During fall 2016 appeared a hardly academic work of two well-known French economists, Pierre Cahuc et André Zylberberg, entitled “Economic Negationism, and how to get rid of it”. The thesis of the book can be summarized as follows: economics has become an experimental science in the same way as the natural sciences, based on a rigorous analysis of facts, and it is necessary that it gets rid of its negationists, that is to say, of those whose beliefs and interests lead them to deny the most established truths. Given the particularly measured nature of this assertion, a controversy ensued between a number of heterodox French directly targeted by this pamphlet and these two authors. After a review of the main arguments put forward during this controversy, our article proposes to consider the latter in terms of the practices of the field of economics, as they constitute norms that define and regulate the methods of investigation that economists use not only to describe and explain economic phenomena, but also to act upon them.

It will first of all be a matter of questioning Cahuc and Zylberberg's epistemological positions in terms of the definitions they give of science, of the characteristics that are necessary for scientific reasoning, and of the criteria for validating the results of science. In a second step, we will consider their main claim through the concepts developed by several renowned philosophers of science: it will be a question of epistemological obstacle and break as defined by Gaston Bachelard, of scientific revolutions in the sense of Thomas S. Kuhn, of scientific ideology according to Georges Canguilhem, and finally, of the approach of comparative epistemology introduced by Gilles Gaston-Granger. According to us, it is thus through concepts derived from the current of historical epistemology that it seems important to shed light on this controversy in order, if not to reveal its meaning, at least to provide a renewed interpretation. Finally, to go beyond erudite criticism, an important part of the article is also devoted to the evaluation of the analogy introduced by Cahuc and Zylberberg between economics and the biological and medical sciences. In a way, the objective of this second part is to "carry the biomedical metaphor a step further" in order to highlight its scope and its limits. This comparison with biomedical sciences allows us to evaluate the main thesis of Cahuc and Zylberberg's book, both in light of their conception of the causal relations that structure their object and in view of their definition of the criteria of scientific validity of their discipline.

Taking into consideration the epistemological and sociological dimensions of this controversy enable the illustration of the will of numerous mainstream economists to bring discredit upon any form of alternative approaches to economic phenomena. In this respect, mainstream economics seems to have progressively constituted itself as a scientific ideology in Canguilhem’s sense, namely it has been institutionalized in the form of an idiosyncratic relation toward its subject matter, its methods of investigation of the latter, and to the conditions of validation of the knowledge that it produces. The theses of Cahuc and Zylberberg, far from molding an epistemologically sophisticated argument, constitute only the most uninhibited side of it.

Keywords: Cahuc & Zylberberg’s controversy, Negationism, Epistemology of Economics, Historical and comparative epistemology, Gaston Bachelard, Thomas S. Kuhn, Gilles Gaston Granger, Georges Canguilhem, Epistemological obstacle and break, Science and scientificity.

Selective Bibliography:

Bachelard, G. (1938), La Formation de l’Esprit Scientifique, Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN, Ed. de Poche 2004, Paris, 306p.

Cahuc, P. & Zylberberg, A. (2016), Le Négationnisme économique, et comment s’en débarrasser,  Flammarion, Paris, 241p.

Coriat, B., Coutrot, T., Eydoux, A., Labrousse, A. & Orléan, A. (2017), Misère du scientisme en économie : Retour sur l’affaire Cahuc-Zylberberg, Editions du Croquant, Vulaines-sur-Seine, 133p.

Gaston-Granger, G. (1993), La Science et les Sciences, Que Sais-Je ?, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 127p.

Jacob, F. (1981), Le Jeu des Possibles, Fayard, Paris, 125p.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962), La Structure des Révolutions Scientifiques, Ed. Flammarion, Champs Sciences 2018, Paris, 338p.

Lecourt, D. (2002), L’Epistémologie Historique de Gaston Bachelard, Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN, Paris, 125p.

Lecourt, D. (dir.) (2006), Dictionnaire d’Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, Presses Universitaires de France, Grands Dictionnaires, Paris, 1195p.