Thinking Beyond the Walls: Notes on Independent Research in Economics

Abstract Epistemic order denotes the configuration by which a disciplinary field stabilises its criteria of validity, its publication formats, and its hierarchies of legitimacy. This article argues that the academic field in the social sciences maintains that order by relegating certain anomalies—questions, formats, postures—to its margins, through a mechanism analogous to anthropic transfer. Drawing on the AFEP/CNU controversy in French economics, on Merton's analysis of cumulative advantage, and on open infrastructures (HAL, ORCID, and overlay journals), the paper shows that these infrastructures alter the visibility of relegation without suppressing its underlying logic—and may generate new forms of epistemic disorder through information overload and filtering collapse. It concludes with a reflexive falsifiability clause: the anthropic framework cannot serve as its own justification for the marginality of its author.