Reflexivity, Moral-Scientific Entanglement, and the Normative Commitments of Neoclassical Economics

This thesis defends and extends Beinhocker and Bednar’s construction of the ontological stack as a conceptual tool for describing economic paradigms. The defense consists of a mechanistic reconstruction of the reflexive dynamics they invoke but do not develop in detail. Drawing on coarse-graining and effective downward causation from complexity science, I argue that reflexivity in economics is a causal process by which theories about the economy enter the internal models of the agents that those theories describe. Once a paradigm achieves dominance, its coarse-graining shapes the epistemic reality within which agents perceive their economic environment and tune their behavior. The extension introduces a deeper component to the stack, philosophical anthropology, which specifies the kind of being the economic agent is and from which the paradigm's evaluative vocabulary derives its content. Together, these contributions support the entanglement interpretation against Friedman's (1953) value-neutrality argument: because reflexivity collapses the observer-subject separation that Friedman's instrumentalism presupposes, the normative content embedded in the construction of economic theories cannot be set aside to be stripped away during validation, and is instead causally operative in the economy itself. What follows is a normative implication about the obligation the discipline faces. Coarse-graining inevitably emphasizes some dimensions of human life and discounts others, and once a paradigm achieves dominance, those choices reshape what agents perceive and attend to. Visibility, the obligation to make these coarse-graining choices explicit, and defensibility, the obligation to justify them on substantive normative grounds, follow from this diagnosis. Applying the framework to the neoclassical paradigm, I show that its normative commitments cohere around the specification of the agent's telos as the satisfaction of desires, and that the twentieth-century purification project concealed rather than defended these commitments while reflexive mechanisms made them causally operative in the economy.