====================== HES POSTING ============================
I'd like to clarify and also add a bit of context to my recent comment on
Wade Hands' HES EDITORIAL on "SSK as a resource for history of economic
thought." First, I'd like to say that I think a discussion of SSK writings
and approaches would be useful and healthy for economists and historians of
economic thought. Getting some sense of the details of this alternative
research approach in social science and history can help anyone in
understanding and thus doing their own research. I'd also like to endorse
the notion that explanatory strategies found in social theory, and insights
into the logic of knowledge developed by workers thinking about such social
phenomena as language and the market order are profoundly useful in
thinking about science and the history of the development of knowledge. I
have even carried out this research strategy in
my own work, specifically in my paper "Science Without Planning: The
General Economy of Science"
(http://members.aol.com/gregransom/scienceplan.htm) and "Thomas Kuhn and
the Differential Selection of Community Members Acting Upon Alternative
Implicit Criteria for Theory Choice"
(http://members.aol.com/gregransom/kuhnselection.htm), papers written for
Alex Rosenberg and Larry Wright. (Comments and suggestions welcome at:
[log in to unmask]). In the picture of science that I have developed
however, there is a radical tension between efforts that focus only on the
level of motivational or interest categories, e.g., the interests and
motives of individuals and groups, and on the so-called 'construction' of
belief and language categories, and a picture like that of Kuhn, Hayek, and
Wittgenstein, which focuses on _non-intentional_ practices, doings, and
built-in commonalities of human going on together, common ways of doing
that are available to most any non-lunatic in the appropriate context. In
this sense, the SSK agenda is actually radically _reactionary_, a rival to
the advancement of folks like Kuhn, Hayek, and Wittgenstein who have moved
beyond anthropomorphic categories and explanations exclusively in terms of
intentional design that can be captured in public language. The sort of
question-begging I mentioned in my early post arises exactly here, in that
SSK is a brother (as Wands points out in his 1992 essay "The Sociology of
Scientific Knowledge") to belief- and desire-modeled strategies for
explaining market phenomena -- which, on the account I have developed (see
my HES "Hayek Myths" paper
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekmyth.htm), is a rival to the
explanatory strategy of Hayek (and others) who have developed an account
that begins with a problem given by patterns in our empirical experience,
and that then provides an explanation in terms of the causal categories of
learning and behavior imitation outside of the given categories of belief
and desire states. In a way, SSK constructivism is as much a throw-back to
explanation in terms of intentional states and designs as is
anthropomorphism in biology, e.g., creationism and essentialism in the
explanation of the existence and character of biological species.
The tension between efforts to undermine and delegitimize the explanations
of Charles Darwin in terms of 'social interests' and 'social constructions'
which arise from the class interests and thinking of middle-class folks in
early-industrial Britain has been a question-begging effort (and
implausible to boot) because this effort has been undertaken in terms of
categories that Darwin's explanatory effort rejects -- Darwin is dealing
with problems generated by empirical patterns that are available to anyone
who is a non-lunatic, problems that show themselves to consist of phenomena
that are anything but self-evidently or necessarily products of
motivational or interest categories of an individual -- or a social group.
Darwin shows that it doesn't take the motivational, constructive, or
interest categories of an individual or social group to produce the
undesigned but design-like feature of organisms -- or the origin of species
with individuals who display such features. The work of Kuhn, Polanyi,
Hayek, and Popper, among others, shows, on my account, that the same is
true in science, and, in the special case of Hayek, also in the explanation
of the undesigned order manifest in the problem raising pattern of the
market. Applying the categories of 'interest', 'motivation',
'negotiation', or 'construction' to the development of explanatory
strategies which echew such categories, (as do Kuhn, Polanyi, Hayek, and
Wittgenstein on my account) in order to undermine and delegitimize these
strategies (Wands, 1992, p. 97) can't help but merely beg the question in
the question of how to choose the most plausible or fruitful or best
explanation of problem raising phenomena in our experience.
Reference: D. Wade Hands, "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", In
_New Directions in Economic Methodology_, edited by Roger Backhouse,
London:
Routledge, 1994.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|