Novelty and the bounds of unknowledge in economics

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The emergence of novelty is a driving agent for economic change. New technologies, new products and services, new institutional arrangements, to mention a few examples, are the backbone of development and growth. Important though it is, the emergence of novelty is not well understood. What seems to be clear, however, is that it implies "bounds of unknowledge" (Shackle) that impose epistemological and methodological constraints on economic theorizing. In this paper, the problems will be examined, possibilities for positively theorizing about novelty will be explored, and the methodological consequences for causal explanations and the modeling of economics dynamics will be discussed. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

Abduction and economics: the contributions of Charles Peirce and Herbert Simon

“…These connections are further discussed by Witt (2009) and Shackle (1972Shackle ( [2009). Shackle, very much like Keynes and Knight, also studies the problem of durable investment in uncertainty and unobservable circumstances (Loasby, 2011).…”

“…Novelty is the transformation of existing knowledge, its reinterpretation; in some degree necessarily its denial and refutation ' (p. 26). Similarly, Witt (2009) identifies two distinct aspects of innovations and novelty, namely the generative and the interpretative. In generative operations, inputs are recombined while the interpretative operations involve the integration of the recombined inputs.…”

Evolutionary Analysis of Tax Law: A Methodological Approach

“…Stochastic uncertainty means that individuals are able to assign objective probabilities to possible states of nature. Incomplete knowledge also exists because the quantity of possible action options is not fixed at the time when the decision is made [32] [33].…”

Knowledge Dynamics, Structural Change and the Geography of Business Services

“…The cost of accessing knowledge was reduced further by its codification. This led to an increase in the volume of knowledge that were required to be managed for its economic use (von Tunzelmann, 1995; Witt, 2009) and the consequences for the division of labour, specialization and structural changes in the sectoral composition of economies. This is discussed in more length in the next section.…”

“…We briefly review the historical debate around the growth of services and then try to unpack the foundations of overused categories, such as the ‘Knowledge Economy’, and identify two main, interrelated views on growth in BS. The first view relates to the increasing importance of intermediate demand for service functions as an outcome of the knowledge‐related division of labour across sectors described earlier (see also Witt, 2009). The second is related to the role of technology – particularly ICTs – in the processes of knowledge complexification on the one hand, and knowledge standardization on the other, which have favoured demand for specialized functions.…”