Sciences As Open Systems - The Case of Economics

Abstract

Unity/disunity and specialization/unification are usually thought of in terms of opposing duals. As such, they have marked the debate about science for a number of years. In this paper it is argued that connections (and the isolative strategies we adopt) are crucial and that an understanding of sciences as theoretical open systems has the potential to break the barrier between specialization and unification. A suggestion is made to consider open systems of knowledge as the way to manage both our cognitive limits and the ultimate, ontological, interconnectedness of the world. Taking this route, it is shown that the full adoption of an open systems approach in economics will have deep implications for the way the discipline is understood and developed as well as how it relates to the other social sciences.