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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:12 2006 |
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==================== HES POSTING =====================
I suspect that one reason for the silence regarding Professor
Mirowski's editorial is that it says things that practically
everyone who is familiar with the other non-hard sciences would
agree with. The historicism, institutionalism, and scientism that
tempted individuals seeking status as professional economists
also tempted individuals in all of those social science
enterprises where newly hired university teachers sought
legitimacy by establishing a profession. And this more or less
covers the field of the social and human sciences.
In the non-social sciences like biology and ecology, mathematical
modeling and simulation played important roles, while there was
obviously little use for historicism and institutionalism. In the
social sciences, as in economics, these developments naturally
met opposition from would-be praxeologists.
So if one wants to discuss the history of a profession, he may
benefit from noting such similarities. But this enterprise
strikes me a bit like trying to understand the performance of a
football team by studying the interaction of the players while
they are off the field. One would find similarities between the
behavior of the players and the behavior of truck-drivers,
stockbrokers, members of the sewing circle, and historians of
economic thought. Such a study might be interesting per se, but
we would be stretching matters to call it the study of football.
So one can agree with Mirowski and wait until next month. Or one
can try to shift the grounds of the discussion -- an enterpise
that does not seem to interest most HESers.
--
--
Pat Gunning
http://stsvr.showtower.com.tw/~gunning/welcome
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