Ontological wars in economics: the return of supervenience

ABSTRACTIn this article, I contest Brian Epstein’s argument (2014) against the applicability of global supervenience to relate micro and macroeconomic properties. Epstein rejects supervenience via a causal-chain relation inside the macroeconomic set in his criticism. Accordingly, the rise of the macro set is fixed by a weather event without any mediation from the realm of microeconomics. As it stands, this idea would demonstrate the autonomy of macroeconomics from microeconomics. However, as I intend to argue, in Epstein’s weather-cases scenarios, the corresponding macroeconomic sets are fixed by their micro bases that codify weather events and thereby fix the macro. This is so because the microeconomic base must include institutional facts; they are as much necessary as the facts about people’s conditions. In so doing, we re-establish bottom–top determination from the micro to the macro, rescuing the applicability of global supervenience.KEYWORDS: Supervenience; global supervenience; Kevin Hoover; Brian Epstein; ontology of economics AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Julie Zahle, Matthew Tugby, Nancy Cartwright, and Pedro Garcia Duarte for helpful feedbacks on previous versions of the manuscript. I also must thank both referees for their valuable comments.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 See McLaughlin and Bennett (Citation2021).2 Usually, the supervenience’ relata are facts or properties. The concept is not normally employed to relate representational items such as theories or their fragments. Butterfield (Citation2011) has applied the concept to relate different scales of physical theories. In this article, I take as the primary relata of supervenience sets as facts/properties. Along the exposition, these two possible relata are employed interchangeably.3 Peter Kivy (Citation1987) defends a Platonist view of musical works: they are abstract objects (universals, types, or kinds) identical to their sound structures. Their performances are particulars, tokens, or instances. The Platonist view of music is the dominant interpretation about the ontology of music, but there are other interpretations. For an overview, see Kania (Citation2017).4 In The Jazz of Physics, the physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander (Citation2016) argues that several symmetries that plays a significant role in quantum mechanics are musically represented in Coltrane’s songs.5 See, Walton (Citation1970).6 Hoover himself did not offer details about emergence. On my view, Hoover bears in mind a weak notion of emergence. Wilson (Citation2021) states two criteria for weak emergence. First, a token higher-level property H is weakly metaphysically emergent from token lower-level property L on a given occasion when (i) H and L are synchronically related and (ii) H has a non-empty proper subset of the token powers had by L. Condition (i) specifies synchronic dependence while (ii) captures a weak sense where an emergent entity E is causally autonomous, and ontologically distinctive from its base entity. This view is, according to Wilson, the proper characterisation of non-reductive physicalism, which indicates why Hoover qualifies his approach to economics as non-reductive strategy.7 Sometimes, institutions may have more pervasive roles instead of merely constraining or enabling behaviour. The constraining role is not the unique feature that institutions may have. About the potential hidden pervasive role of institutions, see Hodgson (Citation2003).8 I would like to thank to one of the referee’s for salienting the consistency between Epstein’s argument and the historical neoclassical microfounded models of 1970s.Additional informationFundingAlexandre Müller Fonseca acknowledges support from the Brazilian Research Council (CAPES, contract number 88881.128923/2016-01)Notes on contributorsAlexandre Müller FonsecaAlexandre Müller Fonseca has recently obtained his Ph.D. degree in Philosophy at Durham University (UK). He is a postdoctoral fellow researcher in economics at Insper (São Paulo, Brazil). His current research focuses on the broader areas of philosophy of economics and the philosophy of social sciences. More particularly, he is interested in various topics related to non-causal and multiple types of inter-level explanations in economics and social sciences, and the explanatory capacity of scientific models, including economics.