Keith Hudson wrote:
>
> My observations on Stiglitz's book has produced a crop of fascinating
> replies.
>
> Where Ed says:
> <<<<
> There is a tendency to convert intuitive or analytical observations into
> truisms and ideologies and then project them into vast supersystems.
> >>>>
> and Arthur says:
> <<<<
> Gee, maybe economics is like a religion. A series of statements based on
> unproven and unprovable assumptions.
> >>>>
> . . . comments are being made as to the nature of economics. I still
> believe it's a science. It's a complex one, rather like the study of
> sociology, or psychology or evolution and also, like them, it's difficult,
> sometimes impossible, to carry out controlled experiments as in the
> physical sciences.
[snip]
I would argue that economics is a *voluntative* science, by which I
mean that we can reduce human beings to objects of economic
prediction if we choose to do that to them (I don't
know about you, but I'd rather be a peer citizen of
the polis, or the economics Dept tenured faculty,
or the Board of Directors, etc.). Jurgen Habermas
summed up the issue:
The systematic sciences of social action, that
is economics, sociology... have the goal, as do the
empirical-analytic sciences, of producing nomological
knowledge. A critical social science, however,
will not remain satisfied with this. It is concerned...
to determine when theoretical statements grasp
invariant regularities of social action as such and when
they express ideologically frozen relations of
dependence that can in principle be transformed. To the
extent that this is the case, the critique of
ideology, as well, moreover, as psychoanalysis,
take into account that information about lawlike
connections sets off a process of reflection in
the consciousness of those whom the laws are about.
Thus the level of unreflected consciousness,
which is one of the initial conditions of such laws, can
be transformed. Of course, to this end a critically
mediated knowledge of laws cannot through
reflection alone render a law itself inoperative,
but it can render it inapplicable. (Habermas, _Knowledge
and Human Interests_, 1968/1971, p. 310)
The saddest thing of all is that this fundamental notion is
not taught in our graduate schools (I know there
are occasional exceptions). We, as a society and a
civilization, are, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger,
"off on a Holzweg [a logger's path in the forest that
leads nowhere and on which those who are not loggers
easily get lost even before they realize it...]"....
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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