Rev Austrian Econ (2011) 24:43–55

DOI 10.1007/s11138-010-0119-z

Against representative agent methodology

Roger Koppl

Published online: 9 July 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract Garnett and Boettke both seek to identify the appropriate behavior for the
representative scientist. The social structure of science is better represented,
however, with a heterogeneous agent model. Social epistemology and epistemolog-
ical naturalism provide context for the argument against representative agent
methodology. Asking whether individual scientists should “commit themselves to
an approach and pursue it doggedly” or make “a professional commitment to
intellectual tolerance, openness, and broad-mindedness” is like asking whether it is
better to be a bouncer or a bookkeeper. The question depends on particulars that vary
from person to person. Down with representative agent methodology. Up with
diversity.

Keywords Peter Boettke . Robert Garnett . Methodology . Social epistemology .

Epistemological naturalism . Experimental epistemology . Psychologism . Apriorism

JEL codes B41 . B53 . C90 . C92 . D8

1 Down with representative-agent methodology

Garnett criticizes Boettke’s “licentious pluralism” and proposes a more pious

version. Garnett says his pluralism is like the ethics of Adam Smith, whereas
Boettke’s pluralism is like Mandaville’s amoralism. Both scholars err by practicing
representative agent methodology. My objections to representative agent methodol-
ogy are based on social epistemology and epistemological naturalism, which have
been enjoying increasing popularity in Anglo-American philosophy.

I thank Maria Minniti for helpful discussions. I thank David Colander, Lester Embree, and Thomas
McQuade for comments. None of these helpful people is to blame for any errors in my paper.
R. Koppl (*)
Institute for Forensic Science Administration, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison,
NJ 07940, USA
e-mail: koppl@fdu.edu
44 R. Koppl

Boettke and Garnett both place their methodology in the context of writers such
as Polanyi (1969) and Thomas Kuhn (1970), who emphasize the social dimension of
science. Science is a social process and the dispute between our two authors should
be understood within that context. And yet each of them seems to invoke a model of
science that radically simplifies its social structure.
Boettke (2007) distinguishes only two types of agents, the “caretakers of the
institutional framework of the republic of science” and the individual scientist,
whom he encourages to be “doggedly committed.” Garnett has a slightly more
complicated model in which he distinguishes a third type of agent, “disciplinary and
school-of-thought leaders.” Boettke thinks pluralism should be an explicit concern of
the caretakers of the institutional order, but not individual scientists. Garnett thinks
disciplinary and school-of-thought leaders should also be concerned with pluralism.
Garnett thinks it best if “all scholars participate in the constitutional process of
defining and enacting the epistemic rules of the game.” Disciplinary and school-of-
thought leaders have a special responsibility, however, because they have power.
In the models of Boettke and Garnett, scholars differ only in their opinions and
which of a small number of roles they might play in the system (two for Boettke,
three for Garnett). There is no cognitive or epistemic diversity and no explicit
attention to comparative advantage. There is very little attention paid to the
“intellectual division of labor” (von Mises 1935, p. 102) in science and none to the
intellectual division of labor that exists within schools of thought. This relatively thin
picture of the social structure of science that has led both Garnett and Boettke to ask
how “individual scholars must think or act.” In other words, they both ask how the
representative scholar should behave.
My criticism of Boettke and Garnett echoes the criticism D’Agostino (2009)
makes of Kitcher (1990) and of his own earlier work. Kitcher’s influential paper,
“The Division of Cognitive Labor,” made several points that seem to harmonize
more with Boettke than Garnett. He notes that truth-seeking scholars might all bet on
the same theoretical horse, generating collectively suboptimal portfolio of active
research programs. There is a gap between individual and collective rationality. He
notes the more vain and venal scientists might find it in their interest to bet on a long
shot they do not quite believe in because priority of discovery would bring fame or
fortune. “The very factors that are frequently thought of as interfering with the
rational pursuit of science—the thirst for fame and fortune, for example—might
actually play a constructive role in our community of epistemic projects” (Kitcher
1990, p. 16). For Kitcher, private vices lead to publick virtues. “[S]ocial institutions
within science might take advantage of our personal foibles to channel our efforts
toward community goals rather than toward the epistemic ends that we might set for
ourselves as individuals” (p. 16).
Kitcher even seems to anticipate Garnett’s concerns about the power of
disciplinary and school-of-thought leaders. If everyone is working on the more
probable of two theories, for example, then it may well be that no individual scientist
(whether piously truth seeking or hot for fame and fortune) has an incentive to work
alone on the less probable theory. The problem is that the chance of a breakthrough
depends on the number of persons working on a theory. Thus, the lone maverick
may have too small a chance of reaching a breakthrough. In this situation, Kitcher
says, powerful leaders may be able to get “several people to jump ship together”
Against representative agent methodology 45

