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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 
 
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