On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, Brad De Long wrote: 
 
> Re: 
>  
> >the continued taint of Enlightenment thought, primarily an 
> >epistemological foundation that guarantees certainty and a 
> >transparent theory of language. 
>  
> _What_ Enlightenment epistemological foundation guarantees certainty? 
_Who_ 
> in the set of Enlightenment thinkers ever thought that language is 
> "transparent"? 
For starters, the British empiricists thought that all our knowledge  
received its warrant in virtue of its reference to self-interpreting  
sense-data. Modern neoclassical economics continues this tradition with  
its naivete about the "data" that sort out true from false theories and  
its pre-Kuhnian belief that the data are "theory-independent". Of course  
practice differs from official methodology in this respect, but one need  
only consult the opening, methodological chapters of any standard  
economics text to see the empiricist version of the Enlightenment "quest  
for certainty" epitomized. (Dewey's *Quest for Certainty* is brilliant on  
the sense in which both rationalism and empiricism, in other ways so  
different, were both variations on the "quest" theme.) 
 
As for language, Enlightenment thinkers did not see transparency, but  
opacity. They saw the task of correcting this opacity as paramount, a  
correction that would allow language to serve as what it essentially is,  
to wit, an instrument of communication. The romantic response to  
Enlightenment, on the other hand, emphasized the constitutive,  
non-instrumental dimension of language. The appeal of mathematics in  
modern economics as a transparent conveyor of pure thought reflects the  
Enlightenment legacy. 
 
>  
> >Hell, we could easily say Kant had it figured out and go home and have a 
beer. 
>  
> I would prefer to say that Hume had the irresolvable dilemmas classified, 
> and go estimate the changing size of automatic stabilizers, and the 
current 
> level of the non-accelerating-inflation-rate-of-unemployment... 
>  
Hume was a complex thinker. Among other things, he was perhaps the most  
eloquent defender of a purely instrumental notion of rationality: "Reason  
is and ought to be the slave of the passions." The notion that reason can  
have nothing to say about our ends, but only about the best means to the  
pursuit of pre-given and a-rational ends, is foundational for neoclassical  
economics in obvious ways.  
 
To see how different economics might be if it were to become  
self-conscious about its modernist (to use McCloskey's term) legacy and  
appreciative of the non-instrumental dimensions of both language and  
rationality, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Anderson's *Value in Ethics  
and Economics*. 
 
 
Kevin