ABSTRACT
Suppose the following kind of representation of complexity: any entity-for example, a human subject, a social institution, a body of knowledge, a particle in space, or a word in a sentence-is understood to be the combined result, quite literally the site, of diverse effects emanating from all other entities. This notion of an entity’s existence or causation, called overdetermination, is radically different from that which informs much of human knowledge inside and outside the tradition of economics.1 It carries profound epistemological implications for the status of our claims about the world as well as ontological consequences for how we conceive of change and development in the world.
