a finales del siglo XX: entre el metabolismo económico y la ecología industrial”, p. 113 (my transl.). 23

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economic process visible, especially with respect to the hidden flows of materials and energy associated with economic activity that have a direct impact on waste generation and environmental degradation. The conceptualization of the marginal productivity of the original factors of production was replaced by the analysis of the sociometabolic profiles.27 The study of the biophysical basis of the economic process gave rise then to important empirical studies on energy consumption and the weight of the economy of the nations,28 as well as bitter controversies about a possible reduction of economic value to the energetic dimension.29 In any case, the material and energy balances of an economy came to replace the marginalist neoclassical modeling, showing that it is improper to speak about an industrial “production” process, since all economic activity consists rather in a process of transformation of natural resources which inherently generates waste and has an environmental impact.30 As a result, the metaphor of “economic metabolism” not only allowed the radical reviewing and subsequent replacement of the neoclassical function of production, to the advantage of a conceptualization based on energy and material flows and stocks, but also paved the way to analyzing the interaction between society and nature from a unified perspective, transferring the analytical tools of environmental sciences to economics. Against a widespread opinion about the alleged dematerialization of advanced economies, these studies showed that the physical demand for materials and energy had been increasing in industrialized societies31 and the said increase in the size of economic metabolism led to the emergence of socio-environmental conflicts. The economy turned to be conceptualized as a subsystem of the biosphere. After all, the metabolic principles were common to both the economic system and the ecosystems. Various biologists and economists, such as Howard T.  Odum, with his well-­ known book Environment, Power, and Society (1971), and Nicholas Georgescu-­ Roegen, with his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), tried to develop economic models capturing the circulation of materials and energy flows.  Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “Society’s Metabolism. The Intellectual History of Material Flow Analysis, Part I, 1860  – 1970”, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2, 1, 1998, pp.  61–78. Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Walter Hüttler, “Society’s Metabolism. The Intellectual History of Material Flow Analysis, Part II, 1970 – 1998”, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2, 4, 1999, pp. 107–136. Paul P. Christensen, “Classical Roots for a Modern Materials-Energy Analysis”, Ecological Modelling, 38, 1987, pp. 75–89. This kind of literature frequently uses the metaphor of “ecological deterioration backpack” or “ecological backpack”. 28  Emily Matthews (ed.), The Weight of Nations. Material Outflows from Industrial Economies, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 2000. 29  Ó. Carpintero, La bioeconomía de Georgescu-Roegen, Ediciones de Intervención Cultural, Montesinos, Barcelona, 2006. 30  Stefan Baumgärtner, Harald Dyckhoff, Malte Faber, John L. R. Proops and Johannes Schiller, “The Concept of Joint Production and Ecological Economics”, Ecological Economics, vol. 36, 3, 2001, pp. 365–372. 31  Ó. Carpintero, Metabolismo, op. cit. Nelo Magalhães et alt., “The Physical Economy of France (1830–2015). The History of a Parasite?”, Ecological Economics, 157, 2019, pp. 291–300 27

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The initial debate on the entropic nature of the economic process gave rise to a systematic questioning of neoclassical economics and its basic foundations, such as the assumption of the circular flow of exchange value. A new generation of economists sensitive to environmental issues sought to elaborate alternative economic models based on steady-state economic processes and on a theory of natural value.32 The successive energy crises of 1973 and 1979–1980 gave definitive impulse for institutional support to, and consolidation of, this type of approach, previously considered heterodox. The history of rehabilitation of the old physiocratic metaphorics in the context of the ecological economics is complex and should include a thorough study of authors such as Kenneth E. Boulding, Abel Wolman, and Robert Ayres, among many others. Here I will just give some details about the specific contributions in this regard by Georgescu-Roegen and Herman E. Daly.

2.2  Economy Has Organs and a Plimsoll Line As is well known, Georgescu-Roegen presents the so-called fund-flow model33 and establishes a connection between the Schumpeterian evolutionism and the laws of thermodynamics filtered through the contributions of Alfred J. Lotka (1880–1949).34 Lotka is responsible for coming up with the notion of an “exosomatic evolution”,35 according to which the technology created by human beings must be integrated into the history of its evolutionary process. The distinction between endosomatic organs and exosomatic organs is usually attributed to Lotka: The most singular feature of the artificial extensions of our natural body is that they are shared in common by a number of individuals. When the sick man consults the physician, who, we will say, makes a microscopic examination, for example, the patient is virtually hiring a pair of high power eyes. When you drop a nickel into a telephone box, you are hiring the use of an ear to listen to your friend’s voice five or ten miles distant. When the workingman accepts a wage of forty dollars for his weekly labor, he is in fact paying to his employers an undetermined amount for the privilege of using his machines as artificial members to manufacture marketable wares.36

 Matt Price, “Economics, Ecology, and the Value of Nature”, in: Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature, The University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 182–204. 33  Quentin Couix, “The Role of Natural Resources in Production: Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz”, Documents de travail du Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, 2018; “From Methodology to Practice (and Back): Georgescu-Roegen’s Philosophy of Economics and the Flow-Fund Model”, Documents de travail du Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, 2018. 34  Jacques Grinevald, “Vernadsky y Lotka como fuentes de la bioeconomía de Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen”, Ecología Política, 1, 1991, pp. 99–112. 35  Alfred James Lotka, “The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle”, Human Biology. vol. 17, May 1945, p. 188. 36  A.  J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, 1925, p.  369. Reprinted: Elements of Mathematical Biology. A Classic Work on the Application of Mathematics to Aspects of the Biological and Social Sciences, Dover Publications, New York, 1956, p. 369. 32

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From this point of view, the exosomatic evolution of the instruments designed and built by societies should be added to the endosomatic evolution of the organs which constitute the human body in order to expand their capacities. Following Lotka’s formulations, Georgescu-Roegen suggests that the economic process should be taken as an example of exosomatic evolution. However, to the extent that exosomatic evolution involves the increasing use of available energy, the economic process is irremediably governed by the law of entropy.37 According to Georgescu-Roegen, the production of economic value involves the irreversible consumption of sources of low entropy, with a subsequent decrease in energy available for human use. The exosomatic evolution allows, in short, an increasing appropriation of energy by societies while decreasing the total energy available for the entire biosphere. Entropic degradation appears as an inevitable and irrevocable consequence of the economic process.38 While envisioning a kind of exosomatic metabolism, Georgescu-Roegen enriched the evolutionary ideas of Schumpeter with Lotka’s input. Given the analogy between the economic process and the evolutionary process, presenting the economy in the terms of an exosomatic evolution, any mutation appears as an “exosomatic innovation”.39 This reconceptualization of Schumpeterian innovations allows Georgescu-Roegen to describe the increases in the use of energy, that is to say, in the utilization of low-entropy natural resources in an increasingly massive way. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen anticipates what Peter Baccini and Paul H. Brunner call the “metabolism of the anthroposphere”.40 “In order to produce the exosomatic organs, mankind must use energy and mineral resources which are found in the bowels of the earth. Because of this, they have become a true geological agents as day and night they remove and excavate the subsoil. Certainly we do not live on bread only, we also need mineral resources that, unfortunately, are, as thermodynamics teaches us, at the same time limited and irrevocably non-renewable”.41

 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths. Institutional and Analytical Essays, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1976, p. xiv; Georgescu-Roegen, “De la science économique à la bioéconomie”, Revue d’économie politique, vol. 88, 3, 1978, pp.  337–82. Reedited in Antoine Missemer, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, pour une révolution bioéconomique, ENS Éditions, Lyon, 2013, pp. 87–128; see especially the section “La genèse et la nature du processus économique”, pp. 89–96. 38  N. Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths, op. cit., p. 25. 39  N. Georgescu-Roegen, Ensayos bioeconómicos, edition by Óscar Carpintero, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2007, pp. 56–7. 40  Peter Baccini and Paul H.  Brunner, Metabolism of the Anthroposphere [1991], 2nd, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 2012. 41  My translation. The original quotation is as follows: “Mais pour produire des organes exosomatiques, l’homme doit employer les ressources en énergie et en minerais qui se trouvent dans les entrailles de la terre. C’est pour cela que l’homme est devenu un véritable agent géologique qui fouille et disloque maintenant le sous-sol du matin au soir. N’en doutons pas, nous ne vivons pas seulement de pain; il nous faut aussi des ressources minérales qui, malheureusement, sont à la fois limitées et, comme nous l’aprend la thermodynamique, irrévocablemente épuisables”. GeorgescuRoegen, “De la science économique à la bioéconomie”, op. cit., pp. 91–92. 37

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Subsequently, Herman E. Daly adapted the teachings of Georgescu-Roegen in order to propose a political economy based on the doctrine of the steady state. Here, it is interesting to remark the use of metaphors in connection with the topic of the optimal size of the economy as a physical subsystem of the biosphere. Daly describes the problem as follows: “What is not reflected in the market is the value of the optimal sustainable physical scale of the economy relative to the ecosystem. The market does not distinguish an ecologically sustainable scale of matter-energy throughput from an unsustainable scale”.42 It is well known that Daly advocates an economic metabolism without growth, in order to adjust the economy to the material and energy limits imposed by the biosphere. To do this, he uses the metaphorical notions of “carrying capacity” and “Plimsoll line”: “This absolute optimal scale of load is recognized in the maritime institution of the Plimsoll line. When the watermark hits the Plimsoll line the boat is full, it has reached its safe carrying capacity. […] The major task of environmental macroeconomics is to design an economic institution analogous to the Plimsoll mark-to keep the weight, the absolute scale, of the economy from sinking our biospheric ark”.43 Thus, the metaphor of the “carrying capacity” enters the toolbox of environmental macroeconomics.44 The project of an environmental macroeconomics found factual application in the attempts to develop a full accounting of natural capital. However, this is also what provided fertile ground for the neoclassical Trojan horses.

