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Date: | Sun Oct 15 17:12:09 2006 |
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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)
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.
Sumitra Shah
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