(p. 17). He is thinking of laboratories and not schools of thought, but that difference
does not seem to affect the underlying logic of the case. As if to purge any doubt that
Kitcher is identifying a benefit of epistemic power, he compares labs to medieval
fiefdoms. “Imagine,” he says, “that the community is divided into fiefdoms
(laboratories) and that, when the local chief (the lab director) decides to switch,
the local peasantry (the graduate students) move, too.” This forced march produces
an epistemic benefit for the community by diversifying its portfolio of active
theories. Kitcher draws the moral that “a certain amount of local autocracy...can
enable the community to be more flexible than it otherwise would be” (p. 17).
Kitcher clearly sides with Boettke when he says, “Perseverance, personal
investment, personal and national loyalties, and devotion to political causes may,
on occasion, help” to bring the number of rival theories or methods up toward the
collectively rational level (p. 18).
D’Agostino criticized Kitcher, complaining, “Kitcher never really dealt with a
proper division of labor, in the sense of Adam Smith or Karl Marx” (2009, p. 103).
He forthrightly confesses, “Neither did I in earlier work. . . . What none of us did
was consider whether, for example, a project of enquiry might be subdivided into
different tasks that could then be distributed across different individuals or teams
within the community” (103, emphasis in original). The contributions of Kitcher and
D’Agostino come out of two related trends in Anglo-American philosophy, the trend
to social epistemology and the trend to epistemological naturalism.

2 Social epistemology and epistemological naturalism

Traditional analytical epistemology was individualistic and anti-naturalist. Both

aspects of traditional epistemology have been challenged in the past several decades.
Kuhn (1970; first published in 1962) challenged individualistic philosophy of
science. After Kuhn, epistemologists and philosophers of science have given increasing
attention to the social dimension of inquiry, giving rise to “social epistemology.” Quine
(1969) defended naturalism. After Quine, epistemological naturalism has been gaining
ground. Before Quine, Goldman (1967) defended a causal theory of knowledge,
though without using the word “naturalism.” As we shall see, Kitcher 1992 traces the
revival of naturalism to Gettier (1963) rather than Quine or Goldman. Gettier may
have cleared the way, but he did not articulate an explicitly naturalist position. I will
discuss social epistemology and epistemological naturalism in that order.
Social epistemology contrasts with individualistic epistemology. Goldman
(2009a) traces the individualistic tradition in epistemology to Descartes. With
“scattered exceptions,” according to Goldman, “the history of epistemology, down to
our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair.” As Goldman has noted,
Karl Mannheim (1985; first published in 1936) and Robert Merton (1957; first
published in 1937) challenged individualistic epistemology with sociological
theories of science. Mannheim, “extended Marx's theory of ideology into a
sociology of knowledge” (Goldman 2009a). Merton looked to the social structure
of science and declared the “quest for distinctive motives” of scientists to be
“misdirected” (1957, p. 559). Mainstream philosophy did not begin to absorb the
important insight that science is social process until the work of Kuhn, however.
46 R. Koppl

After Kuhn, social epistemology has gained ground and philosophers of science
have generally recognized the importance of social structure in science.

