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There is a great deal of good sense in Flavio Comin's HES editorial 
"Common Sense Economics".  Indeed, more than just good sense, there is 
something important here -- and relevant to the central role of the 
history of economic thought in the cognitive capacity of economists to 
provide sound explanations of actual problem raising phenomena in the 
domain of human beings, production, and exchange. 
 
At one level this is simply the superior understanding of value theory and 
price theory that one gets when one learns it from the 'common sense' 
angle found in the work, for example, of the early Austrian economists, 
rather than by unthinking mathematical rote from a textbook and the 
chalk-board scribbling of an economist with more training in mathematical 
equations than in the character of social problems and their causal 
explanation. 
 
I have no doubt that an upper level undergraduate or even a first year 
student in grad school would acquire a much better handle on the real 
character and limits of value theory and price theory after working 
through Friedrich Wieser's _Natural Value_, with its 'common sense' 
approach to thinking about the groundings of the logical validity of value 
theory and its application, than after a year working with the typical 
textbook in economics today, with it rote mathematical memorization and 
problem solving, disconnnected from any link with human experience or the 
argument patterns which justify any interest in value or price theory. 
 
On another level what is important here is the primacy of our background 
understanding to _any_ explanatory endevour, whether conceptual or causal. 
 A good account of the primacy of our background understanding in 
economics can be found in Wieser's above mentioned _Natural Value_, pp. 
5-6, and in language and logic in the various later works of Ludwig 
Wittgenstein.  With every day causal explanation, the primacy of 
background understanding in our cognitive efforts is well pictured in 
Larry Wright's important essay, "Argument and Deliberation:  A Plea for 
Understanding", _J. of Philosophy_, Nov. 1995, pp. 565-585; and in science 
in Joseph Rouse's _Engaging Science_ Cornell, 1996.  In my own work I have 
combined the insights of Wright and Rouse (among others) to argue for the 
central and non-optional role of narrative articulations of background 
understanding within the context of the history of an explanatory problem 
in the cognitive life of _any_ scientific endevour, giving examples in 
Darwinian biology, and citing literature in the history of physics.  
Science in part depends on episodes of articulating problems and patterns 
in our experience, but with always an undischarged larger background of 
unarticulated understanding in which those bits of articulation are 
embedded.  (Those with a knowledge of Wittgenstein should already have 
some deep sense of the significance of this point.) 
 
Comim's important point about the appalling fact that "The aspects of 
reality that are little or non-formalisable are practically ignored by  
economic theories" is utterly devastating to the scientific and explanatory 
pretentions of formalism in economics, when it is recalled that the most 
important aspects of economic phenomena are precisely those which 
necessarily stand outside of any set of 'givens' in a logic (e.g. open-ended 
changes in understandings), and that structure of conceptual and causal  
explanation involves at its core an unarticulated background understanding of 
things, problems, ourselves, and the structure of our own doings. 
 
The most important point for historians of economics is that history 
contains an impressively rich casting of the alternatives in which the 
problems and explanatory components of the discipline can be conceived -- 
with the background of alternatives being a vital non-optional component 
of any explanatory enterprise.  It is, as Comim suggests, a world rich 
with articulated reflection upon our background understanding, which 
unlike the dead restrictions of contemporary formalisms, leaves open room 
creative reflection, explanatory progress, and open-ended advances in our 
understanding of actual phenomena. 
 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
Dept. of Social Science 
Mira Costa College 
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http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm 
 
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