2.3  C  arrying Capacity, Ecological Footprint, and Natural Capital Introduced with the purpose of measuring the population of a certain species that a region can support without decreasing its possibilities of supporting that same species in the future,45 the metaphor of the “carrying capacity” stems directly from  Herman E.  Daly, “Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-UsePolicies: Comment”, Land Economics, vol. 62, 3, August 1986, p. 320. See also H. E. Daly and John Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future [1989], 2nd updated and expanded edition, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1994. 43  H.  E. Daly, “Towards an Environmental Macroeconomics” [1991], in: H.  E. Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2014, p. 42. A broad reconstruction of the “lifeboats of human ecology” in: Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990 [2015], Routledge, London, 2016, Chap. 4. 44  H. E. Daly, “Elements of Environmental Macroeconomics” [1990], in: Robert Costanza (ed.), Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p. 27. 45  Gretchen Daily and Paul Ehrlich, “Population, Sustainability and the Earth’s Carrying Capacity”, BioScience, vol. 42, 10, 1992, pp. 761–71. Reedited in: Robert Costanza, Charles Perrings and Cutler J. Cleveland (eds.), The Development of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1997, pp. 465–75. 42

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ecology.46 The famous neo-Malthusian ecologist, Garret Hardin, for instance, introduces it in these terms: “the idea of carrying capacity […] defines that population of the propositus species that can be supported by a given territory year after year without degrading the environment […]. Transgressing the carrying capacity even for a short time can set in train degradative process (such as soil erosion) that operate by the rule of positive feedback (runaway feedback). For this, transgressing the carrying capacity even momentarily is an error of the most serious sort”.47 In his classic essay on the tragedy of the commons, Hardin states that “in retrospect, I see the revival of Lloyd’s image of the commons and the use of this metaphor in the formulation of conservation laws as necessary measures in putting the policy science on the path toward a rigorous grounding in conservation for science to rigorously apply the principles of conservation”, since the transgression of carrying capacity “brings ruin to all”.48 This metaphor came to collect the demographic concerns of the 1960s49 and soon got linked to a critique of economic growth.50 In this regard, Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees have introduced successive modifications to the metaphor of the carrying capacity in order to establish a measurement pattern of the physical impact of environmental demands. To this aim, they call upon William Catton’s definition of “human load”, understood as “the maximum ‘load’ that can safely and persistently be imposed on the ecosphere by people. Human load is a function not only of population but also of per capita consumption. […] Humankind, through the industrial economy, has become the dominant consumer in most of the Earth’s major ecosystems […]. The human ‘load’ has grown to the point where total consumption already exceeds sustainable natural income”.51 In their famous book, Our Ecological Footprint. Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (1996), Wackernagel and Rees offer several definitions of the “ecological footprint”. The most complete is possibly the following one: “the Ecological Footprint of a specified population or economy can be defined as the area of ecologically productive land (and water) in various classes –cropland, pasture, forests,  The bibliography on carrying capacity is immense. The reader will find historical reconstructions on this notion in Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth, op. cit.; Sayre, Nathan F., “The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98, 1, 2008, pp. 120–34. 47  Garrett Hardin, “Second Thoughts on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’”, in: Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N.  Towsend (eds.), Valuing the Earth. Economics, Ecology, Ethics [1980], The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1993, p. 159. 48  Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, in: Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Towsend (eds.), Valuing the Earth, op. cit., p. 132 and 151. See also G. Hardin, “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept”, Sounding, 59, 1, 1976, pp. 120–37. 49  See, for example, Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, Stanford University, 1968. 50  Kenneth Arrow, Bert Bolin, Robert Costanza, Partha Dasgupta, Carl Folke, C. S. Holling, BengtOwe Jansson, Simon Levin, Karl-Göran Mäler, Charles Perrings and David Pimentel, “Economic Growth, Carrying Capacity, and the Environment”, Science, vol. 268, 1995, pp. 520–521. 51  Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint. Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, 1996, p. 50. 46

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etc.– that would be required on a continuous basis a) to provide all the energy / material resources consumed, and b) to absorb all the wastes discharged by that population with prevailing technology, wherever on Earth that land is located”.52 Accordingly, the ecological footprint becomes the territorial expression of a certain demand for ecosystem services and natural goods, in terms of both natural resources and waste assimilation. In a remarkably economicist formulation, Wackernagel and Rees refer to “natural income flows”,53 to the appropriation of “ecologically productive land”54, and even to the notion of “appropriated carrying capacity”.55 Without going into the technical details of this biophysical metrics, it is important to underline here the destructive epistemological function of the metaphor of “ecological footprint”56 in relation to the neoclassical theory of comparative advantage, as well as its implications in relation to environmental policies. According to the neoclassical economists Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, the theory of comparative advantage – first advocated by David Ricardo – accounts for the “unshakable basis for international trade” and states that “each country will benefit if it specializes in the production and export of those goods that it can produce at relatively low cost. Conversely, each country will benefit if it imports those goods which it produces at relatively high cost”.57 The analysis of the ecological footprint of each country questions this theory, since in response to the metabolic flows of advanced economies, the international trade systematically undervalues environmental costs and covers up the fact that there is actually a geopolitics in place for “importing carrying capacity and exporting ecological degradation”.58 William E. Rees even refers to a “thermodynamic imperialism”, in which some nations are appropriating the carrying capacity of others.59 In connection with the metaphor of natural capital, he claims that “trade may actually accelerate the depletion of essential natural capital, thereby undermining global carrying capacity”; thus, as “trade-­ induced growth increases material consumption and pollution, it must necessarily increase the depletion of natural capital”.60

 M. Wackernagel and W. E. Rees Wackernagel, Footprint, op. cit., pp. 51–52.  Ibid., p. 52. 54  Ibid., p. 12. 55  Ibid., p. 11. 56   Hans Opschoor, “The Ecological Footprint: Measuring Rod or Metaphor?”, Ecological Economics, vol. 32, 3, Forum: The Ecological Footprint, 2000. 57  Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, McGraw-Hill, Irwin, 2010, p. 342. 58  W. E. Rees, “Natural Capital in Relation to Regional/Global Concepts of Carrying Capacity”, in: Ecological Economics. Emergence of a New Development Paradigm, Proceedings of a Workshop, The Institute for Research on Environment and the Economy, University of Ottawa, 1993, pp. 50–51. M. Wackernagel and W. E. Rees Wackernagel, Footprint, op. cit., p. 21: “Expanding world trade leads to increased global resource flows, which stimulates total economic production and accelerates the depletion of the planet’s natural assets….”. 59  W. E. Rees, “Natural Capital”, op. cit., p. 52: “thermodynamic imperialism: trade as appropriated carrying capacity” 60  Ibid., p. 50. 52 53

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The alliance between the metaphors of carrying capacity, ecological footprint, and natural capital61 has formed a powerful critical device with which ecological economics and political ecology could work hand in hand. However, after the publication on Nature of the famous article by Robert Costanza and collaborators on “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital” (1997),62 a bitter controversy has ensued regarding the neoclassical methodology used in the estimation of the value of the planetary natural capital and the dangers of commodifying the biosphere. In this controversy, the Trojan horses of the neoclassical economics have emerged from within the ecological economics itself: the monetary valuation of the environment; the link between the macroeconomic indicators of sustainable development and financial capitalism; methodological reductionism; mechanism and determinism; the systematic omission of political ecology; scientism; anthropocentric consideration of nature; etc. If the metaphor of economic metabolism has allowed a critical scrutiny of the neoclassical function of production, the metaphor of “natural capital” has led de facto to a relapse into the neoclassical style of economic reasoning, promoting a mercantilist vision of ecosystems. Thus, whereas the environmental metaphors of scarcity in ecological economics have been initially employed for destructive and figurative epistemological purposes, the metric metaphor of “natural capital” and the concomitant problem of its measurement have led to the restoration of the neoclassical mindset, fostering the return to a merely quantitative conceptualization of nature. Thus, neoclassical economics has reemerged even from within one of the most heterodox economic thinking approaches, and a price tag has seemed to be applicable to the Earth planet as a whole.

 On the latter, see Maria Åkerman, “What Does ‘Natural Capital’ Do? The Role of Metaphor in Economic Understanding of the Environment, Environmental Values, vol. 12, 4, November 2003, pp.  431–448. Alejandro Nadal, “The Natural Capital Metaphor and Economic Theory”, RealWorld Economics Review, 74, 2016, pp.  64–84. Antoine Missemer, “Natural Capital as an Economic Concept, History and Contemporary Issues”, Ecological Economics, 143, 2018, pp. 90–96. Tyler DesRoches and Antoine Missemer (eds), Ecosystem Services, special issue on “History and Philosophy of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services”, Volume 41, February 2020. 62  Robert Costanza et alii., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital”, Nature, vol. 387, 1997, pp. 253–260. 61

The Two Chief Epistemic Styles of Mathematical Ecology

In this chapter, I deal with the disciplinary speciation of mathematical ecology in the light of the neo-Kantian thesis according to which modern science ensued from the process of mathematization of nature. The issue of a historical epistemology of mathematical ecology finds a suitable place in this context, that is to say, in what I call “the two chief epistemic styles of mathematical ecology”, the “Galilean style”1 and the “fictional style”. The first one – the “Galilean style” – finds exemplification in astronomy studies and considers nature as an expression of rationality. The Galilean style works on the assumption that the laws of nature can be discovered and expressed in the language of mathematics. Differently, the “fictional style” takes mathematical representations as “fictions” aimed to adjust the empirical basis to a scientific theory. Its distinctive feature lies in assuming an ontological distance between the natural object and its mathematical representation. My main claim is that the historical oscillation between both chief epistemic styles proves the epistemological historicity of mathematical ecology.

1  H  istorical Epistemology and Ecology as an Epochal Threshold The topic of the consequences of Cold War on scientific rationality has produced remarkable trends in the contemporary studies in historical epistemology.2 All the more remarkable they are, as the starting point of historical epistemology is precisely to emphasize the importance of the historical processes of formation of scientific experience. In the specific case of the Cold War, a substantial historical shift in scientific rationality is assumed to have taken place then. In my book From Davos to Cerisy-La-Salle: Historical Epistemology in the European Context (2011), I suggest that the ultimate philosophical basis of contemporary historical

1  I borrow this expression from Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 2002, p. 162. 2  P. Erickson, J. L. Klein, L. Daston, R. Lemov, T. Sturm, and M. D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

