The Fox and the Henhouses: The Economics of Scientific Knowledge John B. Davis Wade Hands (1997b) provides a masterful survey of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) literature, tracing its history and mapping out its current divisions. He also links SSK to economics, both as a strat- egy employed by economic historians (for example, Mirowski 1989; Weintraub 1991), and in the form of an emerging economics of scien- tific knowledge (for example, Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986; Knorr Cetina 1991). There is no little irony in this latter development. While economic methodolgists have for years, as Hands says, drawn tools off the “shelf” of recent philosophy of science, trusting in the intellectual authority of philosophers to steer and validate their methodological rea- soning, they now come to find philosophers drawing tools off the shelf of economics for their own philosophy of science arguments (Goldman and Shaked 1991; Kitcher 1993). Adding to this, philosophers, for all their analytical acumen, appear to be largely ignorant of the host of problems associated with contemporary neoclassical economics, which they ap- parently believe offers them authority in their reasoning about the nature and processes of science (see Hands 1995, 1997a). Ina way, this reciprocal borrowing between philosophy and economics recalls one of the two criticisms made of SSK that Hands discusses: the reflexivity problem, or that SSK should also apply to those doing the sociology of science. As he explains it, reflexivity applies to any one Correspondence may be addressed to Professor John B. Davis, Department of Economics, Marquette University, Milwaukee WI 53233. Thanks go to Esther-Mirjam Sent and Andrew Pickering for helpful comments. History of Political Economy 29:4 © 1998 by Duke University Press.742 History of Political Economy 29:4 (1997) approach within SSK. Proponents of SSK take scientists’ beliefs to be socially determined. But this implies that the beliefs of SSK proponents are also socially determined. In contrast, in the case of the reciprocal bor- rowing between philosophy and economics, economic methodologists’ beliefs are socially determined to the extent that they rely on the authority of philosophers, and philosophers’ beliefs are socially determined to the extent that they rely on the authority of economists. Here the reflexivity loops a bit wider, but much the same problem obtains, if with a worrisome twist. Reflexivity is a potential obstacle to SSK, because SSK originally claimed to stand outside science in order to explain it. The radical critique inherent in SSK, that the cognitive content of science was less driven by the logic of thought than the logic of social interest, was undermined by the appearance that SSK was itself driven by social interest rather than by a new form of objective analysis. However, if economic methodolo- gists seek to evaluate economic science with philosophy tools, but get those tools from philosophers who evaluate philosophy with economic tools, then, at least for economics, a less obvious, more surreptitious re~ flexivity obtains. We might characterize this reflexivity as being of the fox-in-the-henhouse variety. The problem can be formulated somewhat more sharply in connection with the emergence of recent economics of scientific knowledge (ESK). ESK is much like SSK, but uses economics concepts rather than sociol- ogy concepts—a substitution some might see as the simple introduction of a new perspective by the addition of new tools to an expanded SSK toolkit. Rational choice, maximization, utility, self-interest, cost-benefit, supply-and-demand markets for ideas, comparative equilibrium statics, and efficiency—all neoclassical concepts—are currently the most pop- ular ESK tools of analysis. Importantly, to date they have been mostly applied in connection with the natural sciences. There is nothing, how- ever, to prevent ESK from being applied to economics itself. Indeed, its application to economics might be thought of as an important test case: if a neoclassically based ESK failed to explain economists’ production and use of neoclassical concepts, then in a Popperian spirit ESK might be questioned as a method of analysis. Unfortunately, as fans of P. Duhem and W. V. O. Quine will be quick to note, itis more likely that a neoclassi- 1. For example: “Let us suppose that scientists are investors of credibility. The result is the creation of a market. Information now has value. . . . There is a demand from investors for information. . . and there is a supply of information from other investors” (Latour and Woolgar 11979] 1986, 206).Davis / The Economics of Scientific Knowledge 743 cally based ESK will find that neoclassical concepts satisfactorily explain the production and use of those same concepts on the part of neoclas- sical economists—thus the fox-in-the-henhouse form of the reflexivity problem. Why is it, then, when SSK proponents have long debated the reflexivity problem, that ESK seems a bold and positive strategy? Hands’s history is helpful here when it distinguishes between the eco- nomics of science (ES) and ESK. In older ES, the traditional aims and content of science are left unexamined, and attention is focused on de- scribing such things as technical change and economic growth, the eco- nomic aspects of science institutions, science funding, and so on. In ESK (and SSK), the very content of scientific knowledge is interpreted in terms of social-economic factors. As Hands puts it, ESK and SSK endogenize the content of science by treating it as socially constituted and contingent, rather than as something objective and universal. ESK and SSK thus derive from Thomas Kuhn, whose work persuaded many readers of the social embeddedness of science, in the process up-ending “the Legend” that science was somehow privileged and above the so- cial fray. Yet while most philosophers have accepted Kuhn’s premise, some still hope to somehow rescue science. And what better way to do this than to show that the social determination of belief itself provides a basis for relegitimating science! Philip Kitcher adopts this strategy by modeling the social determination of belief as the economic deter- mination of belief, and then by arguing that science can be seen to be progressive—thus objective—in virtue of its being the product of a so- cially rational process: “The general problem of social epistemology, as I conceive it, is to identify the properties of epistemically well-designed social systems, that is, to specify the conditions under which a group of individuals, operating according to various rules for modifying their individual practices, succeed, through their interactions, in generating a progressive sequence of consensus practices” (Kitcher 1993, 303). As it turns out, the “well-designed social systems” Kitcher has in mind function like markets between self-interested scientists. The special at- tractiveness of a neoclassically based ESK, then, is that, in contrast to SSK (and for that matter any political economy-based ESKs), on the surface it seems to escape the reflexivity problem by characterizing sci- ence as a set of “consensus practices” evolving progressively, as if by “an invisible hand.”