Goldman (1978) articulates a vision of normative epistemology that

would comprehend social as well as individual dimensions of cognition. It
would concern itself with interpersonal and institutional processes that affect
the creation, transmission, and reception of information, misinformation, and
partial information. Like the sociology of knowledge, it would study not only
organized science, but situational and institutional forces that affect the social
dissemination or inhibition of knowledge (Goldman 1978, n. 1 pp. 509-510).
Thus conceived, social epistemology studies social processes viewed from the
perspective of their tendency to help or frustrate the production of true judgments.
Goldman (1999) developed this vision of social epistemology in detail.
Goldman has used the term “epistemics” (Goldman 1978) for what he now refers
to as “social epistemology.” Goldman uses the qualifier “veritistic” to emphasize the
conservative element in veritistic social epistemology, whereby some claims to truth
are better than others. Kitcher (1994) has a similar view. He favors a “minimal social
epistemology” (Kitcher 1994, p. 113) that would be “the study of the organization of
cognitive labor” (p. 114, emphasis in original). More radical versions of social
epistemology take a more neutral stance on truth. Bloor (1976) emphasizes the
methodological norm of “symmetry,” whereby the sociologist of science does not
appeal to “truth” to help explain why one scientific theory prevails over another.
The sociology of knowledge has become a part of social epistemology. Goldman
(2009a) divides social epistemology into two groups, “classical” and “anti-classical”.
We might call the classical tradition “conservative” because it is “veritistic.” Leading
examples include Goldman (1978, 1999, 2009a), Kitcher (1992), and Merton (1957).
We might call the anti-classical tradition “radical” because, in Goldman’s words, its
practitioners “reject or ignore such classical concerns of epistemology as truth,
justification, and rationality” (Goldman 2009a). Leading examples include Bloor
(1976), Fuller (1988), Latour (1987), and Latour and Woolgar (1979). The classical
and radical traditions are both particularly interested in science. The classical
tradition is conservative and normative. The radical tradition subverts the epistemic
authority of science. In this sense, it is subversive.
The sociology of knowledge of Berger and Luckmann (1966) is not quite in either
of these two main traditions of social epistemology. Berger and Luckmann are more
interested in everyday knowledge than scientific knowledge. They wish to be neither
normative nor subversive. Their scientific purpose requires them to ignore “such
classical concerns of epistemology as truth, justification, and rationality,” but they
are not subversive of science or any other epistemic authority. Berger and Luckmann
explicitly invite the reader to “put quotation marks around” the terms “knowledge”
and “reality” (p. 2). When others have used their term, “the social construction of
reality,” however, that term is often given a subversive meaning. It is often meant to
convey the subversive idea that the social world, including science, is constructed
more or less arbitrarily and, often, in the interests of the powerful. Burr (1995, p.4) is
an unambiguous example. Thus, Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge
has been somewhat inappropriately absorbed into the radical tradition.
Against representative agent methodology 47

