ИСТИНА

Modern Science is based on two epistemological principles: empiricism seen as experimental observation mediated by techniques, and mathematization considered as a tool for constructing of rational models that make it possible to reduce reality to compact rules and perform calculations. Modern economics as a scientific discipline was born on the wave of rapid development of experimental science, and, alike the whole complex of social sciences, fully absorbed the epistemic norms of natural sciences - belief in objectivity and facts, striving to eliminate subjectivism, trust in mathematics as a pure form of veracity. All these epistemic virtues were most clearly objectified and gave the most impressive practical (technical) results in the field of natural sciences (primarily in physics). Therefore, the social sciences willingly aligned themselves with natural science, seeking for adapting their subject-matters to its research standards. Leon Walras regarded ‘pure economics’ as a part of physics. In the early XX century economic theorizing definitely dissociated philosophy and ethics and took the track of "pure" science. This justifies the "scientific" status of the economic theory. However, in recent decades, there has been a marked imbalance between the theoretical and empirical components of economic theory, widely discussed in methodological literature. Along with that, a trend of searching for instruments compensating the apparent lack of empirical basis in economics arose. Experimental and behavioral economics, and later neuroeconomics, represent attempts to put economic theory on a solid empirical basis borrowed from other sciences: psychology, neurophysiology and evolutionary biology. Herewith, the claims for real experimental justification were made and, in the case of neuroeconomics, the ambitions touched the perspective of full-fledged reductive explanation of a physicalist type. This gave a possibility to treat economic laws as biological and being drawn from reliable material experiments that means not just in accordance with natural science standards, but, ultimately, as if they were a natural science laws, - that is, the laws of Nature. On this way economics eventually will be a natural science. Thus, what proved impossible to complete on physical grounds, may be completed on biological grounds. We will show that despite of claims to new revolutionary approach in economics, from epistemological point of view, neuroeconomics as an "experimental" field in economics is not new at all, but even archaic. Thus, neuroeconomics fundamentally depends on 1) classical interpretation of experimentation following from the XIX century’s mechanical objectivity; 2) the Enlightenment mechanical philosophy in the spirit of Julien de La Mettrie in the understanding of human nature 3) the Enlightenment materialism in the interpretation of the social as reducible to the biological; 4) classical empiricism with regard to the representation of the complex as reducible to the simple observable. On the example of neuroeconomics we will show that behind the proclaiming interdisciplinarity and dramatic novelty of the field there are hidden old epistemological norms that requires universality of the research object and of revealed regularities (laws) as well physicalistic reductive explanations and the elimination of subjectivity.