Towards a Transdisciplinary Ecological Economics: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

Postmodern cognitive sciences have identified many historical examples of social downfalls, or even the collapse of entire civilizations, and there has been one common cause: a crisis of perception. A crisis of perception has its origin in a cognitive disconnection of one specific culture with the socio-environmental context from which it arose. Partially this disconnection is possible due to the characteristics of the nervous system, as a system with organizational closure, and consequently the nature of language, as an autonomous cognitive process, developed and performed by human beings. It is the language that gives “sense” to our process of living, but it confuses us too, as ideas are never concrete realities. The cultural context defines “meanings”, bringing this way forth to worldviews that define social coexistence, specific understandings that define disciplines and specific values that define what is valuable. However, language as a behavioral process taking place in human beings, is not about a “universal truth” but a “human truth” that emerges in the process of human living, and consequently it is determined by the human experience. In short, under this prospect, we humans cannot refer to a non-human reality, as we are only capable to perceive and think the reality that our cognitive system is structurally able to perform. Therefore, a so-called “objective” knowing is simply not possible, which in turn leaves a set of strong implications regarding any discipline, including economics. Disciplines are networks of conversations that coordinate themselves setting linguistic (and symbolic) boundaries to the “outside” in the course of internal interactions among the members of each discipline. In this manner, every discipline develops a way to understand (a “disciplinary story”) that sets the framework of rationality within, together with an internal “specialized” technical language. Both the disciplinary understanding and language are not objective realities, but ever-changing cultural phenomena determined by the nature of social phenomena as linguistic processes, even in the so-called “hard” or “natural” sciences. As any disciplinary knowledge, economic thinking has been developed under a certain set of foundational concepts that are implicitly believed. Beliefs arise in the interplay of the different human domains of existence, such as experiences (evidences), cultural background, preferences and the internal drift that the collectivity of a discipline have performed. Disciplinary (scientific) knowledge is never only about facts or truths but involves all the aspects of human living. Neoclassical economics have received critics from the scientific world since decades. Therefore, it is extremely interesting to study the existing incoherencies between neoclassical economics and other scientific disciplines, like natural sciences, in order to discover what set of beliefs are guiding current mainstream economics, and why such incoherencies have been kept for so long.

an extractive economy is a terminal economy.

Thomas Berry