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epistemology may be identified in the historicization of the Kantian transcendental subject.3 The recent turn toward a historical epistemology of scientific reason can also be understood within this framework. Without going, properly speaking, into the philosophical implications of the debate, it can be argued that the emergence of a specific Cold War scientific rationality was closely linked to the increasing globalization of science. Nowadays, science can be considered as one of the world cultures. However, the globalization of contemporary scientific culture during the period of the Cold War has not been immune to ambiguity. On the one hand, astronomy, astronautics, and the later space race allowed a reoccupation of the nineteenth-century ideology of progress, in what has been called “astrofuturism” [“Astrofuturismus”], that is to say, the production of a utopian imagery connected to technological developments and space exploration.4 However, on the other hand, the physical sciences and the nuclear threat opened the possibility of a global catastrophe with apocalyptic dimensions. It is precisely this tension between progress and catastrophe which ultimately defined the historical meaning of the Cold War period. This incomplete reoccupation of the ideology of progress can also be reformulated in the terms of the historical dynamics outlined by Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) between a “space of experience” [“Erfahrungsraum”] and a “horizon of expectation” [“Erwartungshorizont”].5 In reference to Koselleck’s two metahistorical categories, one may say that the fabulous development of astronomy and astronautics during the twentieth century produced an effective expansion of the space of experience, whereas the threat of a ubiquitous nuclear catastrophe involved a drastic reduction in the horizon of expectation. The first views of planet Earth produced by space probes and even more those of the moon landing became the symbol of the reality gain.6 In contrast, the mushroom clouds and photographs of the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 3  That is why in the next chapter I investigate the relationship between classical historical epistemology and neo-Kantianism. Further details also in Alberto Fragio, De Davos a Cerisy-La-Salle: la epistemología histórica en el contexto europeo, Editorial Académica Española  – Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, 2011. Alternative remarks can be found in the journal issue edited by Thomas Sturm and Uljana Feest, “What (Good) is Historical Epistemology”, Erkenntnis, vol. 75, Issue 3, November 2011; and Omar Nasim, “Was ist historische Epistemologie?”, in Michael Hagner and Caspar Hirschi (eds.), Nach Feierabend, Diaphanes, Zurich/Berlin, 2013, pp. 123–144. 4  Alexander C. T. Geppert (ed.), Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012. See also Everett C. Dolman, Astropolitik. Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age, Frank Cass Publishers, London / Portland Or., 2002, pp. 168–176. 5  Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft – Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am M.: Suhrkamp, 1979. English transl. by Keith Tribe, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, Chapter 14. Further details in Carsten Dutt and Reinhard Laube (eds.), Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte. Zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2013. 6  Frank Hartmann, “Sputnik und die Globalisierung des Weltbildes”, in: Igor J.  Polianski and Matthias Schwartz, Die Spur der Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2009, pp. 160–180.

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placed the possibility of an abrupt end of world history in front of people’s eyes. In both cases, representations of the totality of the experienceable were offered. In the first case, planet Earth was shown as a material unity of nature, while in the second case, a picture was produced of an accelerated consummation of the time of history. Nowadays, the tension between progress and catastrophe and the subsequent eschatological expectations have been reoccupied by ecology, up to the point that historians such as Joachim Radkau have referred to the “Age of Ecology” to represent the historical sense of our present.7 From this point of view, the ecological issue would have acquired sufficient relevance and significance to provide the hallmark of our time. At the same time, the “ecological age” can be taken as a new impugning of the myth of progress, since the nuclear apocalypse threat is simply replaced by the perspective of an ecological apocalypse. Consequently, the new eschatological expectation of contemporary ecology once again contemplates the possibility of shortening the historical time in relation to the time of nature and the need to establish its own katechon. In the terms of Koselleck’s historical dynamics, ecology would give new content to the relationship between “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”, now under late capitalism, while preserving the dimensions of wholeness and global inaugurated by Cold War’s scientific rationality. Meanwhile, the subjective rationality of late capitalism can be presented as a variation of the myth of progress, but objective rationality applied to environmental impact shows that we are going toward an ecological catastrophe. The ultimate eschatological irony of the present time is that practical rationality has turned into a form of apocalyptic rationality. It is in this paradoxical threshold between epochs that I suggest to place the epistemic history of mathematical ecology, a subspecialty of contemporary ecology.

2  Modern Mathematization of Nature It can be argued that ecology also belongs, with full rights, to the history of the mathematization of nature, and this is particularly the case for mathematical ecology. Neo-Kantian historians of science, and notably Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), argued that modern science ensued from the process of mathematization of nature. The publication in 1883 of Hermann Cohen’s (1842–1918) book, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Enkenntniskritik, determined the success of functionalist metaphysics and epistemology, which gave priority to mathematics in shaping a theory of scientific knowledge. Mathematical experience came to dictate the prerequisites of all scientific experience. The infinitesimal calculus was considered a universal scheme both for

 Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology [2011], Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014; Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990 [2015], Routledge, London, 2016.

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modern sciences and for contemporary epistemology.8 In short, one hoped to develop a theory of knowledge with transcendental character and capable to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional metaphysics of substance, based on the model of differential and integral calculus.9 In this regard, Ernst Cassirer’s early contributions are absolutely telling. His book, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910) – a text strongly influenced by Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903)  – elaborates on the Marburg School’s ideas about the possibility of constructing a theory of experience from the achievements of exact, physical, and natural sciences. Along the lines of the epistemology of mathematics developed by prominent figures, such as Frege, Kronecker, Dedekind, Cantor, Klein, and Hilbert, Cassirer picks up the notions of “series”, “progress”, and, in general, all those concepts expressing the formal properties of a relational structure. In this way, Cassirer argues that the ultimate key to develop a theory of scientific experience goes through a philosophical reappropriation of the concept of “function”. Originally a mathematical concept employed by differential and integral calculus, the notion of function has been then used to elucidate the new transcendental structure of the subject of knowledge10 and infinitesimal calculus as the universal prototype for modern natural science.11 It is in this context that Cassirer formulates the proposal, later very often repeated, to consider the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century12 as a process of mathematization of nature, especially promoted by modern astronomy and Galileo’s famous assertion that the book of nature is written in mathematical language.13 From this point of view, mathematical ecology can be understood as one further product of the modern scientific rationalization of nature.

3  A  Brief History of Mathematical Ecology: Authors and Topics Now I will undertake a very brief historical review of mathematical ecology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The founding moment of mathematical ecology may be identified in 1826, when Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) presented his 8  Gregory B. Moynahan, “Hermann Cohen’s Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode, Ernst Cassirer, and the Politics of Science in Wilhelmine Germany”, Perspectives on Science, vol. 11, 1, 2003, pp. 41–9. 9  Further details in the following reference books: A. Philonenko, L’École de Marbourg. Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1989; H. Dussort, L’École de Marbourg, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1963. 10  G. B. Moynahan, op. cit., p. 49. 11  Ibid. p. 48. 12  Violeta Aréchiga (ed.), Historiografía, newtonismo y alquimia. Antología sobre la revolución científica, DCSH-UAM-Cuajimalpa, Ciudad de México, 2016. 13  Further details in H. Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1981.

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famous model of exponential population growth.14 As is well known, Malthus claimed that as the population grows geometrically, the food that supports it grows arithmetically. This idea shaped Darwin’s theory of evolution and its principle of natural selection, where the relationship between reproductive capacity and access to limited resources played a key role.15 Clearly, the Malthusian model of population growth – which can be written in the form of a differential equation –16 preceded the formulation of the theory of evolution. In other words, the early development of a mathematical conceptualization paved the way to the emergence of the theory of evolution. The exponential growth model advocated by Malthus provided the ground for the study of “population dynamics”, a discipline consolidated in the early twentieth century, especially through the famous predator-prey equation devised by Alfred J. Lotka (1880–1949) and Vito Volterra (1860–1940).17 The Lotka-Volterra equation describes the interaction of two species, one predatory and the other prey, and their struggle for survival.18 Their mathematical model showed the unexpected result that in normal circumstances both species coexist and none becomes extinct. The Lotka-Volterra equation caused a sudden explosion in “population of population models”19 – so to speak – based on ordinary and partial differential equations.20 Within this proliferating framework, population dynamics became the first major discipline speciation, subsequently extended to models of evolutionary genetics21 and the application of game theory in population ecology.22  In fact, the first anonymous edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers is dated 1798, while the edition signed by Malthus is dated 1826. Further details in Giorgos Kallis, Limits. Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care?, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2019. 15  John Pastor, Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, 2008, p. 62. 16  Linda J. S. Allen, An Introduction to Mathematical Biology, Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2007, p. 141. 17  Alfred J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology, Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1925; Vito Volterra, “Fluctuations in the Abundance of a Species considered Mathematically”, Nature, 118, 1926, pp. 558–60. For further details, see Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology [1985], University of Chicago Press, 1995. 18  R. S. Kaushal and D. Parashar, Advanced Methods of Mathematical Physics, op. cit., pp. 241 and ff. 19  Mario Casanueva and Diego Carlos Méndez, “Poblaciones de modelos y dinámicas científicas”, Stoa, 3, 5, 2012, pp. 159–79. Further details in Faustino Sánchez Garduño, Pedro Miramontes and José Luis Gutiérrez (eds.), Clásicos de la biología matemática, editorial Siglo XXI  – UNAM, México, 2002. 20  Linda J. S. Allen, An Introduction to Mathematical Biology, op. cit. 21  J. F. Crow and M. Kimura, An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, Burgess Pub. Co., 1970; F.  Hoppensteadt, Mathematical Theories of Populations: Demographics, Genetics and Epidemics, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1975. 22  Josef Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund, Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics [1998], Cambridge University Press, 2003; Josef Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund, The Theory of Evolution and Dynamical Systems. Mathematical Aspects of Selection [1984], Cambridge University Press, 1992; John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games, Cambridge University Press, 1982 14

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The next key step in the development of mathematical ecology ensued from the application of matrix calculus and linear algebra to population dynamics and to ecological problems. The modern theory of matrix algebra was formalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, with prominent authors such as Arthur Cayley (1821–1895), W. R. Hamilton (1805–1865), or J. J. Sylvester (1814–1897). The first major application of algebraic calculation matrices to population models was introduced by Patrick Holt Leslie (1900–1974), and its main outcome was a first-order linear system for age-structured populations, known as the Leslie matrix model.23 This model was inspired by studies of rat populations in the sewers of London after bombings occurred during World War II that affected the water supply and wastewater treatment.24 Instead of studying the relative rates change between a few variables, matrices allowed to treat a wide collection of mathematical objects simultaneously and describe their mutual relations. In this respect, the way was open for both the structuralist approach in mathematics and the implementation and generalization of the notion of “system” in mathematical biology, since matrix algebra allowed to model how various elements of a system interact with each other according to rules that can be specified. Consequently, matrix algebra allowed the modeling of total biological systems, which subsequently led not only to the various theories of stability and chaos – as we shall see – but also to mathematical epidemiology25 and the so-called island biogeography. The latter discipline, introduced in the 1960s of the last century by Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson,26 promoted the study of biodiversity of species in relatively isolated habitats, such as islands, lakes, and mountains surrounded by deserts. Additionally, one should here mention the attempts to develop a mathematical theory of evolution combining the findings of population genetics with classical evolutionary biology.27 Within this context, the project of theoretical biology emerged, promoted notably by Conrad H.  Waddington (1905–1975) and René F. Thom (1923–2002).28 It was largely thanks to the latter, the main proponent of catastrophe theory, that the old question of morphogenesis was revived.29 The debate over the origin of living forms, that is, why organisms have one form and not

