Tony Lawson

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Tony Lawson
Philosophy of economics, ontology, ethics, gender
Notable ideas
Social positioning theory, critical ethical naturalism, contrast explanation
WebsiteHomepage at University of Cambridge

Tony Lawson is a British

Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.[1] He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics,[2] a former director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and co-founder of the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group.[3] Lawson is noted for his contributions to heterodox economics and to philosophical issues in social theorising, most especially to social ontology.[4]

Work

Economics

Lawson's early contributions were on philosophical topics such as uncertainty, knowledge and prediction as well as on substantive analyses of the

mathematical modelling in economics fails to provide insight, he reasons, is simply because such methods are quite inappropriate, given the nature of social material.[14][15] Lawson develops dialectical methods that he systematises as contrast explanation. More basically Lawson advocates pluralism in method for modern economics.[4][16]

Philosophy

As a result of his argument that economics should concern itself with ontology, Lawson has developed and defended his own theory of the constitution and nature of social reality.[3] The main philosophical influence for this is the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. An early influence was the work of Roy Bhaskar.[17][18][19] Indeed, in his early work, Lawson joined Bhaskar and others in referring to the account of social reality defended as "transcendental realism".[14] Since 1997, however, Lawson has developed his own conception of social ontology, largely in collaboration with the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, and refers to it as social positioning theory.

Social ontology

Lawson's conception of social ontology has been in part derived through transcendental argument.[14] He defines as social anything "whose formation/coming into existence and/or continuing existence necessarily depend at least in part upon human beings and their interactions”.[3] Lawson argues that there is a level of emergent – from human interaction – reality that is reasonably demarcated as social.[20] This comes about through processes of social morphogenesis.[21] In general, Lawson argues, “we human beings for the most part do not create social reality, but rather, on finding it given to us at each moment, each draw upon it in acting in always situated ways, pursuing our particular situated concerns, in conditions clearly not of our own making, with understandings that are always fallible and extremely partial at best, and in so doing thereby contribute, along with the simultaneous actions of all others, to the continuous reproduction and transformation of social reality in a manner that is mostly unintended and poorly understood”.[22]

The result is a world in which

social rules, social positions, powers, social relations, and artefacts.[13][15]

Ethics

Lawson defends a conception of ethics named Critical Ethical Naturalism in which the goal is a society in which we all flourish in our differences, and the mechanism ever nudging us towards it turns on the fact that the flourishing of any one of us depends on the flourishing of all and at some level we all recognise this.[23][24]

Debates

Lawson has engaged in debates with numerous contributors, including, early on, over the use of econometrics, and later, regarding the value of ontology to social theorising, including to feminist theorising. In addition, Edward Fullbrook’s Ontology and Economics: Tony Lawson and his Critics, contains a series of debates between Lawson and leading heterodox economists.[25] Recently Lawson has debated the relative advantages of competing conceptions of social ontology with several ontologists such as John Searle, Doug Porpora and Colin Wight.[22] Moreover, he has debated the nature of specific social existents, such as money, with Searle and Geoffrey Ingham.[26]

Bibliography

Books (single author)

  • Lawson, Tony (2019). The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology. London: Routledge.
    OCLC 1082243306
    .
  • Lawson, Tony (2015). Essays on the nature and state of modern economics. London: Routledge.
    OCLC 907773349
    .
  • Lawson, Tony (2003). Reorienting Economics. London: Routledge.
    OCLC 810086031
    .
  • Lawson, Tony (1997). Economics and Reality. London: Routledge.
    OCLC 225574891
    .

Selected articles

Secondary sources

References

  1. ^ Administrator (9 December 2016). "Professor Tony Lawson". www.econ.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 11 October 2017.
  2. ^ "Editorial_Board". Cambridge Journal of Economics. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 11 October 2017.
  3. ^
    OCLC 891449934
    .
  4. ^
    OCLC 227191562.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  5. JSTOR 2233256
    .
  6. JSTOR 2233082
    .
  7. ISSN 0160-3477
    .
  8. S2CID 153432601
    .
  9. ^ Lawson, Tony (2001). "The Varying Fortunes of the Project of Mathematising Economics". European Journal of Economic and Social Systems. 15: 241–268.
  10. ISSN 1354-5701
    .
  11. S2CID 9622266
    .
  12. S2CID 28097842
    .
  13. ^
    ISSN 0309-166X
    .
  14. ^
    OCLC 34545173
    .
  15. ^
    OCLC 810086031
    .
  16. OCLC 859038420
    .
  17. OCLC 4614842
    .
  18. OCLC 872522672.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  19. ISSN 0309-166X
    .
  20. OCLC 800035791.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  21. OCLC 828794257.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  22. ^
    ISSN 1468-5914
    .
  23. ISSN 0147-2011
    .
  24. ^ Lawson, Tony (1 December 2014). Critical Ethical Naturalism: An Orientation to Ethics.
  25. OCLC 227191562.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  26. ISSN 0309-166X
    .
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