Your point about frequency of verb use in mathematics is interesting 
Barkley.

But the quote by Anne about mathematics not having enough
verbs (for economics) is making a different point than you are in your
last post.  

The number of verbs or "actions" in abstract mathematical operations 
is not by itself so interesting to an economist (however interesting it
might be to linguists and rhetoricians).

Frequent use of verbs in mathematics is no advantage if one is using 
the wrong verbs.

Actions such as "obstructing (or promoting) justice", "raiding (or restoring) 
pensions", "appropriating (or sharing) company surplus", and "stealing (or 
extending) economic democracy" are more to the point of Anne's quote so 
far as I understand its meaning for economic inquiry.  

These types of actions, however common and economically significant, 
rarely enter into today's Langrangeans and existence proofs.

-Steve Ziliak

________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Richard Lipsey <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 12:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] Mathematics and language

I have always been fascinated to watch how some topic originally suggested
on this chat line evolves into discussions that are less and less related to
the original posting, although not uninteresting in themselves. Some
comments on this case in point.

I apologise for my slip of the pen in writing "the price level" when, of
course, I should have said the rate of change of the price level. In
Phillips' original stabilisation paper his curve relates deviations of
national income, Y, from some target level to the rate of change of the
price level.

For those who posted suggestions and to those who wrote privately with one
or two quotes that got close to what I wanted, my thanks.
As to the comments on the relevance of models and mathematics, my position
is they, like any other human construct, have uses and abuses. Discussion
the abuses in one context, such as what I want to do in the paper I am
preparing does not imply that there are not valid uses as well. In this
context, I agree with pretty well everything that Barkley Rosser has
written. My own first encounter with the misuse that concerned Mark Blaug
and I came when, as a graduate student, my teachers mused about the
instability of the capitalist system as a result of teaching  the
Harrod-Domar model of the knife edge "equilibrium" of the highly (I would
say unrealistically) simplified Harrod-Domar "dynamic" macro model.

I completely agree that Mary Morgan's (2012) "The World in the Model: How
Economists Work and Think" is highly relevant to the ensuing discussion. and
so are several other works, including Larry Boland's "Model Building in
Economics: Its uses and limitations" (2014). I gave some of my views on
these and related issues in  my article "Successes and failures in the
transformation of economics", The Journal of Economic Methodology, (2001).

Richard LIpsey



-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
Sent: November-17-14 10:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] Mathematics and language

Actually, while it seems like a devastating wisecrack to say that
mathematics does not have enough verbs, in fact it uses the ones it has a
great deal.  If one reads out most equations, they are indeed sentences that
usually contain several verbs, including with the equal sign one that
suggests both existence and equivalence.  But all the arithmetic operations,
as well as algebraic ones and ones from calculus and differential equations,
and even some involving higher mathematics that is not usually used in
economics are action verbs.  To add or multiply or exponentiate are actions.
They are verbs, even if put in the form of symbols that are not spelled-out
words.

J. (not "John") Barkley Rosser, Jr.
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of
Steve Ziliak [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 11:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] Mathematics and language

Michael Polanyi is insightful on the mathematics-and-language question, with
implications for economic and other social science interpretation:

"Take words, graphs, maps and symbols. . . . They are never objects of our
attention in themselves, but pointers towards the things they mean. If you
shift your attention from the meaning of a symbol to the symbol as an object
viewed in itself, you destroy its meaning. . . . The skillful use of a
tennis racket can be paralyzed by watching our racket instead of attending
to the ball and the court in front of us."  - Michael Polanyi, The Study of
Man (Univ of Chicago Press 1958, pp. 30-31), quoted in Ziliak's and
McCloskey's The Cult of Statistical Significance (Univ of Michigan Press
2008, p. 193).

In other words, even if mathematics had more "verbs" (as in the wonderful
quote from Anne), the language would have more rackets than swings, more
swings than hits, so long as investigators continue to neglect the "things"
our words and graphs and symbols "mean".

-Steve Ziliak




________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of
Nicola Giocoli <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 12:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] Mathematics and language

Even more pedant. I don't have the text in front of me here (so I am only
half-pedant...), but I recall that in that paper Samuelson first wrote "math
is A language"; then he corrected himself (and the learned physicists who
said it earlier, too) into "math is language", claiming that this was the
best - actually, the only - way to put it.
The latter is what I suggest to call the Samuelsonian disease!

I agree with John that many contemporary economists look more or less immune
from it, but the backbone, the underlying structure of much of their
empirical analysis (both in micro - RCT -and macro - DSGE) is, I guess,
still largely "infected". And I suspect many of them are even unaware of
that, because of their lack of methodological and historical training.

Nicola
Sent from my BlackBerryR wireless device from WIND