John C. Medaille has a long quotation, I believe from Charles Clark. Charles is a colleague whom I respect immensely, and I suspect the quote is longer than what is in the post. In any case, the thought at the end comes from Schumpeter "This _vision_ is pre-analytical in the sense that it exists before theoretical activity takes place.[Charles M. A. Clark]" Schumpeter wrote: "Now it should be perfectly clear that there is a wide gate for ideology to enter into this process. In fact, it enters on the very ground floor, into the preanalytic cognitive act of which we have been speaking. Analytic work begins with material provided by our vision of things, and this vision is ideological almost by definition.” (History of Economic Analysis, p.42) But I take issue with what follows as he shows his absolute faith in the scientific method: "But we also observe that the rules of procedure that we apply in our analytic work are almost as much exempt from ideological influences as vision is subject to it....[these rules] tend to crush out ideologically conditioned error from the visions from which we start." (ibid. p. 43) And the trouble with relying solely on pure logic (as was suggested in one of the posts), is that it involves reasoning from assumptions, and they can be value-laden, even in statistical studies, as some feminist economic research has pointed out. In this respect, there is a very wide gap between the natural and social sciences. Sumitra Shah