 Linda J. S. Allen, An Introduction to Mathematical Biology, op. cit., p. 18.  John Pastor, Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, op. cit., p. 67. 25  See, for instance, Vadrevu Sree Hari Rao and Ponnada Raja Sekhara Rao, Dynamic Models and Control of Biological Systems, Springer, Heidelberg, 2009; Sergei V. Petrovskii and Bai-Lian Li, Exactly Solvable Models of Biological Invasion. Chapman & Hall / CRC Press, Broken Sound Parkway, 2006. 26  Robert H.  MacArthur and Edward O.  Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1967; Jonathan B. Losos y Robert E. Ricklefs (eds.), The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2010. 27  Faustino Sánchez Garduño, Pedro Miramontes and José Luis Gutiérrez (eds.), Clásicos de la biología matemática, editorial Siglo XXI – UNAM, México, 2002, pp. 37; Marcus W. Feldman (ed.), Mathematical Evolutionary Theory, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1989. 28  F. Sánchez Garduño et alii (eds.), Clásicos de la biología matemática, op. cit., pp. 22 and ff. 29  Ibid., pp. 47–66. 23 24

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another, found its strongest symbolic expression in D’Arcy Thompson’s (1860–1948) book, On Growth and Form (1917). There, morphology and development are investigated based on few general principles expressed formally in the language of mathematics. This is how the so-called rational morphology has seen the light of day. A contemporary version of this tradition, “dynamic structuralism”, is based on geometric approximations combined with the theory of dynamic and complex systems.30 Within this framework, René F.  Thom introduced the aforementioned catastrophe theory to account for the dynamics of production of life forms through a system of differential equations of reaction-diffusion.31 The catastrophe theory attempts to model drastic change phenomena in continuous processes, “whose essential characteristic is the behavior of ‘violent change of phase’ after transposing a threshold of saturation”.32 However, the theory of bifurcation and chaos eventually replaced the catastrophe theory, and it consolidated the notion of “dynamical system” to model physical and biological phenomena.33 The bifurcation theory can be taken as an extension and generalization of the traditional study of equilibrium in mechanical systems accounting for systems evolving in time according to the interaction of their components, which are specified by variables and parameters. Darwin himself visualized bifurcation phenomena in biology through diagrams. However, the rigorous mathematical description of equilibrium points and bifurcations dates back to celestial mechanics and the researches on the stability of the solar system, notably in Laplace’s and Poincare’s work.34 By bifurcation, it is currently understood a qualitative change in the stability of a system, for example, in the evolution from a stable regime to an unstable one.35 Consequently, bifurcation points are those where the stability of the system changes.36 The bifurcation theory was therefore applied as a mathematical tool for the study of changes in ecological systems, particularly when a certain parameter or a set of them exceeds a critical value.37 As a result, at small distance from the equilibrium points, the behavior of a system is taken to show the evolution of the overall system over time. Interestingly, if a system is very sensitive to initial conditions, then we talk about chaos.38

 Ibid., p. 63.  Ibid., p. 41. 32  F. Sánchez Garduño et alii (eds.), Clásicos de la biología matemática, op. cit., p. 24 (my transl.). 33  George David Birkhoff, Dynamical Systems, American Mathematical Society, 1927. 34  Further details in Linda J. S. Allen, An Introduction to Mathematical Biology, op. cit., pp. 199–204 35  D. S. Jones, M. Plank, B. D. Sleeman, Differential Equations and Mathematical Biology [1983], Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2010, p. 331. 36  Jack K. Hale and Hüseyin Kocak, Dynamics and Bifurcations, Springer Verlag, New York, 1991. 37  Further details in John Pastor, Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, op. cit., pp. 41 ff. 38  Jones, Plank, Sleeman, Differential Equations and Mathematical Biology, op. cit., Chap. 13: “Bifurcation and Chaos”. R.  S. Kaushal and D.  Parashar, Advanced Methods of Mathematical Physics, op. cit., Chap. 6 and 7. Stephen Wiggins, Global Bifurcation and Chaos. Analytical Methods, Springer Verlag, New York, 1988. 30 31

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Contemporary chaos theory is usually linked to the names of David Ruelle, Edward Lorenz, Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Smale, and James A. Yorke, among many others,39 and it involves the definitive consolidation of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. This transformation was largely influenced by mathematical methods and modeling from the physical sciences, addressing specific problems such as the phenomena of turbulence in fluid dynamics, irreversible processes, the study of nonlinear oscillators, or limit cycles.40 For the purposes of mathematical ecology, the introduction within this context of statistical and stochastic methods41 which ultimately led to the emergence of biostatistics42 and computer simulations played a key role.43 I would like to conclude this quick review of the history of mathematical ecology making reference to ecological economics. This latter can also be said to have relied on an intensive process of rationalization of nature. Ecological economics projects indeed economic rationality on the whole of nature, this latter being taken as an autonomous system that provides basic ecosystem services such as the production of breathable air, water, and carbon sequestration. To the extent that profit from the natural cycles is obtained, a certain economic value is assigned to the services provided by nature. In this regard, nature is conveniently considered as a system of production and income, supplying natural assets that can be sold and consumed.44

4  Mathematical Ecology as a Discipline Speciation Case The tortuous path of the mathematization of nature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, here merely outlined, produced a peculiar disciplinary tension between the “mathematical biology”45 and the “mathematical ecology”.46 The latter  T.Y.  Li and J.A.  Yorke, “Period Three Implies Chaos”, American Mathematical Monthly 82, 1975, p. 985. 40  See R. S. Kaushal and D. Parashar, Advanced Methods of Mathematical Physics [2000], Alpha Science International Ltd, Pangbourne, 2008. 41  R. S. Kaushal and D. Parashar, Advanced Methods, op. cit., pp. 162–211; Linda J. S. Allen, An Introduction to Stochastic Processes with Applications to Biology, CRC Press, Broken Sound Parkway, 2010. 42  Bernard Rosner, Fundamentals of Biostatistics, Duxbury, Pacific Grove, 2000. 43  See, for instance, D.  Brown, P.  Rothery, Models in Biology: Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, 1993. D. J. Barnes, Dominique Chu, Introduction to Modeling for Biosciences, Springer, 2010. 44  See, for instance, R. Costanza et alii. An Introduction to Ecological Economics, St. Lucie Press and International Society for Ecological Economics, 1997. 45  James D Murray, Mathematical Biology, Springer Verlag, New York, 2001. Faustino Sánchez Garduño, Pedro Miramontes and José Luis Gutiérrez (eds.), Clásicos de la biología matemática, editorial Siglo XXI – UNAM, México, 2002. 46  John Pastor, Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, 2008. 39

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is often subsumed under the first, although mathematical biology includes a very heterogeneous set of issues, methodologies, and conceptualization repertoires. This tension between scientific disciplines is also well accounted for by Kuhn’s late notion of speciation. Kuhn modified his earlier views on the structure of scientific revolutions turning to an evolutionary epistemology which provides a new image of both scientific change and the historical processes of transformation of knowledge.47 Kuhn described his new position as a “post-Darwinian Kantianism”.48 This evolutionary view, in line with other authors such as Popper, Campbell, and Toulmin, was only roughly sketched by Kuhn in a few of his later works and seems to form the core of his forthcoming posthumous book The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development.49 As already mentioned in Chapter 3, the new Kuhnian conceptual framework was also closely related to a change in metaphors, that is to say, the embracing of the evolutionary metaphor par excellence: the Darwinian tree of species. The main issue was now to explain the emergence of scientific disciplines in the evolutionary tree of knowledge. In this regard, Kuhn coined a new metaphor, the “speciation of disciplines”.50 Indeed, the speciation of disciplines fragments science. But it also allows knowledge to grow, since it provides new tools and a detailed treatment of numerous topics. In this respect, it can be argued that also mathematical ecology features a case of speciation of scientific disciplines. However, as far as I know, it has been only accomplished in an effective way in population dynamics, and to some extent in ecological economics, as previously seen.

5  Leggiadro viso: The Old Myth of a Self-Speaking Nature Granted that, as propounded by Neo-Kantian historians,51 the beginning of modern science finds its roots in the growing process of mathematization of nature, mathematical ecology would qualify as one more offspring of this scientific spirit. In the modern mathematization of nature and in its rationalist promise, a singular oscillation can be detected between what might be termed “the myth of a self-speaking

 For further details, see Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “Revolution as Evolution. The Concept of Evolution in Kuhn’s Philosophy”, in: Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis (eds.), Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited, Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 134–52. 48  Kuhn, The Road Since Structure. Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, eds. James Conant and John Haugeland, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2002, p. 104. 49  T. S. Kuhn, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, James Conant and John Haugeland (eds.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago (forthcoming). However, many Kuhnian scholars do not expect major new insights from this book. 50  Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, op. cit., p. 98; Kuhn, “Afterwords”, op. cit., p. 337. 51  Further details on this topic in Chapter “Classical Historical Epistemology in Retrospect: A Review Essay”. 47

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nature” and its criticism. According to this myth, nature is intrinsically semantic, and a relationship of trust is established on the assumption that nature is a source of meaning.52 The issue of a historical epistemology of mathematical ecology finds then a suitable place in this context, that is to say, in what I call “the two chief epistemic styles of mathematical ecology”,53 the “Galilean style” and the “fictional style”. The first one – the “Galilean style” – finds exemplification in astronomy studies and considers nature as an expression of rationality, within a variation of the myth of a self-­ speaking nature. The Galilean style works on the assumption that the laws of nature can be discovered and expressed in the language of mathematics. Principles are, for instance, assumed to regulate the organization of nature,54 such as the aforementioned cases taken into account by rationalist morphology and dynamic structuralism. No effective “ontological distance” is therefore assumed between the biological or ecological object and its mathematical representation. Differently, the “fictional style” takes mathematical representations as “fictions” aimed to adjust the empirical basis to a scientific theory or model. Its distinctive feature lies in assuming an ontological distance between the natural object and its mathematical representation. Consequently, the approximate character of the mathematical representations of nature is emphasized.55 Mathematics is not so much the expression of an immanent logic in nature but a symbolic approach to some of its prevalent features. The fictional style is based primarily on an epistemology of mathematical models and maintains the symbolical neutrality of nature. In other words, whereas the Galilean style is self-speaking, the fictional style takes nature to be symbolically neutral. By way of conclusion, in the oscillation between these two chief styles, if not in the adoption of intermediate positions, epistemological historicity shows its marks also in mathematical ecology. One of the essential tensions of mathematical ecology can therefore be identified in the duality between the old Galilean dream and the fictional style; between an immanent law-like structure in nature and the production of mathematical fictions to represent nature; and between the critique of the biological reason and the legend of the liquidation of the self-speaking nature.

 Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds.), The Moral Authority of Nature, The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 53  I take this expression from Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [1632]. 54  John Pastor, Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, op. cit., p. 5. 55  “[…] Mathematical ecology does not deal directly with natural objects. Instead, it deals with the mathematical objects and operations we offer as analogs of nature and natural processes. These mathematical models do not contain all information about nature that we may know, but only what we think are the most pertinent for the problem at hand. In mathematical modeling, we have abstracted nature into simpler form so that we have some chance of understanding it. Mathematical ecology helps us understand the logic of our thinking about nature to help us avoid making plausible arguments that may not be true or only true under certain restrictions. It helps us avoid wishful thinking about how we would like nature to be in favor of rigorous thinking about how nature might actually work”. Ibid., p. 3. 52

Classical Historical Epistemology in Retrospect: A Review Essay

According to the American philosopher, Michael Friedman, while triggering the so-called historical turn, Kuhn reinstated the history of science as perhaps the most important object for the philosophy of science. In this last chapter, I show that this reinstatement is rather a rehabilitation of the philosophical and epistemological uses of the history of science, something already present in the continental historiography of science in the first half of the twentieth century and especially in Gaston Bachelard’s work. In this respect, I undertake a review of the European history and philosophy of science during that period, paying special attention to Gaston Bachelard as one of the leading representatives of the French historical epistemology of the 1930s. The late and quite problematic reception of Bachelard’s thought in the early work of Thomas S. Kuhn provides an opportunity to review the main philosophical tenets of classical historical epistemology. This line of inquiry may help to define what the continental history and philosophy of science is, notably in relation to classical historical epistemology. Moreover, it may open new perspectives for the emerging field of historical epistemology of economics.

1  Is There a Continental History and Philosophy of Science? In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the history and philosophy of science coming from continental traditions.1 In this regard, Gary Gutting’s edited book Continental Philosophy of Science is one of the most systematic attempts to clarify the topic.2 Former professor at Notre Dame University, Gutting argues that Kant’s critical epistemology is indeed the very beginning of philosophy of science as an autonomous discipline. According to Gutting’s account, the need to distinguish Galileo’s, Descartes’, and Newton’s contributions to modern science from traditional philosophy implied a fundamental shift in the understanding of 1  See, for instance, Mary Domski and Michael Dickson (eds.), Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, 2010. 2  Gary Gutting, “Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy of Science?”, in: G. Gutting (ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005, pp. 1–16.

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aprioristic assumptions. Empirical approaches and methodologies produced during the seventeenth century showed the possibility of separating philosophical knowledge from scientific knowledge. Gutting suggests then “a rough but useful”3 taxonomy for continental philosophy of science based on the different basic attitudes regarding the relationship between philosophy and science. The empirical or positivist attitude considers that science has an independent status and philosophy is a kind of secondary consideration which explicitizes the outcomes obtained by science and the methods used to reach them. Another attitude, more related to Kantian criticism, believes that science provides original knowledge, but it is philosophy that shows what makes scientific knowledge possible. In short, while philosophical justification clearly requires the assumption of the validity of scientific knowledge, the philosophical analysis is the only one connected to the realm of transcendental truths. The third and last attitude, the ontological or metaphysical one, states that the access to philosophical truths is entirely independent and even superior to science. According to Gutting, the empirical attitude is typical of scientists and philosophers who are deeply committed to science. For instance, this is the case for Ernst Mach, in Germany, and Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem, in France. The second attitude, the critical one, has been widely developed by French and German neo-Kantianism. Authors such as Jules Lachelier, Émile Boutroux, Léon Brunschwicg, and Bachelard are representatives of the French neo-Kantianism, while the German neo-­Kantianism consists of two different schools, the Marburg School, with leading figures in Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer, and the Southwest School, with Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask. The Frankfurt School, especially Habermas, could also be linked to this position. The last of these attitudes, the ontological one, would have its earliest expression with Bergson and Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, with the Husserlian phenomenology, and, subsequently, with Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity and with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. A further continuation may be found, according to Gutting, in Deleuze’s and Irigaray’s post-structuralism, among other traditions. Gary Gutting’s attempt to map the continental philosophy of science was not followed by other analogous attempts to map the continental history of science. The continental history and philosophy of science is indeed a neglected tradition overlooked by dominant analytical philosophy of science, a sort of non-received view in contemporary history and philosophy of science, that is to say, in the English-­ speaking world. In order to clarify this issue, I will analyze the relations among Kuhn, the neo-Kantianism of Marburg, and some contributions from the French historiographical tradition. This should suffice to elucidate what the continental history and philosophy of science is. I will argue that the missed connections between Thomas S. Kuhn and the European historiography of science may be seen as a crucial episode in the misunderstanding and dismissing of this continental tradition, including historical epistemology.

 Ibid., p. 1.

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Through the consolidation of logical empiricism, philosophy of science has not only taken a formal turn but has also discarded any historical approximation. A remarkable exception to this trend comes from the French world, which has preserved a distinctive historical style in the formulation of philosophical problems and, more importantly, a theory of scientific knowledge inseparable from time. Although it is an exaggeration to claim that Kuhn is responsible for killing logical empiricism,4 it is certainly true that he contributed decisively to the subsequent historicist backfire. While rediscovering and elaborating on some historical and philosophical elements of the European tradition, Kuhn, however, overshadowed what is possibly the main contribution of the continental history and philosophy of science of the 1930s, that is, the so-called historical epistemology.5 Concerning this point, it should be emphasized that historical epistemology shares with Kuhn both the French background and some element of neo-Kantianism. Nevertheless, the historians disregarded by Kuhn are also those who had the greatest impact on historical epistemology, namely, Canguilhem,6 Bachelard, and, to a lesser extent, Brunschvicg. In this sense, I take historical epistemology to be in the perfect position to act as connecting point between the conventional history and philosophy of science and the continental history and philosophy of science.7 To the aim of clarifying this topic, I will briefly review both the influence on Kuhn of the continental historiography of science and the contributions of several forerunners to early historical epistemology, as to then conclude on the famous missed connection between Kuhn and Bachelard.

4  George A.  Reisch, “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?”, Philosophy of Science 58, 1991, pp. 264–77. Further details in his The Politics of Paradigms. Thomas S. Kuhn, James B. Conant, and the Cold War ‘Struggle for Men’s Minds’, SUNY Press, Albany, 2019, Chapter 10. 5  Dominique Lecourt, L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard [1969], Vrin, Paris, 1978. Translated by Ben Brewster as part of Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology. Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, NLB, London, 1975, pp. 23–118. 6  Unfortunately, I am not able to pay attention here to Canguilhem. I refer the reader to Francisco García Vázquez, Georges Canguilhem. Vitalismo y ciencias humanas, Universidad de Cádiz, Cádiz, 2019. 7  A more detailed account of this issue is included in Alberto Fragio, De Davos a Cerisy-La Salle: la epistemología histórica en el contexto europeo, Editorial Académica Española  – Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, 2011. Additionally, I have aimed to contribute to the continental history and philosophy of science through two studies that connect historical epistemology with Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, notably concerning the epistemological function of metaphors in the history of astronomy in the twentieth century and in the history of psychology in the nineteenth century: Paradigms for a Metaphorology of the Cosmos: Hans Blumenberg and the Contemporary Metaphors of the Universe, Aracne Editrice, Roma, 2015; Metaphors of Subjectivity in the 19th Century Psychology, and other Essays, Aracne Editrice, Roma, 2015.

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2  T  homas S. Kuhn and the Continental History and Philosophy of Science In the preface to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn acknowledges the influence on his work of several historians of science – whose names are not always famous. There he tells us about him abandoning academic and professional projects in the field of physics to devote himself entirely to the history of science. During his studies, he had followed several seminars on philosophy and history, but after making up his mind, he continued “to study the writings of Alexandre Koyré and first encountered those of Émile Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Anneliese Maier”. According to him, this group shows “[more] clearly than most other recent scholars, […] what it was like to think scientifically in a period when the canons of scientific thought were very different from those current today”.8 Evidence seems to suggest that from the systematic reading of these texts, Kuhn found “a function for the history of science” ensuing from a non-cumulative understanding of scientific change: Historians of science have begun to ask new sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines for the sciences. Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group, i.e., his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in the sciences. Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint –usually very different from that of modern science– that gives those opinions the maximum internal coherence and the closest possible fit to nature. Seen through the works that result, works perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Alexandre Koyré, science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the older historiographic tradition.9

In an essay that here guides my account,10 the American philosopher, Michael Friedman, reminds us that the preface is not the only place where Kuhn declared his early philosophical and historiographical affiliations. Moreover, not only there he revealed his detailed knowledge of authors such as Cassirer and Brunschvicg. In an article on the development of the history of science, he claimed that he:

 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970, pp. v–vi. 9  Ibid., p. 3. On new scholarship on T. S. Kuhn, see Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston (eds.), Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty. Reflections on a Science Classic, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016. Thomas S.  Kuhn, Desarrollo científico y cambio de léxico. Conferencias Thalheimer, Universidad Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland, Estados Unidos de América, 12 al 19 de noviembre de 1984, Universidad de la República de Uruguay, Montevideo, 2017. Juan Vicente Mayoral, La búsqueda de la estructura, Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, 2017. Errol Morris, The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018. 10  Michael Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, in: Thomas Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 19–44. 8

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came to the history of science from philosophy. Partly it was learned from men like Lange and Cassirer who dealt historically with people or ideas that were also important for scientific development. [...] And partly it was learned from a small group of neo-Kantian epistemologists, particularly Brunschvicg and Meyerson, whose search for quasi-absolute categories of thought in older scientific ideas produced brilliant genetic analyses of concepts which the main tradition in the history of science had misunderstood or dismissed.11

