Pluralism in economics and the question of ontological pluralism

ABSTRACT

Within the heterodox economic literature on pluralism, attention has predominately focussed on epistemic and methodological levels. The response to the question of what ontological pluralism could mean, and its contribution to the debate, remains limited. This paper argues for greater attention to be given to ontological pluralism, not only because it enriches the existing discussions around pluralism in the heterodox literature but it also provides support for a plurality of epistemological standards and methodological approaches. The paper proposes an alternative definition of ontological pluralism based on the work of McDaniel and Turner. Both argue that ontological pluralism should be understood as saying that there are different ways to exist and that acceptance of the semantic characteristics of ontological questions and statements within different ontological discourses are essential in a proper definition. This paper details their definition and explores its consequences with an analysis of the Searle–Lawson dispute on social objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Pluralism
• ontology
• semantics
• epistemology

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• B50
• B59

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript, as well as Dr Anna Gilliland for proofreading. Special thanks go to Dr Saima Rajasingam and Dr Lewis Walsh for supporting and motivating me to write this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the case of the UK, groups such as the Post-Crash Economic Society at Manchester University, the Cambridge Society of Economic Pluralism, and the Post-Crash Economics Group at the London School of Economics received some media coverage in a few notable media outlets (see Inman, 2013a, 2013b). Globally active groups, such as Rethinking Economics and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are also becoming more and more prominent.

2 I wish to stress here the limitation around the specificity of definitions. There may be authors that use one of these conceptions implicitly without outlining their ontological commitments.

3 I conceptualise epistemic pluralism as a ‘variety of shared but also framework-specific epistemic standards, which provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge’ (Meyenburg, 2018, p. 341), with framework-specificity referring to the epistemic communities (Bacevic, 2023) of heterodox schools of thoughts.

4 Turner (2010, pp. 3–4) says, to define ontological pluralism, ‘that metaphysics aims to uncover the ultimate structure of reality’ and that metaphysicians ‘want, in short, theories that are metaphysically perspicuous. My claim is that we have to use different quantifiers to talk about things in different ontological categories in order to speak in a metaphysically perspicuous way’.

5 Some contemporary critical realists, for instance Fleetwood (2005), seem to follow the former conceptualisation. He distinguishes four fundamental modes of being, i.e. ‘material, ideal, artefactual, and social’ (Fleetwood, 2005, p. 198).

6 I differentiate here between ‘natural languages’, which refers to how we speak in everyday life, and ‘philosophical’ or ‘formal languages’, which refers to our attempts to be metaphysically as perspicuous as we can (Turner, 2010).

7 As we can see from this, modes of existence refer to discursive fields rather than classical interpretations, such as Heidegger’s (2010) differentiation between substance, utility and existence, or Weiss’ (1958) actuality, ideality, existence, or God. In fact, we are more reminded of the early stance of Wittgenstein (2012); we must grant holes existence in order to be able to speak about them, to attribute properties, put them into relations and so on.

8 The thesis that existence is to be understood in terms of quantification was first proposed by Frege (1980a, 1980b) and also finds support in Russell (1905) (see also, Soames, 2014).

9 Normally, the formal notation is ∃. McDaniel (2010a) admits that ontological pluralism can be formulated without the need for the unrestricted quantifier. There is also some debate over whether it actually exists (Uzquiano, 2014). See McDaniel (2009) for a detailed argument.

10 Formally ∃x F(x).

11 Formally notated with ∀ and the respected existential formula being ∀x F(x).

12 Hall (2010, para 10) refers to Lewis’ (1983) New Work for a Theory of Universals as a major contribution to categorising properties of entities with the help of degrees of naturalness and summarises the underlying proposal as in the following: ‘Property F counts as more natural than property G just in case some predicate expressing F can be defined, in terms of predicates expressing perfectly natural properties, more simply than can any predicate expressing G’. However, Hall (2010) remains sceptical whether this proposal generally succeeds, which in turn means that ontological pluralism might need to be formulated without degrees of naturalness. Yet, the question remains of what a suitable substitute could be.

13 Formally notated as ${\mathrm{\exists }}_b\mathrm{\Phi }=\mathrm{df}.\mathrm{\exists \Phi }\wedge \sim ({\mathrm{\exists }}_c\mathrm{\Phi }\vee {\mathrm{\exists }}_a\mathrm{\Phi })$ with ${\mathrm{\exists }}_b$ being the new restricted quantifier, $\mathrm{\exists }$ being the unrestricted quantifier, and ${\mathrm{\exists }}_c$ and ${\mathrm{\exists }}_a$ being the restricted quantifier for concrete and abstract entities respectively as examples for two other commonly used restricted quantifier (McDaniel, 2010a).

14 For a comprehensive defence of ontological pluralism against a number of criticisms, e.g. that ontological pluralism and monism are merely notational variations of each other, or that restricted quantifiers are metaphysically misleading and the use of the unrestricted quantifier is to be preferred, see Turner (2012) for more detail.

15 It is still debated whether the distinction between relativistic mass and rest mass actually makes sense; there are arguments that relativistic mass is a misconception of Einstein's work and that there is only proper mass (see, for instance, Okuň, 2009).

Remembering that $\mathrm{\exists }$ is a semantic quantifier iff $\mathrm{\exists }xF(x)$ with the indeterminacy the pluralist can now say that a semantic ‘quantifier₁, $\mathrm{\exists }$ is an s-(un)restriction₁ of another, ${\mathrm{\exists }}^{\mathrm{\prime }}$, if everything₁ ranged over by ${\mathrm{\exists }}^{\mathrm{\prime }}$ is ranged over by $\mathrm{\exists }$ but not vice versa, and similarly for s-(un)restriction₂’ (Turner, 2010, p. 20), then (i) can be divided into

(i-S1)	'${\mathrm{\exists }}_1$ and ${\mathrm{\exists }}_2$' are semantic restrictions1 of '${\mathrm{\exists }}^{\ast }$'
(i-S2)	'${\mathrm{\exists }}_1$ and ${\mathrm{\exists }}_2$' are semantic restrictions2 of '${\mathrm{\exists }}^{\ast }$'

This means that an expression is an existential quantifier₁ if, as stated above, the semantic function satisfies the postfixed formula with 'there is₁'.

16 In addition, Searle seems to have developed a clearer conception of collective intentionality in his work, which finds its application in combination with game theory in, for instance, Martins (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Imko Meyenburg

Imko Meyenburg is Senior Lecturer in Economics and International Business in the School of Economics, Finance and Law at the Faculty of Business and Law, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on the linguistics of social ontology, ethics, the ontology and the philosophy of economics, and political economy. His current work looks at the meaning and ontology of populism in political discourses in the UK.