Altug Yalcintas

Intellectual Paths And Pathologies: How Small Events In Scholarly Life Accidentally Grow Big

How do ideas evolve actually? Often, there is more than one pathway of advancement in which different ideas emerge and flow in different directions. Does this mean that there is no advancement in intellectual history? Or, are pathways constituents of scholarship? This thesis argues that it is possible to understand the course of history as a bunch of overlapping, divergent, and endlessly changing pathways. Such pathways operate in different fashions. They sometimes lead to more coherent and higher levels of understanding. And sometimes they delay or obstruct advancement in intellectual history. In either way, outcomes are unpredictable and multi-directional.

Historical Small Events and the Eclipse of Utopia:Perspectives on Path Dependence in Human Thought

Abstract 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 and thought in general? That is to say, what if we ask such questions as: what if Greek philosophy had not been interested in ‘essences’ and ‘foundations’? What if Kant had not invented the ‘thing‐in‐itself?’ Nature and society, according to such Platonic philosophers, can be known only if it can be shown that events are governed, regulated and characterised by ‘forms’, which are immutable, complete, and perfect in their nature. But is there an ‘essence’ that makes a man 100 per cent male? Was there really a ‘foundation’ in history that caused a proletarian revolution in Russia? What if we had pushed aside the rhetoric of utopian ideality? What if we had a worldview different than the one depicted by Thomas More in his Utopia? The essay points at the possibility of such skepticism in human ideas and thought.

Intellectual Disobedience in Turkey

Yalcintas argues that the Gezi protests were a spontaneous form of activism in which individuals, dissatisfied with the established ideologies and viewpoints in the Turkish political rhetoric, occupied the squares and streets of major cities in Turkey in the absence of a political party and trade union. The protestors were intellectually disobedient individuals, pulled into politics as intellectual activists with instincts of creativity and senses of humour. The protesteors used untried metaphors to communicate their desires for the future, specifically about the intellectual climate in which they desired to live.

Scientific misconduct and research ethics in economics: an introduction

Abstract Since the screening of Inside Job in movie theatres around the world in 2010, research integrity in economics has been questioned by scholars and public intellectuals. Prestigious economists and policy makers are accused of conflicts of interest while prominent economists are charged with plagiarism and self-plagiarism. Some of these economists replied to accusations about themselves while many others have preferred not to respond at all. These days, economists hear the following question more often than before: “what is wrong with economics?”

Research Ethics Education in Economics

Abstract 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 papers published in these journals. There has been no evidence in economics showing that economics departments have taken strong initiative on teaching research ethics to undergraduate and graduate students.

The Oomph in Economic Philosophy: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Main Trends, from the 1960s to the Present

In this essay, I quantitatively analyze the significance of scholarship in economic philosophy since the 1960s. In order to do so, I examine, through the number of publications and citations, the evolution of the main trends in economic philosophy over a fifty years period. This paper will develop a better conception of how the pathways of major debates, in particular rhetoric of economics (RoE) versus realism in economics (RiE), helped economic philosophy achieve its present status in economics. Viewed through this lens, it is clear that the main trends in the recent history of the discipline have emerged out of the concerns of non-mainstream economists since the 1980s.

The Economics of Rhetoric: On Metaphors as Institutions

The professional life of economists takes place within the boundaries of the institution of academic economics. Belonging to the institution enable economists in many ways. It provides a context wherein their contribution is meaningful. But it constrains, too, what economists are allowed to do or say. Thus, institutions both enable and constrain individual action. Metaphors do the same and are therefore, in this respect, institutions. They are place-holders to communicate our beliefs, feelings, and thoughts. So far, there is nothing wrong. This may become a problem, however, as Richard Rorty has once said, when the “happenstance of our cultural development [is] that we got stuck so long with place-holders.” In the essay we focus on the enabling and disabling roles of metaphors as institutions in the rhetoric of economics. We argue, from the perspective of economics of rhetoric, that some of the metaphors can lead us to path dependent circumstances where the performance of the metaphors is not as desirable as it was when the metaphors were first introduced. Sometimes certain metaphors undergo exaptation, and are employed with new functions. Altogether, we believe, the tools of institutional economics can be fruitfully employed to study metaphors.