----- Original Message ----- From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 9:27 AM Subject: [PEN-L:22533] RE: Re: : Premises, Circularities
Assuming that ETIR refers to ECONOMIC THEORY IN RETROSPECT, I don't own a copy. Could you please give one example? I don't see why we're "at an impasse regarding this issue" if you could provide an example. -- JD ================ Yes it's that book. When you wrote: I wrote: >> If I remember correctly, Robinson interpreted Marx's law of value as a Ricardian labor theory of price. Given that assumption (i.e., that the point of values was to explain price), _of course_ she should have rejected it. That's an important reason to reject that misinterpretation, the basis of almost all criticisms of Marx's heuristic. (Weirdly, that misinterpretation is shared both by most critics of Marx's law of value and also by many "fundamentalists." They then feed each others' misconceptions.)<< I took this to mean that the quest to get a price theory out of KM's theory of value was a mistake. In quoting KM I was pointing to that section of Capital which seems to be what led many commentators to start their explorations of the causal relationship[s], if any, between values and prices. Since those relationships are empirical they are in constant conjunction, issues of non-equilibrium, non-linearity, convergence and divergence aside, no? If they're not in constant conjunction how can any quantitative model even get started to track the dynamics so that the results can serve as data in need of explanation? To that extent KM was caught up in Ricardo's quest for an invariance condition/measure for the theory of value. So if the LoV and or LTV are true by definition how can we even get to the empirical realm for the sake of testing, let alone confirming or refuting the entailments--correlations of values/prices-- unless auxiliary concepts are invoked? If on the other hand they are not apriori, as KM insisted they weren't, then all non-equivalent entailments [specific models] regarding the quantitative correlations between values and prices points to problems with the terms by which the LoV and LTV are defined because the auxiliary concepts would be superfluous in facilitating understanding of the correlations. To then say that the definitions are non-revisable and indispensable because they're apriori is to argue in a circle because then we would need to show why every set of auxiliary concepts used to facilitate the correlation of entailments leads to both models that are equivalent and models that aren't. If we say the problems are with the auxiliary concepts then we're back to saying either the LoV and LTV are a priori and the attempt to get a causal model of value/price correlations is moot; so we're back, again, to what does the LoV and LTV explain? Ian
