The following comments from Geoff Davies's book, Sack the Economists: and Disband Their Departments (2013: 218), which are made in the context of discussing the Platonic theories of neoclassical economics, are worth bearing in mind when thinking critically about the perfectionist approach of modern orthodox neoclassical economics as well as the imperfectionist approach of some modern heterodox economics:
Plato thought in terms of the ideal, the perfect... there is no such thing as perfection in nature, indeed the concept makes no sense. Every living organism... is scrambling to maintain a place amidst the continually shuffling and changing order of creatures and conditions... Plato thought there was a conceptual ideal horse, and that all real horses are imperfect approximations... the horse was excellent at what it was, good enough to survive and persist on the Asian steppes...
Here we have the neo-Darwinian picture of the world of nature and the origins of species. It's a realistic picture. It depicts the natural world as it is and tries to scientifically understand it, not by recourse to some Platonic idealist conception of perfection, but by how things really are. If, for example, there's a blind spot in the back of the retina of the human eye, as Richard Dawkins cites in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, and even though (say) from the perspective of a Platonist this is held to be an 'imperfection', it doesn't actually matter from a neo-Darwinian perspective (ie, the scientific perspective which holds that the evolution of species is driven by the two causal mechanisms of natural selection and genetic mutations) as long as it doesn't hinder the ongoing survival of the human species. What matters from the neo-Darwinian perspective is not whether a species is perfect and/or imperfect, but whether it has survival value. A species can look like a thing of ideal beauty or not, for example, but if it lacks the ability to survive within its environment then that is all that matters. Therefore, the task of such a biological science (like any science worth its salt) is to get its theoretical picture of things to match up with the real world itself at both the descriptive and explanatory levels. This is what modern orthodox neoclassical economics (plus some schools of heterodox economics) fails to do by coming from a perfectionist/imperfectionist methodological perspective. That is, it fails to start with the real-world of a market economy like capitalism in order to accurately represent it in terms of a theory of it. In short, it fails to start with the real in preference for the ideal.
On this note, both modern orthodox neoclassical economics and some schools of heterodox economics could learn a lot from studying the philosophy of John Locke who, in his account of the names of natural substances in his Essay on Human Understanding (ie, the naming and classification of the genus and species of both inorganic and organic things via their real and nominal essences), shows that one of the aims of science (or what he called 'natural philosophy') should be to get our conceptual picture of things in the world to rigorously match up with the way nature is actually 'carved at the joints'. Thus, they could learn a lot about how science endeavours to be a realist research project rather than an idealist one.
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