Finally, while replying to the criticism met by his book on Max Planck and the black-body theory,12 Kuhn would explain that “the concept of historical reconstruction that underlies [the Planck book] has from the start been fundamental to both my historical and my philosophical work. It is by no means original: I owe it primarily to Alexandre Koyré; its ultimate sources lie in neo-Kantian philosophy”.13 All these quotations suggest that a clearly non-negligible thematic core of Kuhn’s work ensues from the internalization of historicism caused by the crisis of Kantian transcendental philosophy: “The view toward which I grope would also be Kantian, but without ‘things in themselves’ and with categories of the mind which could change with time as the accommodation of language and experience proceeded”.14 Clearly, only a very broad definition of Kantianism and neo-Kantianism makes it possible to gather all the authors mentioned by Kuhn within the same tradition. At any rate, what they all share is the rejection of radical empiricism applied to the evolution of science and, at the same time, the support of several different strands of epistemological constructivism. Both logical empiricism and the subsequent theories stemming from it would have excluded the history of science from the new logical-formal articulation of epistemology,15 but, as Friedman claims, “it was [...] Kuhn’s great merit [...] to have reinstated the history of science as perhaps the most important object considered in the philosophy of science”.16 It is important to remark, though, that this reinstitution is in the end nothing but some sort of new renaissance of the history of science as key instrument for philosophical and epistemological inquiries, something that would have been developed precisely by the  Thomas S. Kuhn, “The History of Science”, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Crowell Collier and Macmillan, New York, 1968. Reprinted as The Essential Tension, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1977, quoted in Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., pp. 29–30. 12  Thomas S.  Kuhn, “Revisiting Planck”, Historical Studies in the Physical Studies 14, 1984, pp. 231–52, reprinted in Kuhn, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 [1978], 2nd ed., Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1987, pp.  311–341, quoted by Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit. 13  Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 30. 14  Thomas S.  Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, eds. James Conant and John Haugeland, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000, p. 207. Further details in Michael Friedman, “Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of Science”, Philosophy of Science, 69, 2002, pp. 171–190; “Ernst Cassirer and Thomas Kuhn: The Neo-Kantian Tradition in History and Philosophy of Science”, The Philosophical Forum, 39, 2008, pp. 239–252. 15  Alberto Fragio, De Davos a Cerisy-La Salle: la epistemología histórica en el contexto europeo, Editorial Académica Española – Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, 2011, pp. 70–89. 16  Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 35. 11

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historiographic tradition outlined by Kuhn and, in particular, by Gaston Bachelard in his works from the 1930s. One should also emphasize the fact that the representatives of the French historiography of science have not always favored disagreement both internally and with the German tradition championed by Cassirer. The following statement by Koyré – at some point a student of Husserl – proves this point: Fortunately it is no longer necessary nowadays to insist on the interest of the historical study of science. It is no longer even necessary – after the magisterial work of those such as Duhem and Émile Meyerson, Cassirer and Brunschvicg  – to insist on the philosophical interest and fruitfulness of this study.17

3  Ernst Cassirer and Neo-Kantian History of Science The key figure in the early neo-Kantian historiographical tradition is Cassirer with his four-volume book, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (1906–1957). His work provoked a great amount of replies and polemical responses. There is no doubt that, in a way or another, the work was abundantly read and quoted. Cassirer was one of the main supporters of a history of epistemology, faithful to the neo-Kantian School of Marburg, subsequently developed as a historicization of epistemology by his philosophy of symbolic forms. However, neither Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944), Hélène Metzger (1889–1944), nor Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) and Edwin A. Burtt (1892–1989) included his name in their texts for this achievement, but rather for having shed considerable light in his ground-breaking work on the scientific culture of the seventeenth century and having offered many rich interpretative suggestions. Among the most impactful stands indeed his aforementioned Platonic interpretation of Galilean science as mathematization of nature, from whose gradual transformation would have derived also Hegel’s philosophy. These historical modifications would ultimately show, according to Cassirer, the existence of formal structures with mathematical predisposition that remain unchanged for long periods of time and that are then applied to the empirically given natural world. His most significant contribution would clearly not concern, in this respect, philosophical idealism, but rather mathematical physics and its subsequent refinement of symbolic formalism. As peak of this process, the modern concept of nature features, for instance, the triumph of the mathematical concept of function over the substantialist obstacles of Aristotelian metaphysics. Evidence is available of Meyerson’s opposition to the functional epistemology of the Marburg School. Although he would agree on the need for an a priori requirement of subjectivity, which would allow to bestow meaning and organization on the results of empirical science, all philosophy of history attempting to liken the understanding of science to the universal laws regulating empirical phenomena was  Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1978, p. 1. Originally published as Études Galiléenes. 3 Vols., Hermann, Paris, 1939.

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deemed by Meyerson as unacceptable. In one of his most important contributions, Identité et réalité (1908), while arguing at the same time for the striking position according to which the identity of substance through change is a logical a priori of experience, he claimed that scientific knowledge must not be reduced to mere normativity mediated by consciousness.18 Claims of the like would contradict the basic tenets of Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte (1883) by Hermann Cohen and the anti-substantialism supported by Cassirer in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910). From the opposite front, Meyerson would argue that the logical a priori must be understood in terms of identity of substance. Throughout the several perceptible alterations of nature and throughout all historical transformation, an immutable underlying substantiality must stay the same. In this respect, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, rather than the mathematization of nature, would be the reactualization of the mechanist atomism, according to which the elementary bodies preserve their properties despite undergoing local displacement. This is not the only example of identity beyond time. The principle of conservation of matter in Lavoisier and of energy in Helmholtz and Fechner would be other examples one could mention here. Nevertheless, Meyerson was fully aware that the cognitive requirements of identity cannot be fulfilled neither by nature nor by history. The a priori needs of identity meet hardly avoidable resistance. This is why, within the realm of evolution of science, he would point to the conflict between the stability requirement and the irrational chances imposed by reality. Whereas according to Cassirer the history of science resembles a slow and endless process of improvement of our logical and formal tools as well as of our understanding of nature, for Meyerson, it would rather be some sort of unsolvable dialectical exchange between the substantialist tendencies of human reason and the stubborn “irrationality” of nature. While the former would avoid any reference to an ontology of substance as foundation of our representations, the latter would reject any attempt to formulate an abstract vision, purely functional and committed to the sterile normative precision of mathematics. Meyerson would accordingly speak against anti-substantialist theories, while the contributions that take an interest in Cassirer, at least in the early Cassirer, go in the direction of a peculiar mathematical idealism. In the text, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, Cassirer expresses clear criticism of Meyerson based on the remark that: “the identity toward which thought progressively strives is not the identity of ultimate substantial things but the identity of functional orders and coordinations”.19 Koyré, on his turn, partially sided with Meyerson.20 One should not forget that the Études galiléennes (1939) are dedicated to him, although it is true that the  Émile Meyerson, Identité et réalité [1908], Vrin, Paris, 2001. Among his most renown works, one should mention also De l’explication dans les sciences, Payot, Paris, 1921. An English translation is available for both books. 19  Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, Open Court, Chicago, 1923, pp.  323–325, quoted in Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 32. 20  Mario Biagioli, “Meyerson and Koyré: Toward a Dialectic of Scientific Change”, History and Technology, 4, 1987, pp. 169–182. 18

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quarrel between Meyerson and Cassirer was not, at least in principle, the same as that developed between Koyré and Cassirer.21 On this topic, in his “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, Michael Friedman speculates that Koyré’s loyalty to Meyerson comes to the fore in relation to the Platonic interpretation of Galileo. This point would then be confirmed by the following quote from Koyré: E. Cassirer, in his Erkenntnisproblem, vol. I, expresses the opinion that Galileo resurrected the Platonist ideal of scientific knowledge; from which follows, for Galileo (and Kepler), the necessity for mathematising nature. [...] Unfortunately (at least in our opinion) Cassirer turns Plato into Kant.22

The Études galiléennes are no sufficient proof that Koyré’s criticism of Cassirer should be extended to the whole of the functionalist epistemology. In this direction goes, however, Koyré’s article presenting Meyerson’s philosophy to the German readership. In the text, “Die Philosophie Émile Meyersons” (1931), not only he endorsed the philosophy of his Polish friend – an immigrant in France as himself – but he also stated his opposition to the “anti-substantialist” claims of neo-­Kantianism, according to which “science has nothing to do with substantial causes, but is occupied only with constructing functional dependencies, functional interconnections of the phenomena and clothing them in mathematical formulas”.23 Once defined the limits and affiliations of his thought, notwithstanding, Koyré could not but agree with Cassirer’s basic tenet on the rationalism and mathematization of the natural world. After all, what mostly disturbed Koyré was not the Platonic interpretation of Galileo but rather the transformation of this latter in the shadow of Hermann Cohen.

4  F  rench Historical Epistemology as Continental History and Philosophy of Science So far a fragment of the continental history and philosophy of science has been investigated in relation to Kuhn, the neo-Kantianism of Marburg, and some contributions from the French historiographical tradition,24 notably by Meyerson and

 Further details in Jean Seidengart, “Science et réalité chez Meyerson et Cassirer: les ressorts philosophiques d’un grand débat épistémologique au xxe siècle”, Corpus. Revue de philosophie, 58, 2011, pp.  187–200. Jean Seidengart (ed.), Vérité Scientifique et Verité Philosophique dans l’Œuvre d’Alexandre Koyré, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2016. Eva Telkes-Klein and E. Yakira, (ed.), L’Histoire et la philosophie des sciences françaises à la lumière de l’oeuvre d’Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), éditions Honoré Champion, Paris, 2005. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Eva Telkes-Klein, Les identités multiples d’Émile Meyerson, Champion, Paris, 2017. 22  Koyré, Galileo Studies, op. cit., p.  223, fn. 123, quoted in Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 39, fn. 38. 23  Alexandre Koyré, “Die Philosophie Émile Meyersons”, Deutsch-Französische Rundschau 4, 1931, pp. 105–126, quoted in Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 33. 24  Further details in Michel Bitbol and Jean Gayon (eds.), L’Épistémologie française 1830–1970, PUF, Paris, 2006, 2nd. edition 2015. Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible. French Philosophy Since 1960, OUP, Oxford, 2011. 21

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Koyré. In order to provide some philosophical background for the famous missed connection between Kuhn and Bachelard, I will briefly review the cases of Brunschvicg and Bachelard, teacher and pupil.25 Since these authors are not very well known in the English-speaking world, that is to say, in the history and philosophy of science inspired by the analytical tradition, it is worth mentioning here some of their most important insights. Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944) is one of the lesser known names of the French tradition, although his contributions provide essential clues to the understanding of the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. Strongly influenced by Meyerson’s thought, Brunschvicg embraces the rejection of the Kantian noumenon. His first move is to get rid of the thing in itself, based on the idea that any knowledge of something that persists beyond our representation is nonsense. In short, everything that by definition is unaccessible and undeterminable is the same as nothing. Through a typically Kantian move, Brunschvicg applies this perspective to the realm of scientific knowledge and the judgments pronounced by the subjectivity in relation to the production of knowledge. What is at stake is a qualitative taxonomy of the different types of judgments and of their consequences on the several modes of knowledge based on the unity they are able to generate.26 The key point lies here in the unity ensuing from the internal connections between ideas and the alleged exteriority of sensations. Nuances are determined by the very composition of judgments and especially by their linguistic conditions. Brunschvicg emphasizes the categorial configuration of enunciations in relation to the material provided by the senses. Like Meyerson pointed to the dialectical resistance to representation of the world, for Brunschvicg, the shocks of reality – “le choc est, par essence, caractéristique de la réalité”27 – are what triggers some sort of exceptional state of representation which brings about a change in our conceptual system. Furthermore, like it was the case for Meyerson, these shocks of reality entail a non-conceptual core which needs to be accepted by the mind without understanding it and, to an extent, without questioning it. Around this limit, an ontological match is produced, inasmuch as cognitive judgments are able to confirm mere existence without being able to penetrate the constitution of the objects of experience. As a result, reality is given to consciousness as exteriority and as world. Based on this specific and restricted positivity, the history of knowledge can start as exploration of the limits of the faculty of judgment. Applied to the history of science, this means to investigate the representational transformations of the objects as much as the historicity of these very objects. In other words, to the positivity of the world showed by the

