Socio-Economic Review Advance Access originally published online on March 12, 2008
Socio-Economic Review 2008 6(3):395-426; doi:10.1093/ser/mwn006
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Transforming socio-economics with a new epistemology
1 University of Wisconsin, Office 4126 Mosse Building, 455 North Park Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
2 Vienna Institute of Social Scientific Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM), Maria Theresienstrasse 9/5, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
Correspondence: hollingsjr{at}aol.com
This paper argues that a new scientific framework (Science II) has been slowly emerging, rivaling the Descartes–Newtonian perspective (Science I) dominant for several hundred years. The Science II framework places a great deal of emphasis on evolution, dynamism, chance and/or pattern recognition. As both cause and effect of the new perspective, scholars in the physical, biological and social sciences are increasingly addressing common problems, borrowing insights from and interacting with each other. The epistemology of Science II has enormous potential for understanding problems of fundamental interest to socio-economists. The paper focuses on five useful concepts in the framework of Science II: self-organizing processes, complex networks, power-law distributions, the general binding problem and multi-level analysis.
Key Words: complex networks power-law distributions multi-level analysis interdisciplinarity epistemology inequality socio-economics