While Berger and Luckmann are not subversive of science, there are
constructivist elements in their thought. They say at one point, for example, “the
social world was made by men—and, therefore, can be remade by them” (p. 89). We
now know what they could not know in 1966, namely, that the social world is not
“made by men” if that phrase remains unqualified. Advances in ethology and
psychology have shown us just how much of human social life is derived from our
pre-human ancestors and is, therefore, a product of Darwinian natural selection
rather than free human invention (Cosmides et al. 1992). Informed opinion in 1966
held that human sexuality, “is pliable both in the objects toward which it may be
directed and in its modalities of expression” (p. 49). Our current understandings of
homosexuality, transgendered persons, and incest all require a model that, while
more complex than certain old-fashioned models of what is “natural,” represents
human sexuality as far less pliable than we could reasonably have imagined in
earlier decades.
It may be somewhat ironic that Berger and Luckmann have been absorbed into
the radical tradition of social epistemology because their chief influence, Alfred
Schutz, was not a social constructionist or subversive of science. On the contrary,
Schutz was conservative on science (Schutz 1962, pp. 245-253). He was an explicit
follower of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy and thus an anti-
naturalist in epistemology. He says, for example, that Husserlian “phenomenology is
the matrix from which all ontological insights originate” (Schutz 1975, p. 50). He
was a laissez-faire liberal (Prendergast 1986, 2001), a follower of Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises (Schutz 1967, pp. 242-246). In a further irony,
Schutz, the chief influence on Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, had
a decidedly individualistic philosophy of science. He says, “The theorizing self is
solitary; it has no social environment; it stands outside social relationships” (Schutz
1962, p. 253).
Several economists have applied social science models and reasoning to either
science in general or the methodology of economics and other social sciences. These
include Diamond (1988, 2008), Hands (2002, originally published in 1994), Leonard
(2002), Levy and Peart (2010), McQuade and Butos (2003), Mirowski and Sent
(2002), Stigler (1976), Tullock (2005; originally published in 1966), and Wible
(1998), among many others. Although these economists all apply social science
models to science, they represent a wide variety of epistemological and
methodological views. Colander (2009) links the repudiation of representative-
agent methodology to complexity when he says, “If one accepts my complex system
view of the profession, such a composite ‘representative researcher searching for the
truth’ view of the profession’s views is incorrect” (p. 7). This statement seems to link
representative agent methodology to the assumption that researchers are truth
seekers. The philosopher Nicholas Rescher (1978) applies an economic model to the
philosophy of science.
The trend toward epistemological naturalism is related to the trend toward social
epistemology. Kitcher (1992) says epistemological naturalism was the norm in the
history of Western philosophy until Russell, Schlick, and (especially) Frege helped
to make anti-naturalism the dominant view. Kitcher sees Frege as “the emblem of a
revolution which overthrew philosophical naturalism” (p. 54). In Kitcher’s account,
Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Mill all exhibited a “willingness to draw on the
48 R. Koppl

ideas of the emerging sciences, to cull concepts from ventures in psychology and
physics, [and] later still to find inspiration in Darwin” (p. 54). Frege and others,
however, resisted what they “perceived as intrusions from psychology or biology”
(p. 54). Kitcher notes two related dimensions to the distinction between naturalist
and anti-naturalist epistemologies. First, epistemological naturalism tends to be
psychologistic in some sense. Anti-naturalists oppose psychologism. Second,
epistemological naturalism tends to be a posteriori in some sense. Anti-naturalists
“conceive of the products of philosophical reflection as a priori” (Kitcher 1992,
p. 57). I use the fuzzy words “in some sense” because psychologism and apriorism
have many different meanings. Thus, labeling a position “psychologistic” or
“aprioristic” tells us little about it until further details are brought forward.
Kusch (2009) says, “Many authors use the term ‘psychologism’ for what they
perceive as the mistake of identifying non-psychological with psychological
entities.” Thus, “psychologism” identifies an indeterminate range of supposed errors
in which something is improperly labeled “psychological.” The most salient and
historically important forms of psychologism in some way reduce logic or
mathematics to psychology. Here again, there are many forms of the supposed the
error. We can generally speak of “psychologism” when a thinker wishes to draw on
empirical psychology to in some way bolster an epistemological argument.
The term “apriorism” is used when the supposed apriorist denies that facts may
induce change in a set of regulative ideas. This seemingly straightforward statement is
subject to multiple interpretations. Kant had a rather strict test for what is prior. He said,
“Necessity and strict universality, therefore, are infallible tests for distinguishing pure
from empirical knowledge, and are inseparably connected with each other” (Kant 1934,
originally published in 1787, p. 26 [section II of “Introduction”]). Imre Lakatos (1970)
introduced the notion of the “hard core” of a “research program,” which is prior to the
research program and not subject to direct empirical test. If the research program is not
“progressive,” however, we may pitch its hard core in favor of another. It is subject,
therefore, to an indirect test. Lakatos (1976) showed that the logic of “proofs and
refutations” in mathematics is similar to the logic of conjecture and falsification in
empirical sciences. This demonstration tends to weaken the epistemic authority of a
priori reasoning. In an interview, Fritz Machlup criticized the weight his teacher
Ludwig von Mises has given to the distinction between a priori and a posteriori. “You
may call any model a priori because you can ‘build’ the model, according to your own
specifications” (Machlup 1980 p. 9). Citing the physicist Henry Margenau, Machlup
went on to explain that “Construction is always a priori, even if you construe with
some experience in mind. The domain of construction needs constructs and postulated
relationships between constructs, but it is itself not the result of observation; it is a
priori. So you don’t have to take these distinctions so seriously as Mises himself did
and as some of his followers do today” (p. 9). The distinction between a priori and a
posteriori is not always clear and distinct.
Kitcher cites passages in Frege (1980; originally published in 1884) objecting to
the view that mathematical objects are “ideas.” Frege says, “Mathematics is not
concerned with the nature of our mind, and the answer to any question whatsoever in
psychology must be for mathematics a matter of complete indifference” (1980,
p. 105). In so saying, Frege firmly rejected psychologism in mathematics. Frege
influenced Husserl by helping to turn him away from psychologism in logic and
Against representative agent methodology 49

