•  51
    On Error: Undisciplined Thoughts on One of the Causes of Intellectual Path Dependency
    Ankara University SBF Review 66 (2): 215-233. 2011.
    Is there not any place in the history of ideas for the imperfect character of human doings (i.e. capability of error) that is repeated for so long until we lately start to think that it had long been wrong? The answer is: In the conventional histories of ideas there is almost none. The importance of the phenomenon,however, is immense. Intellectual history is full of errors. Scholarly errors are among the factors that generate intellectual pathways in which consequences of historical small events…Read more
  •  44
    The frequency of historical materialist explanations in evolutionary social sciences is very low even though historical materialism and evolutionism have great many shared aims towards explaining the long term social change. David Laibman in his Deep History (2007) picks up some of the standard questions of evolutionary social theory and aims at advancing the conception of historical materialism so as to develop a Marxist theory of history from an evolutionary point of view. The contribution of …Read more
  •  28
    How do ideas evolve? Can one speak of scientific progress when there is more than one pathway of intellectual evolution in which different ideas emerge and flow in different directions? Is the history of economic analysis a compilation of a number of intellectual pathways? This essay argues that it is possible to understand the course of history as a number of overlapping, divergent, and endlessly changing pathways. Such pathways operate in different fashions. They sometimes lead to more coheren…Read more
  •  17
    Questions such as ‘What if such small companies as Hewletts and the Varians had not been established in Santa Clara County in California?’ or ‘What if Q-type keyboards had not been invented?’ are well known among economists. The questions point at a phenomenon called path dependence: ‘small events’, the argument goes, may cause the evolution of institutions to lock in to specific paths that may produce undesirable consequences. How about applying such skeptical views in economics to human ideas …Read more
  •  16
    Scientific Misconduct and Research Ethics in Economics
    with Wible James R.
    Review of Social Economy 74 (1): 1-6. 2016.
    Considered here are matters relating to the responsible conduct of research in economics and science in the United States for the last forty years. In science there was a “late 20th century wave” of scientific misconduct and then a “millennial wave”. For economics in the former era, episodes of honest error and replication failure occurred. Recently plagiarism and data manipulation have been reported. Overall few economists seem to fabricate data, but falsification of data, replication failure, …Read more
  •  13
    This volume offers scholarly perspectives on the creative and humorous nature of the protests at Gezi Park in Turkey, 2013. The contributors argue that these protests inspired musicians, film-makers, social scientists and other creative individuals, out of a concern for the aesthetics of the protests, rather than seizure of political power.
  •  12
    Research Ethics Education in Economics
    with Selcuk I. Sirin
    Review of Social Economy 74 (1). 2016.
    In this paper, we report the findings from the data we collected from a survey in order to measure how common research ethics education in economics is. We have found out that (1) research ethics is taught in only a very few economics departments around the globe; (2) topics related to research ethics are not taught in courses on economics and ethics; and (3) the number of papers published in specialised peer-reviewed journals on economics education is only a tiny fraction of the number of paper…Read more
  •  9
    Intellectual paths and pathologies: how small events in scholarly life accidentally grow big
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 3 (1): 123-125. 2010.
  •  4
    Is economics always self-corrective? Do erroneous theorems permanently disappear from the market of economic ideas? _Intellectual Path Dependence in Economics _argues that errors in economics are not always corrected. Although economists are often critical and open-minded, unfit explanations are nonetheless able to reproduce themselves. The problem is that theorems sometimes survive the intellectual challenges in the market of economic ideas even when they are falsified or invalidated by critici…Read more
  •  1
    Errors in the history of economic analysis often remain uncorrected for long periods due to positive epistemic costs (PEC) involved in allocating time to going back over what older generations wrote. In order to demonstrate this in a case study, the economists’ practice of the “Coase Theorem” is reconsidered from a PEC point of view.