 For the drafting of these remarks, I rely on Gary Gutting’s work, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science”, in: Thomas Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 44–64. 26  Léon Brunschvicg, La modalité du jugement [1897], Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1964 27  Ibid, chapitre IV, Les modalités de la copule dans les jugements d’ordre théorique, II - Le ‘Cela est’, ibid., pp. 115 ff. Further on he adds: “le jugement a pour base une sorte de choc, une limite à l’esprit qui contraint l’esprit […]”. 25

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r­epresentational anomalies, one must add the positivity of consciousness betrayed by the historical failures recorded by the history of science. Brunschvicg stands, therefore, among those, like Dilthey, who aimed at converting the Kantian critique of pure reason into a critique of historical reason. His historicization of the epistemology of judgment and his metaphysics of the mundus absconditus provide him with the basic heuristic tools applied in his monumental historical investigations: Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (1912) and L’expèrience humaine et la causalité physique (1922). The former outlines the history of mathematical thinking from the Egyptian world and Ancient Greece up to the modern theories of logical foundations from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.28 In this essay, Brunschvicg aims to show that mathematics adds up within the millennial human efforts to understand the world, in relation to the creativity of the mind and the quest for sense. Not in vain several thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant have taken mathematics seriously into account as soon as they had to define their philosophical stance, ultimately expecting to achieve a rigorous formulation based on the result of hard science. This was meant to allow the outlining of an ultimate vision of the world articulated by a philosophical system that can be perfected within a limited amount of time. In this regard, mathematics seemed to provide the possibility to get emancipated from both the temporality and the provisional character of our systems of representation. The downside of such epistemological optimism lies instead in the need to revise the old mathematical systems and introduce new ideas to react to the unexpected shocks of reality. The ultimate result of this historical appeal to the evolution of the mathematical statements lies in that the full representation of the world is never seen as concluded and all systematizing effort is revealed as soon or later crumbling apart. In L’expèrience humaine et la causalité physique (1922), Brunschvicg deals with the abovementioned problem by means of the historical scrutiny of the scientific and philosophical theories of causality.29 He notably claims that the philosophical problem of causality has remained open, despite the variety of contributions, such as that of Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, and Kant. Just like the history and philosophy of mathematics greatly contributed to the understanding of the world, also causality was assigned great epistemological importance. In particular, Brunschvicg is interested in exploring how causality has been commonly connected to the philosophy of nature and then has come to acquire empirical and experimental features. However, both the discussion about causality and the philosophy of nature have been inclined to speculation, to the postulation of principles and ideas that go beyond the real possibilities of corroboration. In this sense, Brunschvicg would reject the said dogmatic abuses in order to question scientific truths. With his Kantian frame of mind, Brunschvicg deems necessary to impose limits to these developments, given that they have frequently come in clear conflict with the

28 29

 Léon Brunschvicg, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, Alcan, Paris, 1912.  L. Brunschvicg, L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique, Alcan, Paris, 1922.

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procedures of scientific verification. Accordingly, these are seen as speculative contents which are eliminated by history and, despite their original claim to a definitive truth about the world, would turn out to be disposable. Finally, Brunschvicg would advocate a form of historically aware scientism, since, according to him, science is able to share a correct vision of reality as long as it keeps memory of its becoming. This fusion of science and history allows him to situate the present in relation to its different evolutionary stages, ultimately delivering a philosophy of history that accounts for the transformations in the epistemological interaction between people and the world. For his part, the work of Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) was deeply influenced by Poincaré, Meyerson, and, especially, Brunschvicg, who, together with Abel Rey, supervised his doctoral thesis.30 Like Brunschvicg, Bachelard believes that the history of science is the perfect place where to investigate the alterations in the understanding of the world and in the evolution of human rationality. He also shares with Brunschvicg an interest for the history of the physical-mathematical sciences, although, unlike his mentor, he insists more on the discontinuities and on the fractures which have defined these disciplines. In this regard, Bachelard aims to put together a theory of scientific development articulated on epistemological breaking points, i.e., coupure épistémologique. This redefinition of Brunschvicg’s shocks of reality appears to be linked to a theorization of scientific experience as clearly different from the everyday lived experience of the world. The notion of coupure épistémologique is applied to two different realms. On the one hand, as it assigns to the objects of the world properties and attributes that are not previously revealed by common perception, science fundamentally requires a fracture in relation to common sense and the ideas and beliefs it produces. On the other hand, the epistemological breaking point is part of the development of science and of the representations produced in it. Consequently, scientific change implies a dissolution of previous theories, which are in this respect presented as “epistemological obstacles” (“obstacle épistémologique”) opposing resistance to alteration. Newtonian physics, for instance, would have obstructed the innovative formulations of Einstein concerning gravity, space, and time. Once the obstacles have been removed, a “new scientific spirit” comes about, in this case, a new interpretation of the physical world and a new scientific methodology.31 According to Bachelard, the transformations in scientific thinking are connected to modifications in the philosophical theories of knowledge of reality. In short, the

 Bibliographical references on Bachelard are abundant. With no aim to exhaustivity, I mention here a small selection: Massimiliano Simons, Jonas Rutgeerts, Anneleen Masschelein and Paul Cortois, “Gaston Bachelard and Contemporary Philosophy”, Parrhesia 31, 2019, pp.  1–16. Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination, Routledge, London and New York, 2001. Cristina Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind. Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008. Gary Gutting, “Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science”, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2, 1987, pp. 55–71. 31  More on this point in Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, Alcan, Paris, 1934; La valeur inductive de la relativité, Vrin, Paris, 1929. 30

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epistemological breaks involve changes at an ontological and epistemological level, which from a philosophical perspective appear as true revolutions. In this way, Brunschvicg’s hermeneutical trajectory is extended: the study of the history of science is also the study of the development of new philosophical visions and the imposition of scientific innovations. Nevertheless, these breaking points prevent us from hoping that epistemology will manage to establish foundations beyond time. What’s more, it contradicts strategies, like the Kantian one, which seek eternal validity for certain categories, once it can be established that they have concrete historical origin. In the case of Kant, his categories are the contingent expression of Newtonian physics. Concerning these questions, Bachelard argues for the need of a “psychoanalysis of knowledge”,32 in order to point out to what extent common sense includes content that is obsolete, historical prejudices that rule our thinking and should be eradicated. The redefinition of the reality shocks and of the dialectical resistance in terms of breaking points and epistemological obstacles not only entails a theory of the history of science and of philosophical speculations, based on discontinuities, but it also introduces an amendment to the progressive image of scientific change. At variance with Meyerson and Brunschvicg, according to Bachelard, the becoming of science does not appear to be an essentially progressive enterprise, nor it seems to require any continuity whatsoever. This does not mean that epistemological breaks in methodology or in the category systems are incompatible with the accumulation of the achievements of previous theories, although these can be assessed as special cases. For instance, the notion of “specific heat”, developed by Joseph Black within the framework of phlogiston physics, is still taken as valid even today, like the notion of “mass” or that of “triangle”. Bachelard’s history and philosophy of science aims to establish an epistemological and metaphysical model which stands half way between realism and idealism.33 According to him, realism supports the belief “in the prolix richness of the individual sensation and in the systematic impoverishment of abstractive thought”34 and, also, warrants an onto-epistemic primacy to the objects given to sensibility as opposed to the theoretical formulations of scientific entities. He also wishes to avoid idealism and its transformation of the world in mere epiphenomenon of pure subjectivity. In between these two extremes, he places his applied rationalism, which combines the realist choice to stay faithful to a given experience, and the idealist alternative, which supports the natural activity of the mind.35 Bachelard ends up  Bachelard, La psychanalyse du feu, Gallimard, Paris, 1938.  Daniel Mcarthur, “Why Bachelard is not a Scientific Realist”, The Philosophical Forum XXXIII, 2, 2002, pp. 159–172. 34  Bachelard, La valeur inductive de la relativité, op. cit., p. 206, quoted in Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science”, op. cit., p. 51. 35  Gaston Bachelard, Le rationalisme appliqué, PUF, Paris, 1949. Bachelard’s other works in relation to the philosophy of science are as follows: Essai sur la connaissance approchée, Vrin, Paris, 1928; Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides, Vrin, Paris, 1928; La valeur inductive de la relativité, Vrin, Paris, 1929; Le pluralisme cohérent de 32 33