toward a thoroughgoing anti-naturalism in epistemology. Lester Embree has alerted

me to a controversy over how decisive Frege’s influence was. Apparently, Mohanty
(1982) produces evidence that Frege’s influence on Husserl had previously been
exaggerated. Continental anti-naturalism can be found in Schutz, Mises, and
Gadamer. Anti-naturalism has expressed itself in Anglo-American philosophy
mostly as traditional analytical philosophy.
Kitcher traces the resurgence of epistemological naturalism to Edmund Gettier. In “Is
Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Gettier (1963) gives two examples of statements
that did not intuitively seem like “knowledge” to analytical philosophers even though
the statements are justified true beliefs. In the first of them, Smith is competing with
Jones for a job. Smith has good reason to believe Jones will get the job and that Jones
has ten coins in his pocket. Smith does not realize that he will get the job nor that,
coincidentally, he has ten coins in his pocket. Smith correctly believes that the person
who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket and ex hypothesi his belief is justified.
But his belief is inferred from a proposition (Jones, who has ten coins in his pocket,
will get the job) that, though justified, happens to be false. Gettier considers it “clear
that Smith does not know” the inferred proposition even though it “is true,” and
“Smith believes” that it is true, and “Smith is justified in believing that it is true”
(1963, p. 122). Gettier’s paper is a classic even though it is not quite three-pages long.
It is Gettier’s only publication so far. “In the late 1960s,” Kitcher explains, “a number
of authors proposed that a solution to Gettier’s puzzling cases must lie in differentiating
the causal processes that generate and sustain belief on those occasions where the
subject knows” (1992, p. 59). As Kitcher notes, the first of these authors was Goldman
(1967). With the turn to causal processes, the floodgates of naturalism were opened.
Wrenn (2005) lists Quine, Kuhn, and Goldman and the “key figures in naturalistic
epistemology.” Naturalists are interested in the reliability of our ways of knowing.
They are therefore interested in the mechanics of human cognition. Thus, Alvin
Goldman (1978) allies epistemology first with cognitive psychology and later with
economics and other social sciences (1999). They also allow for the possibility that
procedures we do not think of as “rational” may be more epistemically reliable than
rational processes. The “fast and frugal algorithms” of Gigerenzer et al. (1999)
provide some examples familiar to economists. Cosmides and Tooby (1994) note
that our evolved psychology can sometimes make us “better than rational.”
Experimental philosophy (“X-Phi”) is an offshoot of epistemological naturalism.
Beginning with Weinberg et al. (2001) a small group of philosophers has used
experiments with human subjects as a method of philosophy. Beebe (2010) says that
the experiments are science, whereas reflection on them is philosophy. This distinction
seems a bit strained since the “scientific” experiments were designed to allow the
“philosophical” reflections on them, and such reflections would be impossible without
the experiments. However, one wishes to parse this particular linguistic issue,
“experimental philosophy” is now about a decade old and seems to be a growing
success as measured by objective factors such as publications in top journals. The
experiments of this literature are surveys that are meant to uncover the epistemological
intuitions of naïve subjects. Experimental philosophy has shown that epistemological
intuitions differ across cultures, which puts into doubt the implicit assumptions of
modern analytical epistemology that such intuitions are uniform among all competent
persons and a reliable basis from which to derive epistemological norms.
50 R. Koppl

