Structured Pluralism

Abstract

Methodological pluralism, understood as the advocacy of plurality, has become commonplace among methodologists. Indeed, Salanti (1997, p. 7) went so far as to state in his introduction to the pluralism conference volume that ‘all people interested in economic methodology seem to be, in a broad sense, ready to endorse one kind or another of “pluralism”’. More recently, the plurality and pluralism of modern methodological thought is set out in Hands’s (2001) account of what he calls the ‘new economic methodology’. Indeed, the idea of pluralism has been taken up more widely, not only within economic methodology, but also within economic practice itself. There is now a grouping of around 40 international organisations in ICAPE, the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics. At the theoretical and policy levels too, there has been an explicit expression of pluralism.

The argument developed in this volume is both that it is useful to understand economics in terms of the different methodologies employed by different schools of thought and that this diversity allows much better scope for contemplating new economic thinking. But much of the discussion of pluralism, curiously, has discouraged thinking in terms of schools of thought, due in part to a tendency to apply categories in a dualistic way. This chapter aims to reinforce the non-dualistic understanding of pluralism and the usefulness of thinking in terms of schools of thought and indeed of (permeable, evolving) categorisations in general as a guide to thought. These categorisations provide pluralism with the kind of structure which makes it workable.