ABSTRACT
Introduction If the most perplexing thing in the world is a lack of theory, the second most perplexing must be an abundance of it. The latter is what we witness in economics today. A broad range of schools strive for scholarly attention: neoclassical, social, feminist, institutionalist, Sraffian, Marxian, Austrian, Post Keynesian, etc. They not only differ in their answers but also in the way they frame their questions, rendering an unbiased comparison extremely difficult, if not impossible. This issue is clearly not economics specific. Whether it is quantum mechanics, international relations theory, or indeed even forest management, diversity is ubiquitous across the spectrum of the sciences. Even highly formalized sciences like logic and mathematics are divided into different schools of thought, debating fundamental issues such as the acceptability of certain kinds of inconsistencies or the existence of numbers. This strongly suggests that dissensus is not a transient matter. I consider it to be a stylized fact about scientific research and as such the related issue of pluralism becomes of key importance. I take pluralism to be an epistemic position which acknowledges the validity of different possible perspectives on reality in an active way, which means that they are not only tolerated but also taken into account when goals of knowledge (prediction, problem-solving, truth, curiosity, policy advice, funding decision, . . .) are to be achieved. Given the ubiquity of divergent views, it is indispensable to develop strategies to handle them without halting or distorting knowledge production. How to manage this multiplicity of views constitutes the basic problem at hand. Of course, discrimination among views is often best dealt with by scholars from within the respective disciplines themselves. But given its common occurrence in virtually any science, an across-the-board story remains to be told. What are the causes of pluralism? Does it result from the nature of the world or from the way we investigate that world? How should scientists manage diversity? What does pluralism mean for science policy? What can a general analysis contribute to the solution of discipline-specific problems of theory choice? I introduce a crucial but often neglected distinction between different levels at which pluralism can be situated. From this framework I address the general
question of how to manage divergence of views, a matter intricately connected to pluralism. Basically, my argument is the following. I maintain that pluralism is a desideratum at the aggregate level, but not necessarily at the individual level. We should be pluralists, but not me and neither should you. I argue that an individual scholar should take a stance, i.e. come up with an original, robust, and consistent position from which he develops and defends his results. A personal stance, biased as it can be, is the only way to obtain sufficient informative guidance for question-resolving inquiry.