In the first experiment Weinberg et al. (2001) discuss, subjects are presented with
a version of the “Truetemp” hypothetical of academic philosophy originally put
forward by Lehrer (1990). A falling rock rewires Charles’ brain, causing him to have
an unerring sense of the ambient temperature. He is “unaware that his brain has been
altered in this way.” Sometime after this change Charles feels that the temperature in
his room is 71°. Experimental subjects were asked, “Does Charles really know that it
was 71° in the room, or does he only believe it?” (Weinberg et al. 2001, p. 15).
Truetemp is an important part of the epistemology literature. Presumably, “our”
intuition that Charles does not “know” that the temperature is indeed 71 casts doubt
on epistemologies that do not require the knower to know why his or her beliefs are
justified. (These are called “externalist” epistemologies.) Weinberg et al. (2001;
pp 16 and 40) report that East Asian students were much more likely to say that
Charles “only believes” the temperature is 71°. This epistemic diversity calls into question
the notion that “we” have common intuitions upon which philosophers may rely.
In the wake of the seminal article by Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich, several
philosophers have been conducting experiments in epistemology. Experimental
epistemology in the Stich tradition has begun to explore the variety of
epistemological intuitions among humans and, especially, how different cultures
correlate with different epistemological intuitions. Beebe (2010) reviews the
literature. He discusses experiments by Beebe and Buckwalter (forthcoming), Beebe
and Jensen (n.d.), Buckwalter (forthcoming), Cullen (2010), Feltz and Zarpentine
(forthcoming), Knobe (2003), May et al. (2010), Schaffer and Knobe (n.d.), and
Starmans and Friedman (n.d.). In all of these experiments, philosophers are probing
the epistemological intuitions of their subjects though questionnaires similar to that
of the original Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich study.
The experiments reviewed by Beebe are examples of epistemological naturalism.
Facts exposed in the human-subjects laboratory are inputs to the philosopher’s
epistemological reasoning. These experiments have not examined how alternative
social institutions might influence the distribution of opinion. In this sense, they are
individualistic. They form part of the tradition of epistemological naturalism, but not
of social epistemology. Koppl et al. (2008) report on experiments that bring in social
epistemology. Their experiments were designed to reproduce in the human-subjects
laboratory elements of the social structure of forensic science testing in the US and
to compare the current structure to one in which evidence is routinely subject to
independent redundant testing in separate laboratories. A sender, representing a
crime lab, examines evidence and sends a report on that evidence to a receiver, who
represents a jury. The receiver guesses what the evidence was based on the sender
report(s) he or she has received. Receivers have an incentive to guess correctly.
Senders, however, are sometimes given an incentive to send inaccurate reports. This
incentive represents bias that may exist in crime labs. Senders often give accurate
reports even when they have an incentive to send inaccurate reports. They are more
likely to send an inaccurate report, however, the stronger is their incentive to do so.
Koppl, Kurzban, & Kobilinsky compare epistemic performance of the system when
each receiver gets reports from only one sender with the performance when each
receiver gets three independent reports. The first treatment represents the current
structure of forensic science, whereby each crime lab has a monopoly on the testing
and interpretation of the forensic evidence it receives. The second treatment
Against representative agent methodology 51

represents Koppl’s (2005) proposal for multiple, independent, forensic examinations

