A Sustainable World needs Transformative Science : Ontological Reflections on Contemporary Economic Science

• Modern sciences promise to deliver the means to achieve the medical and technological progress needed to overcome the crisis provoked by COVID-19, thereby resuming previously charted economic growth trajectories. However, especially in times of crises, sciences are showing their paradoxes by pointing to the fact that not only their fundamental notions and theories, but also objectified facts are rooted in the social sphere (Gretzel et al 2020, 191-192). After pointing at ontological inconsistencies of modern sciences, like the Fact-Value Antinomy (Putnam 2004), this presentation recalls that all sign-systems and languages, like mathematics, theories but also empirical facts, are aspects of the same societal world, wherefore they should not be confused as isolated entities of an illusory world of ‘scientific thinking’ (Brodbeck 2019). Following Kuhn (1962) who reminded us that scientific revolutions are driven by the social, psychological and ethical nature of sciences, it is argued that a crisis like COVID-19 shows the potential to challenge current paradigms, especially the way we think about values and facts in relation to the economic foundations of our society. Therefore, major ontological discrepancies of contemporary economic science are critically reflected. Following the science paradigm, economists relate measured and objectivized ‘things’ to the empty abstract measuring-unit money, so as they receive their price. However, this ‘calculative form of thinking’ has led to a new type of pecuniary socialization: Not only production processes, but also social acts of exchange, technological processes, and even skills and the arts, stop being social processes initiated by humans, rather become abstract elements in economic equations (Brodbeck 2019). As a consequence, the uniqueness and diversity of social acts of exchange is transformed into ‘identical’ monetary values, i.e. objectified things of nature become comparable but empty units (Brodbeck 2019, 16). However, the reference to such a misleading ontology led to the paradox that economics cannot be considered an empirically exact science exactly because humans do not behave like mechanical objects of classical physics. The presentation concludes by showing, that contemporary economic science, although represented through a system of factual statements (‘hard facts’) should be uncovered as ‘implicit ethics’ guided by the ontological assumptions of modern sciences (Brodbeck 2019; Gretzel et al 2020). As a precondition to transform economic thinking towards a critical science capable to cope with the needs of a truly sustainable world, a post-mechanist economic theory (Brodbeck 2019) which defines ‘The Economy’ as a socio-communicative network in line with SDGs is deduced in the outlook.  Brodbeck, K.-H. (2019) Die Illusion der Identität und die Krise der Wissenschaften, Working Paper, 47, 03, Cusanus Hochschule.Gretzel, U., Fuchs, M., Baggio, R., Hoepken, W., Law, R., Neidhardt, J., Pesonen, J., Zanker, M., & Xiang, Z. (2020).  e-Tourism Beyond COVID-19: A Call for Transformative Research. Information Technology & Tourism, 22, 187-203.Kuhn, Th. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1962.Putnam, H. (2004). The collapse of the fact-value dichotomy. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

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