Michael Perelman wrote:
Jim's question was tongue in cheek. Dean Baker got a Ph.D in a conventional program. So did Jim. I suspect both were not conventional thinkers when they began. During Vietnam a number of economics grad students became radicalized. In Michigan, where URPE began, they had a mentor in the faculty.
It's very difficult to get outside "conventional" modes of thought. Confining discussion of the philosophy of science to the tradition represented by Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, for example, is confining it within ontological and anthropological premises conventional in science since the 17th century and ignoring the tradition that puts these premises in question, the tradition to which Marx and Keynes belong and which has its best modern philosophical representatives in Husserl and Whitehead. The former tradition was an attempt to avoid the absurd epistemological conclusion that Hume long ago deduced from these premises. The absurd conclusion (which Hume himself failed to completely work out) was the radical skepticism of "solipsism of the present moment". This attempt failed because the premises allow of no other conclusion. Instead of treating this as a reductio ad absurdum, economists interested in such questions have used it to rationalize dogmatic adherence to the particular version of the premises that dominates modern economics. Ted
