A Coherentist Defense of Economics as an Interdisciplinary Social Science

This article provides a normative account to justify why economics should be a more interdisciplinary social science. The philosophy of science we use to ground this defense is Laurence BonJour's coherentist theory of justification. Through his philosophical framework, we present a justification for economics to be more mindful of its fellow social sciences as a way to understand social phenomena more thoroughly. Our conclusion is that interdisciplinarity may enable economics to represent its own knowledge to itself in new forms. This does not mean economics' correspondence with reality will eventually become flawless-it simply represents the fact that economic reasoning has plenty of room for improvement.