In a fight between Sugden and Cartwright, who would win?
I claim Sugden illustrates a more refined view of the function of economic sciences in knowledge generation. Through a survey of characterizations of the economic process he distinguishes the real and theoretical world (and how they may collide), with a respect for the emergent behaviors of socioeconomic systems shown by e.g. Schelling. Deductive steps are performed only in the “imaginary” or structured world, while the inductive leaps are clearly earmarked for analysis and evaluated with the robustness and credible-worlds criterion. On the other hand Cartwright presents a naïve understanding of socioeconomic/game theories especially in her comparison to physics; to search for an Aristotelian nature of things relies heavily on our unjustified attempt at finding the core mechanism of things; in realty much of physics and mathematics relies on descriptive definitions/proofs, and theories that are mathematically true without representation (“shut up and calculate”). The dichotomy of regularity and laws is especially jarring as it relies on our sense of “aesthetics” of a claim, a sense modern physical sciences often discredit—nature is often neither simple nor reducible. Sugden’s analysis better respects such complexities by providing a tighter analytic framework than such intuition.