Sumitra Shah wrote:  
>John C. Medaille has a long quotation, I believe from Charles Clark.  
>Charles is a colleague whom I respect immensely, and I suspect the  
>quote is longer than what is in the post. In any case, the thought at  
>the end comes from Schumpeter  
>  
>"This _vision_ is pre-analytical in the sense that it  
>exists before theoretical activity takes place.[Charles M. A. Clark]"  
>  
>Schumpeter wrote: "Now it should be perfectly clear that there is a  
>wide gate for ideology to enter into this process. In fact, it enters  
>on the very ground floor, into the preanalytic cognitive act of which  
>we have been speaking.  Analytic work begins with material provided  
>by our vision of things, and this vision is ideological almost by  
>definition.” (History of Economic Analysis, p.42)  
>  
>But I take issue with what follows as he shows his absolute faith  
>in the scientific method: "But we also observe that the rules of  
>procedure that we apply in our analytic work are almost as much  
>exempt from ideological influences as vision is subject to  
>it....[these rules] tend to crush out ideologically conditioned error  
>from the visions from which we start." (ibid. p. 43)  
  
  
I think Clark and Schumpeter are saying different   
things, but you are, apparently, in a position to   
check this directly with Charles. For Schumpeter,   
ideology is an almost necessary but certainly   
regrettable part of vision, a part which can be   
eliminated by proper method. For Clark, we need   
some framework to be able to "see" anything at   
all and hence methodology alone is insufficient   
to correct our vision. In other words, for   
Schumpeter, we widen our vision by correcting our   
methodology, but for Clark we correct our   
methodology by widening our vision; its a matter   
of which has priority, method or vision. The   
practical application is that for Schumpeter, we   
would have to be more narrowly scientific to   
correct our pre-analytical vision, while for   
Clark we would have to be more broadly educated   
(and hence "see" more things) in order to correct a narrow methodology.  
  
Science, I think, bears out Clark's view more   
than it does Schumpeter's. Physics, for example,   
used to be taken as a model of "pure"   
observation, but this turns out not to be true;   
the observer cannot be divorced from the   
observation. In measuring light, to take but one   
instance, the observer determines before any data   
is gathered whether light will be a wave or a   
particle (it cannot be both in the same   
experiment). In other words, the observer decides   
on the results; they are never a pure "given."   
Another example comes from Oliver Saks (the   
Doctor depicted in the movie Awakenings). A   
middle-aged blind man has his sight restored. But   
he still cannot see in any meaningful sense,   
though there is nothing physically wrong with his   
sight. Where you and I would see a man walking   
across the grass, this man would see a spot of   
pink moving across a field of green; he has no   
way to interpret the pink as a face and the green   
as grass. The cognitive act turns out to be very   
complex indeed, a complexity hidden from us by   
repetition. The man with his sight restored still   
has to walk with a cane, even though he can see   
everything that you and I can see; he has sight, but no vision.  
  
The upshot is, I think, that economics needs to   
be treated as a liberal art more than a physical   
science. Philosophy, mathematics, history, art,   
and literature need to be part and parcel of the   
training of an economist; what is needed is not   
so much better method as better vision.  
  
  
  
>And the trouble with relying solely on pure logic (as was suggested  
>in one of the posts),  is that it involves reasoning from  
>assumptions, and they can be value-laden, even in statistical  
>studies, as some feminist economic research has pointed out. In this  
>respect, there is a very wide gap between the natural and social  
>sciences.  
  
I agree completely. Every logical exercise starts   
with the selection of fundamental premises, a   
process which is itself non-logical. Further,   
logic is only a test of validity, not of truth;   
it can only tell us whether conclusions are   
properly inferred from the premises, but not   
whether the premises are themselves true. Logic   
by itself can eliminate transformation errors but   
can never establish a truth. That comes from a   
different process altogether. The belief in a   
purely "logical" economics comes, I believe, from   
Nassau Senior, but Senior's four fundamental   
premises were blatantly political and hardly fundamental at all.  
  
  
John C. Medaille