ABSTRACT

An intuitively appealing argument for pluralism in economics can be made on the grounds that schools of economic thought complement one another. Let us call this the complementarity-based argument for pluralism (CAP). The concepts of complementarity, pluralism, and school of thought are scrutinized in this paper to evaluate this argument. I argue that the complementarity of schools is relative to scientific goals, which implies that discussing complementarity of schools of economic thought requires discussing the goals of economic research. I also distinguish weak from strong complementarity and show that some alleged complementarity relations between schools are weak and thus provide little support for CAP. However, if strong complementarity relations, relative to a valuable goal, can be demonstrated to exist between specific schools, this is a strong reason for pluralism about those schools. Finally, I provide suggestions on how to distinguish strong from weak complementarity.

摘要

基于经济思想流派相互补充的理由，可以对经济学中的多元化提出一种直觉上有吸引力的论点。让我们称之为多元主义的基于互补性的论点（帽）。本文仔细研究了互补性、多元主义和学派的概念来评估这一论点。我认为流派的互补性是相对于科学目标而言的，这意味着讨论经济思想流派的互补性需要讨论经济研究的目标。我还区分了弱互补和强互补，并表明学校之间一些所谓的互补关系很弱，因此对 CAP 的支持很少。但是，如果可以证明特定学校之间存在相对于有价值的目标而言的强互补关系，那么这就是这些学校多元化的重要原因。最后，我提供了关于如何区分强互补性和弱互补性的建议。