I try to respond to all threads that involve me, but I'm not going to do so for this one (even though I let it sit in my in-box for weeks). I just don't have the constitution for scholasticism, the quoting and interpretation of Authorities. I prefer the method of folks like Marx & Keynes, whose main interests were empirical rather than textual.
On 5/2/07, Ted Winslow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim Devine wrote: >> "Philosophy" in the sense of "ontology" is necessarily an feature of >> every explanation, i.e. every explanation involves explicit or >> implicit claims about the ultimate nature of reality... > > sure, the "ultimate nature of reality" is crucial. It's a major > matter. It distinguishes, say, Marx's perspective from, say, that of > the neoclassicals. (However, I'd say that their differing class > stances are even more important.) One's conception of ontology in term > determines the broad outlines of one's views of epistemology (i.e., > methodology). > > But what about a purely intellectual enterprise? It is the standard > view -- the conventional wisdom, if you wish -- that a bunch of > individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity) if > they are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma-type situation. If Julio is > pointing to a reason why this isn't so, it says something about the > validity of this "wisdom." > > It's true that the line between "purely" intellectual exercises and > the real world is at best a permeable membrane and a thin one at that. > But there is some place for ivory-tower theorizing, even if it's > provisional. Some of us have jobs in academia and thus end up having > to pay attention to sometimes-silly debates whether we want to or not. > It can be very useful to have intellectual raw material to deal with > -- and if possible, subvert -- some of the pompous windbags and > narrow-minded dogmatists who populate academia. How is this relevant to demonstrating that Julio's "non-intuitive results" are "a major blow against Ted's critique"? >> This has "methodological" implications. It makes it logically >> impossible to translate that explanation into mathematical >> abstractions for the reason that such abstractions require the >> irrelevance of internal relations for their valid application. >> > > Do you mean "empirically impossible" here? after all, one might take > an insight or explanation and try to distill it down into some axioms > or assumptions and then logically/mathematically derive conclusions. > (By "logic," I mean that which follows the Aristotelian tradition.) > The problem is, of course, with what's left out (the abstraction) and > how it leads to a distortion preventing correspondence with empirical > reality (ultimate or otherwise) . What's at issue is Keynes's explanation of a liquidity crisis, an explanation that, in the way I claimed, makes the ontological idea of "internal relations" relevant. It can't be consistently translated into an explanation that implicitly assumes the idea is irrelevant, i.e. the assumption that internal relations are relevant contradicts the assumption that internal relations are not relevant. >> In addition to this, an explanation in terms of the psychological >> fact that "everyone in New York is scared so stiff as to be unable to >> move" can't be consistently translated into an explanation in terms >> of the assumption that "everyone in New York" is rationally >> optimizing. >> > > I don't understand why you bring up this point. I don't think _anyone_ > is rationally optimizing. However, I do think that as a first > approximation, a lot of people are pushed to act _as if_ they were > "rationally optimizing" (in the neoclassical sense of that phrase) by > certain societal situations, e.g., extremely competitive markets. > > You're the expert on quotes from Marx: didn't he say somewhere that > capitalism encourages individualistic behavior and ideologies to > prevail? if so, then neoclassical "rational optimizing" isn't totally > irrelevant. It might be a first approximation of actually-existing > behavior and ideology. > > Because (again as a first approximation) a lot of people sometimes act > _as if_ they were rationally optimizing by certain societal > circumstances, it seems to me that we cannot _a priori_ reject models > based on "economic rationality." Rather, we have to decide the extent > to which they actually reveal something about the (ultimately) real > world. We have to examine all of the assumptions to decide if they are > so far off that the model isn't worth the effort at all. Most aren't, > but that does not say that all aren't. > Again, what's at issue is Keynes's explanation of a liquidity crisis. Part of my "critique" (Julio had claimed that "dynamic systems, statistics, and game theory provide the sharpest and most economical framework for people (e.g. young people) to grasp what Keynes' is really up to in chapter 12 of his General Theory") was that game theory couldn't represent an explanation, Keynes's, or a reality in which irrationality plays an essential role. He'd asked for a concrete illustration of why this wasn't so. In response, I pointed to Keynes's explanation of interest rate levels in New York in 1932. So the point is relevant to demonstrating that Julio's "non-intuitive results" are irrelevant to this critique and don't constitute a "major blow against" it. Marx claims a particular kind of "individuality" dominates in capitalism. Even where he characterizes this individuality as "rational," however, as in his characterization of the capitalist as a "rational miser," the "rationality" can't be represented as "neoclassical 'rational optimizing'." For instance, as does Keynes's, his explanation of a "monetary crises" gives an essential role to an irrational "feeling about money." "Under conditions of advanced bourgeois production, when the commodity-owner has long since become a capitalist, knows his Adam Smith and smiles superciliously at the superstition that only gold and silver constitute money or that money is after all the absolute commodity as distinct from other commodities - money then suddenly appears not as the medium of circulation but once more as the only adequate form of exchange-value, as a unique form of wealth just as it is regarded by the hoarder. The fact that money is the sole incarnation of wealth manifests itself in the actual devaluation and worthlessness of all physical wealth, and not in the purely imaginary devaluation as for instance in the monetary system. This particular phase of world market crises is known as monetary crisis. The summum bonum, the sole form of wealth for which people clamour at such times, is money, hard cash, and compared with it all other commodities - just because they are use-values - appear to be useless, mere baubles and toys, or as our Doctor Martin Luther says, mere ornament and gluttony. This sudden transformation of the credit system into a monetary system adds theoretical dismay to the actually existing panic, and the agents of the circulation process are overawed by the impenetrable mystery surrounding their own relations." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ ch02_3b.htm This is repeated in Capital: "Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what its cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. 'Commodities alone are money,' he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. [A footnote cites John Bellers in1696 'The poor stand still, because the rich have no money to employ them, though they have the same land and hands to provide victuals and clothes, as ever they had; ... which is the true Riches of a Nation, and not the money.'] In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm#S3b >> On it's own, the claim that "if simple social science produces >> unexpected results, it' a step forward" leads to absurd conclusions. >> >> The Bedlamite conclusion of the "remorseless logician" Hayek that >> real wealth was growing faster in the Great Depression than in the >> preceding boom was "non-intuitive." ... >> > > that example doesn't fit. He wasn't being logical. Instead, he was > making up "facts." This isn't true. Hayek's claim was the conclusion of an axiomatic deductive argument. This is why Keynes was able to treat it as "an extraordinary example of how, starting from a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam." > The rest of this missive seems to be a _non sequitur_ to me. I don't > know why anyone on pen-l needs to know about what Keynes said > sneeringly about Hayek or how Hayek was less than charitable in his > review of Keynes' book. But, again, perhaps I don't understand your > purpose. The psychology underpinning Keynes's economics can be used, and was used by Keynes (as in the case of Hayek), to explain why it's unreasonable to expect rational critique to have much influence on, among others, "the pompous windbags and narrow-minded dogmatists who populate academia." I think myself this is a realistic claim. It explains, for instance, the immunity of game theory to rational critique. It also explains why individuals who don't have rational responses to criticism respond with irrelevant ad hominem. Ted
-- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
