orthodoxy: one construct, many systems

In the philosophy of science, orthodoxy is the reigning paradigm: the shared body of theory, method, and exemplary problems that a scientific community treats as settled during a period of “normal science.” Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes how such a consensus channels research, marginalises anomaly, and resists overturning until a crisis forces a revolution to a new orthodoxy. The referent is a received disciplinary consensus against which deviation is judged, and it is the same construct (an established position defining its own dissent) that recurs in religious doctrine and in economics, here operating on scientific rather than doctrinal claims.[1]

Unit

The consensus theory and practice a scientific community treats as established

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised historically by citation of shared exemplars, textbook canon, and the treatment of anomalies as puzzles rather than refutations

In economics, orthodoxy denotes the mainstream (broadly neoclassical) approach, against which “heterodox” schools such as post-Keynesian, institutional, and feminist economics position themselves. Lawson argues that what actually unifies the orthodoxy is not its substantive claims but a shared commitment to mathematical-deductive modelling, so that heterodoxy is best understood as dissent from that method rather than from any single theory. The referent is a disciplinary mainstream defined by its dominant method and the dissent it provokes, the same orthodoxy/heterodoxy construct seen in religion and in science, operating here on economic method.[2]

Unit

The dominant methodological and theoretical mainstream of the discipline

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by dominance in journals, departments, and training, and by the methodological commitments heterodox critics contest