? But all this really does is drive reflexivity out of 2. Philip Kitcher does not actually use the expression; but see Hands 1995.744 History of Political Economy 29:4 (1997) sight, and thereby make it the more dangerous fox-in-the-henhouse sort of problem. Putting aside, however, that economics is no more privileged as a sci- ence than any other science (see Hands 1995, 1997a; Mirowski 1996), it is worth noting how relying on a neoclassical ESK also brings a fox into the natural science henhouse. Hands emphasizes that ESK goes beyond the economics of science by endogenizing the very content of science. How does this work in the case of a neoclassical ESK? Essen- tially, because neoclassical economics is a theory of market exchange, a neoclassical ESK must model scientific thought as a collection of dis- crete, transferrable commodities or as delimitable bits of information over which individuals have private property rights. There are a num- ber of reasons to think that this seriously misrepresents the nature and development of scientific thought. First, and perhaps most importantly, thought—scientific or otherwise—is not equivalent to information. Sec- ond, even information does not come in discrete, commodity-type bits with relatively well-defined boundary and identity conditions. Third, transfers of information from one individual to another typically have transformative effects on that information, whereas commodities remain basically unchanged until consumed. Fourth, transfers of information in science generally do not occur on the basis of the principle of exchange. Fifth, possession of information in science is typically not a matter of an exclusive private-property relationship between an owner and informa- tion. Sixth, consumption of information does not imply its destruction, as is normally the case with commodities. More generally, the problem with a neoclassical ESK is that since neoclassical economics restricts economics to the process of exchange between self-interested private property owners, there is little to no op- portunity to investigate social processes, economic or otherwise, not confined to exchange between self-interested private-property owners. Indeed, narrowing the concept of science in this way is precisely what gives force to this ESK’s method of endogenizing scientific thought: that it transforms the content of science so as to read it in the language of a market process. Or, as has recently been argued, this sort of ESK elides the social side of scientific production by privileging atomistic individ- uals as the agents in science (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996, 114). But is it even the case that the individuals we observe in science are the sorts of individuals neoclassical economics is all about? On the traditional view (for example, Stigler and Becker 1977), individuals in neoclassicalDavis / The Economics of Scientific Knowledge 745 economics are defined in terms of preferences said to be stable across choice episodes and property changes.’ Thus individuals operate on the world, but their identities are never affected in the process of their do- ing so. Andrew Pickering (1995), however, argues that the development of science tends to transform scientists’ identities. Nature is not a pas- sive receptacle, but rather an agent in its own right that resists human agency, causing scientists to accommodate their practices and intentions to it in often unpredictable ways. Both human and material agency, he thus argues, are temporally emergent in a process of development that continually revises science’s material-conceptual alignments. Moreover, the form of human agency is itself just as regularly reconfigured, with, for example, relatively isolated individual scientists cast forth on the “surface of emergence” on some occasions, and big laboratory science embedded in corporate-military-university networks on others. None of this should be taken to imply, of course, that science studies cannot benefit from the introduction of perspectives drawn from eco- nomics. Science operates in a social-economics context, and an SSK augmented by concepts from economics offers additional means of ex- plaining science. At the same time, the lesson we may learn from the fox-in-the-henhouses problem is that ESK can be motivated as much by an impulse to privilege one domain of science as by a desire to explain sci- ence. Pickering, who characterizes scientific culture as “an assemblage of multiple and heterogeneous elements” (Pickering 1995, x), would regard such a strategy as an illusion. It supposes that scientific culture is simply a field of knowledge that can be given representation in the discourse of one’s choosing. But scientific culture is more realistically seen as a domain of “made things”—“skills and social relations, machines and instruments, as well as scientific facts and theories” (Pickering 1995, 3)the interpretation of which invariably encounters resistances requir- ing accommodations. Only an ESK premised on such accommodation is likely to escape the problem of reflexivity. References Bares, Barry, David Bloor, and John Henry. 1996. Scientific Knowledge: A Socio- logical Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, John. 1995. Personal Identity and Standard Economic Theory. Journal of 3. For an argument that this conception fails to explain the identity of individuals as inde- pendent agents, see Davis 1995.746 History of Political Economy 29:4 (1997) Economic Methodology 2.1:35-52. Goldman, Alvin, and M. Shaked, 1991. An Economic Model of Scientific Activity and Truth Acquisition. Philosophical Studies 63:31-55. Hands, D. Wade. 1995. Social Epistemology Meets the Invisible Hand: Kitcher on the Advancement of Science. Dialogue 34 (Summer): 605-21 1997a, Caveat Emptor: Economics and Contemporary Philosophy of Sci- ence. Philosophy of Science 64:107-16. . 1997. Conjectures and Reputations: The Sociology of Scientific Knowl- edge and the History of Economic Thought. HOPE, this issue. Kitcher, Philip. 1993. The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objec- tivity without Hlusions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1991. Epistemic Cultures: Forms of Reason in Science. HOPE 23,1:105-22, Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. [1979] 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construc- tion of Scientific Facts, 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. First edition published by Beverly Hills, Calif.; Sage. Mirowski, Philip. 1989, More Heat Than Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. The Economic Consequences of Philip Kitcher. Social Epistemology 10.2:153-69 Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stigler, George, and Gary Becker. 1977. De gustibus non est disputandum. American Economic Review 67:76-90. Weintraub, E. Roy. 1991, Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Copyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing