Interdisciplinary Minor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)

In recent years, research in economics, political theory, and philosophy increasingly crosses disciplinary boundaries, and researchers trained in these different disciplines have come to focus on closely related questions: What is the relationship between normative and empirical assumptions in theories that explain economic and political behavior? What is the relationship between prediction and explanation in theories at the core of these disciplines, e.g., theories of rational choice, simulation and modeling, or equilibrium analysis? What is the relationship between rational ideals described or presupposed in these theories and the realities and limits of institutional design, imperfect information, and less than ideally rational decision makers? These and related questions are being posed by researchers in each of these three disciplines, as well as other disciplines, and the results of this trend in research will have substantial ramifications in other areas of these fields.

Owing to the institutional division of subject areas into departments, the curricular demands on students who major in any of these fields, and the inevitable compartmentalization of knowledge in undergraduate education, these interdisciplinary developments have so far had little impact in the education of undergraduates at most universities. Yet when our students graduate and pursue careers in law, health care, public policy, management, or other fields, or when they continue their education in graduate or professional schools, they will be better prepared if they have been exposed to an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to their undergraduate majors.

For this purpose, faculty members in the respective departments at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill will provide an inter-campus and interdisciplinary program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (traditionally referred to as PPE). At UNC Chapel Hill this program will be a minor in the Philosophy Department. At Duke it will be a certificate program. One goal of this minor is to provide students trained in each of these disciplines with a common framework of understanding that will assist them to integrate and apply their skills to the broader issues that call on knowledge from more than one discipline. Another goal of the minor is to increase our students’ awareness of the limitations of each of the cooperating disciplines considered individually. For example, economics students may learn more about the nature of market failures from examining issues of institutional design as they are approached in political science. Philosophy students have much to learn from economics about the incentive effects of various schemes of distributive justice. And political science students may gain a better understanding of the normative assumptions of techniques for evaluating public policies by learning how these issues are treated in economics and philosophy.

The interdisciplinary minor will also be available to students majoring in other fields who might benefit in similar ways from being exposed to these issues. For example, students who are training in other areas of the social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology) or the humanities (e.g., history, religious studies), can expect to confront questions about the relationship between normative and empirical assumptions, ideal theories and the limits of institutional design, etc., in their disciplines. Similarly, some students in the natural sciences and engineering will also find these topics to be of great interest in their work.