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advocating a form of constructivism based on scientific concepts applied to objects. In this interaction between conceptual systems and basic ontology of science is nested one of his most popular ideas: instrumentation is materialized theory, and, therefore, scientific instrumentation has a prominent function in the confirmation and subsequent interpretation of the physical world. This claim leads him to outline a peculiar demarcation of categories. Those that are scientific receive their concrete reality by means of a “technique of realization”36 which, in its turn, comes together with instrument technology in the phenomenization of the objects. Inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld, Bachelard defines this phenomenization in terms of “phenomenotechnique”.37 According to him, instruments play a very relevant role since “as instruments are improved, their scientific products will be better defined. Knowledge becomes objective in proportion to its becoming instrumental”.38 A higher degree of precision depends, then, on a higher degree of instrumentization and, consequently, of socialization. This is what Bachelard calls “educated materialism” or “technical materialism”.39 Well before the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn, Bachelard had already assessed the evolution of some disciplines among the physical sciences as a history marked by epistemic fractures.40 As soon as one tries to investigate scientific progress in relation to its psychological conditions, it becomes clear, says Bachelard, that the development of scientific knowledge must be understood in the terms of its epistemological obstacles. Whenever one investigates the cognitive conditions which makes scientific knowledge possible, one discovers that: It is at the very heart of the act of cognition that, by some kind of functional necessity, sluggishness and disturbances arise. It is in the act of cognition that we shall show causes of la chimie moderne, Vrin, Paris, 1932; L’intuition de l’instant, Stock, Paris, 1932; Les intuitions atomistiques, Boivin, Paris, 1933; Le nouvel esprit scientifique, Alcan, Paris, 1934; La dialectique de la durée, Boivin, Paris, 1936; L’expérience de l’espace dans la physique contemporaine, PUF, Paris, 1937; La psychanalyse du feu, NRF, Paris, 1938; La philosophie du non, PUF, Paris, 1940; L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, PUF, Paris, 1951; Le matérialisme rationnel, PUF, Paris, 1953; Epistémologie, PUF, Paris, 1971, texts edited by Dominique Lecourt; and L’engagement rationaliste, PUF, Paris, 1972, posthumous collection with a preface by Georges Canguilhem. 36  Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, translated by A.  Goldhammer, Beacon, Boston, 1984, pp. 13 and 16. quoted in Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science”, op. cit., p. 52. 37  A discussion of this topic can be found in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Gaston Bachelard and the Notion of ‘Phenomenotechnique’”, Perspectives on Science 13, 3, 2005, pp. 313–328. 38  Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind. A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, Translated by Mary McAllester Jones, Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2002, p. 217, emphasis in the original. 39  On further developments, see Paola Donatiello, Franceso Galofaro, and Gerardo Ienna (eds.), Il senso della tecnica. Saggi su Bachelard, Esculapio Editore, Bologna, 2017. 40  Gary Gutting, “Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy of Science?”, in G. Gutting (ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, pp.  4–12; Dominique Lecourt, L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard [1969], Vrin, Paris, 1978, p. 12.

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stagnation and even of regression; there too we shall discern causes of inertia that we shall call epistemological obstacles. Knowledge of reality is a light that always casts a shadow in some nook or cranny. It is never immediate, never complete. Revelations of reality are always recurrent. Reality is never ‘what we might believe it to be’: it is always what we ought to have thought.41

In order to produce scientific knowledge, it is necessary to pose questions, interrogations, and queries: “Nothing is self-evident. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed”.42 Bachelard believes that philosophy, the great questioner of science, must keep abreast of its time. According to Bachelard, as it was the case also for Brunschvicg, history is the first premise to the understanding of scientific knowledge development. The French philosopher, Dominique Lecourt, referred to Bachelard’s epistemological revolution as “historical epistemology”, since “the discipline which takes scientific knowledge as its object must take into account the historicity of that object. […] If epistemology is historical, the history of the sciences is necessarily epistemological”.43 Within Bachelard’s philosophy of science, epistemology and history of science go hand in hand. One should also emphasize the remarkable element of creation of concepts as an historical ability possessed, according to Bachelard, by scientific thinking and that somehow brings philosophy back to its origins. It is from this viewpoint that Bachelard’s historical epistemology and the history of science should be seen: the former as a regulated system of concepts and the latter as the object of theoretical thinking. Unlike classical philosophy and epistemology, Bachelard revived the philosophy of the origins through the emerging of the concepts of scientific knowledge, later organized and materialized in institutions, congresses, etc. He then introduced the notion of history as theoretical requirement for the work of the philosopher of science; the work of scientific thinking is then an intellectual activity whose object is the analysis of the process of production of epistemic concepts. This is also the kind of work Bachelard achieved in his contributions as early as the Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique: la propagation thermique dans les solides (1928) – dedicated to Brunschvicg – where he reviewed the formation of scientific concepts in the eighteenth century. Here he resolved to present the conceptual context and the objectives pursued by experiments and observations within the framework of a history of science, this latter being presented more as a history ruled by its needs than by its results. As Dominique Lecourt has put it, “we may assert that once it had become historical, in the sense of taking for its object the historicity of the concepts produced by scientific knowledge, epistemology ‘enveloped’ in a Spinozan manner a new concept of the history of the science and a new discipline

 G. Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, op. cit., p. 24.  Ibid., p. 25. 43  D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, op. cit., p. 25. See as well Norma Durán R. A. (ed.), Epistemología histórica e historiografía, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco, Mexico City, 2017. 41 42

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commanded by that new concept”.44 According to Bachelard, the epistemic values and the pragmatic ones complement each other so that the acquisition of scientific knowledge no longer is a purely mental activity but an activity, practice, a form of thinking with which the philosophy of science should deal:45 the object of science is to be found inside its own activity. Bachelard’s proposal, as it has been outlined so far, could be condensed around two key points. As to the first point, Bachelard believes that the best way to penetrate reason is through the historical investigation of science. First because reason cannot be accessed by means of abstract reasoning but rather through the concrete usages of reason and science is the main successful realm in these applications. Second, because Bachelard rejects the a priori ideal principles of reason, favoring instead concrete historical and scientific developments.46 As to the second point, which is the direct consequence of the first, Bachelard presents as core of his philosophy of science the shift in scientific perspective that is exemplified by the epistemic categories of “fracture”, “cuts”, “obstacles”, “usefulness”, and “acts”. All of these categories allow him to reject the continuity-based vision of science, without thereby abandoning the notion of scientific progress. He believes, indeed, that science is discontinuous but progressive.47

5  Final Remarks: Thomas S. Kuhn Meets Gaston Bachelard As previously pointed out, Kuhn made reference to Cassirer, Meyerson, and Brunschvicg,48 but never to Canguilhem, Foucault, or Bachelard. He also never mentioned any of the members of the Annales School of History. Concerning Bachelard, in particular, Gary Gutting recalls an unsuccessful meeting Kuhn once had with him.49 Apparently, Alexander Koyré convinced Kuhn to get in contact with  D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, op. cit., p. 86.   Mary Tiles, “Technology, Science, and inexact Knowledge: Bachelard’s Non-Cartesian Epistemology”, in: G. Gutting (ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science, op. cit., pp. 157–175, on 161, 164. 46  More details on this point can be found in Zenia Yébenes, “Entre filosofía e historia: tres deseos para la epistemología histórica a partir de una lectura del a priori”, in: N. Durán (ed.), Epistemología histórica e historiografía, op. cit., pp. 55–83. 47  G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 13, 14, and 21. 48  See also Thomas S. Kuhn, “The History of Science”, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Crowell Collier and Macmillan, New York, 1968, and M. Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., p. 28. 49  G.  Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science”, op. cit., pp.  44–64. See also T.  S. Kuhn, “A Discussion with Thomas S.  Kuhn, a Physicist who Became a Historian for Philosophical Purposes: A Discussion between Thomas S.  Kuhn and Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, Vasso Kindi”. Neusis, 6, 1997, pp. 145–200; Teresa Castelão-Lawless, “Kuhn’s Missed Opportunity and the Multifaceted Lives of Bachelard”, Studies in History and Philosophy of 44 45

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Bachelard. Linguistic difficulties, the reciprocal lack of acquaintance with each other’s work, the age, and cultural distance transformed this encounter in a “comedy of situation”. Kuhn was aware of Bachelard’s interest in the issue of imagination in literature. Maybe this led him to believe that he was also an expert of English literature and, therefore, that he mastered the English language. His hope to be able to speak his own language was soon shattered, and the conversation failed. Despite the missed opportunity, Kuhn took a brief interest in Bachelard’s work, although he claimed that “there were things to be discovered there that I did not discover, or did not discover in that way”.50 I agree, however, with Gary Gutting that substantial similarities subsist between the focus and problems of Kuhn’s philosophy of science and the French epistemological tradition, especially concerning the historicity of knowledge and of the systems of categories in which knowledge is situated. Granted that we owe to Kuhn the restoration of the history of science as the most important object for the philosophy of science, he clearly shares this merit with those responsible for the first “establishment” of the philosophical value of the history of science: the neo-Kantian historians of science and the French epistemological tradition, most notably Gaston Bachelard in the 1930s. While Kuhn made a record of his sympathy for Koyré, the French historiographical tradition with which the young Kuhn came into contact did not qualify as a uniform realm from which one could extract an organized set of philosophical ideas and interpretative approaches. It seems that the early Kuhn introduced the historical structure of scientific revolutions in an in-between created by Cassirer’s mathematical idealism, Meyerson’s defense of a substantialist and transhistorical ontology, and Brunschvicg’s synthesis of formalism and phenomena. Michael Friedman goes as far as to claim that the philosophical tensions of Russian and French historiography find a suitable explanation in Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolutions, especially inasmuch as it points to continuity at theoretical level and to the tendency to provide ontological interpretations instead of mathematical ones, as it was the case with Meyerson.51 The relationship between relativistic mechanics and Newtonian mechanics, for instance, was not assessed based on the continuity provided by the same physical reference nor on the alleged unity provided by their underlying mathematical structures. As a matter of fact, Kuhn, this time at variance with Meyerson, has abundantly emphasized changes precisely in the basic ontology of science and therefore has sided more with interparadigmatic differences than with identities. After all, a change of paradigm means a change of world. Science, 35, 2004, pp.  873–81; “La philosophie scientifique de Bachelard aux États-Unis: son impact et son défi pour les études de la science”, in: Jean Gayon et alii. (ed.), Bachelard dans le monde, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2000, pp. 77–94. 50  T.  S. Kuhn, “A Discussion with Thomas Kuhn”, in T.  S. Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, eds. James Conant and John Haugeland, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000, pp. 284–285. 51  M. Friedman, “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism”, op. cit., pp. 33–35.

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Kuhn’s work, finally, can be added to that somehow despoiling action of selection and revision of the great topics of the continental historiography of science: the theory-ladenness in scientific experience, the irreducibility of rationality to logic, the philosophical usages of the history of science, the epistemic and ontological historicity, and the philosophy of history applied to the development of science. In this regard, however, as Gary Gutting has pointed out, “by then the two approaches were too far apart for fruitful interaction”.52 The one was put off by the lack of analytical rigor and clarity, by the literary prose and a promiscuous interchange with Central-European philosophy; the others by formal vacuity, specialism, and the absence of humanities. Nobody was convinced by logical empiricism in its most radical versions and would rather self-confine themselves in their own jargon. The truth is that historicism was at work in the neo-Kantianism of Marburg, as much as in the French historiography, in Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, and, in our time, in the contemporary historical epistemology of sciences. The missed connections between Thomas S. Kuhn, Gaston Bachelard, and the continental historiography of science may be seen as a crucial episode in the misunderstanding and dismissing of the continental history and philosophy of science, in its becoming a non-received view. This strand however may provide some clues to further clarify not only what is indeed continental history and philosophy of science but also what this neglected tradition entails for the current historiography of science and the historical epistemology of economics.

52

 G. Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science”, op. cit., pp. 44–64 and 46.