Historical Epistemology of Ecological Economics and Styles of Economic Reasoning

In this chapter, I present a historical answer to the question of why ecological economics fails to persuade many economists, even though, as a scientific discipline, it has been growing in importance for several decades now. In order to address this problem, I rely here on the so-called historical epistemology of economics. I will then investigate seven styles of economic reasoning, some of them conflicting, and thereby point to the occurrence of communication breakdowns in economics. My main claim is that the stabilization of a biophysical style of economic reasoning, in the period that goes from Lotka’s Elements of Physical Biology (1925) to the publication of the famous report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972), was decisive for the emergence of ecological economics as a scientific discipline in the last third of the twentieth century. However, this biophysical style of reasoning is not necessarily shared by other economic disciplines. Recognizing multiple styles of economic reasoning and the features that distinguish them can finally serve to better understand the difficulties in convincing economists who do not belong to the same style of reasoning, and then try to overcome potential communication breakdowns.