by separate crime labs. Receiver guesses are more accurate in the three-sender
condition even when such redundancy degrades the performance of individual
senders. This experimental result suggests the epistemic benefit of redundancy.
Goldman (2009a) calls the experiments just described “a fine example of a field
that Koppl calls ‘epistemic systems design,’ where we study the impact of
institutional system design on matters of veracity.” Goldman (2009b) notes that
the requirement of independence of labs implies a kind of enforced ignorance
serving the end of improved epistemic performance for the system. He says, “this
ignorance is a means to achieve an ultimate state of accurate judgment on the part of
the fact-finder (the jury). So we cannot say that our interest in the laboratories’ being
ignorant of one another’s reports is not of social epistemological interest, because we
certainly want to regard the forensic laboratory case as a specimen problem for
social epistemology” (Goldman 2009b, emphasis in original). Goldman (2009c)
discusses Koppl et al. (2008) in the context of the problem of experts.
Experimental epistemology seems to have drawn the attention of epistemologists
to cognitive and epistemic diversity. Cognitive and epistemic diversity are important
to the epistemology of one of the authors of Weinberg et al. (2001), namely, Stephen
Stich (Bishop, forthcoming). Cognitive diversity exists if “[t]here are significant and
systematic differences in how different people reason about the world” (Bishop,
forthcoming, p. 2). Epistemic diversity exists if “[t]here are significant and
systematic differences in the epistemic concepts, judgments and practices different
people employ in evaluating cognition” (Bishop, forthcoming, p. 2).
Lütge (1999) reviews the “economic approach to epistemology” as “part of the
project of naturalizing epistemology and philosophy of science.” He advises
naturalizing epistemologists to respond to criticisms of the economic approach to
epistemology by substituting “the Buchanan research program” for “the traditional
neoclassical approach to economics” (p. 17).
Outside of social epistemology and epistemological naturalism there is a vast literature
in the intersection between social science and philosophy. Economists and game theorists
have given attention to issues in, or touching on, epistemology and the philosophy of
science. Salient examples include Akerlof (1970), Aumann (1976), Bikhchandani et al.
(1992); Brock and Durlauf (1999), David (2002), Fudenberg and Kreps (1988),
Milgrom and Roberts (1986), and Winden (1999). Cognitive and social psychology
also addresses many of the issues relevant to the theme of science as a social process.
The famous conformity study of Solomon Asch (1951) showed that most people will
(in certain laboratory setting, at least) adjust their opinions away from the obvious truth
in order to conform to majority opinion. Rosenthal (1966) has encouraged the spread of
blinding procedures in science by showing that “observer effects” are ubiquitous and
important. He urges researchers to “keep the processes of data collection and analysis
as blind as possible for as long as possible” (Rosenthal 1978, p. 1007).

3 Up with diversity

Recall that D’Agostino (2009) criticized Kitcher (1990) for failing to take the
division of cognitive labor seriously. This criticism comes in the context of social
52 R. Koppl

epistemology and epistemological naturalism. D’Agostino considers collective

problem solving in complex environments. He draws on works in complexity
theory, economics, and management including Ethiraj and Levinthal (2004), Loasby
(1976), Marengo and Dosi (2005), and Simon (1969). He shows that it is difficult to
design a division of cognitive labor for the efficient search of the space of possible
theories and methods. Because of epistatic interactions, the problem space is not
decomposable. No modularization of the problem space is satisfactory. In other
words, it is hard to plan scientific progress. Laissez-faire is the only “solution” to the
central planner’s problem of designing a division of cognitive labor. “We need, in
other words, a liberal solution to the design problem in complex environments. Each
team will construct and traverse that region of the space which they find interesting”
(D’Agostino 2009, p. 124). Diversity is a central implication of D’Agostino’s
analysis. He says, “We need both division [of cognitive labor] and diversity to pursue
enquiry in complex situations” (p. 120, emphasis in original). D’Agostino supports
diversity of research strategies. We should also recognize the epistemic and cognitive
diversity that experimental philosophers are beginning to explore.
If the problem space of science is complex and not decomposable, then we can,
will, and should have diversity in science. We can, will, and should have diversity of
theories, methods, and research strategies. We can, will, and should have cognitive
and epistemic diversity too. The necessity and inevitability of diversity in science
implies that representative-agent methodology radically simplifies. It has led Boettke
and Garnett into a mistaken dispute over whether it is better for scientists to be
doggedly determined or intellectually tolerant. We might as well as whether it is
better to be a bouncer or a bookkeeper. The question depends on particulars that vary
from person to person.

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