Sumitra Shah wrote: >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) I think Clark and Schumpeter are saying different things, but you are, apparently, in a position to check this directly with Charles. For Schumpeter, ideology is an almost necessary but certainly regrettable part of vision, a part which can be eliminated by proper method. For Clark, we need some framework to be able to "see" anything at all and hence methodology alone is insufficient to correct our vision. In other words, for Schumpeter, we widen our vision by correcting our methodology, but for Clark we correct our methodology by widening our vision; its a matter of which has priority, method or vision. The practical application is that for Schumpeter, we would have to be more narrowly scientific to correct our pre-analytical vision, while for Clark we would have to be more broadly educated (and hence "see" more things) in order to correct a narrow methodology. Science, I think, bears out Clark's view more than it does Schumpeter's. Physics, for example, used to be taken as a model of "pure" observation, but this turns out not to be true; the observer cannot be divorced from the observation. In measuring light, to take but one instance, the observer determines before any data is gathered whether light will be a wave or a particle (it cannot be both in the same experiment). In other words, the observer decides on the results; they are never a pure "given." Another example comes from Oliver Saks (the Doctor depicted in the movie Awakenings). A middle-aged blind man has his sight restored. But he still cannot see in any meaningful sense, though there is nothing physically wrong with his sight. Where you and I would see a man walking across the grass, this man would see a spot of pink moving across a field of green; he has no way to interpret the pink as a face and the green as grass. The cognitive act turns out to be very complex indeed, a complexity hidden from us by repetition. The man with his sight restored still has to walk with a cane, even though he can see everything that you and I can see; he has sight, but no vision. The upshot is, I think, that economics needs to be treated as a liberal art more than a physical science. Philosophy, mathematics, history, art, and literature need to be part and parcel of the training of an economist; what is needed is not so much better method as better vision. >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. I agree completely. Every logical exercise starts with the selection of fundamental premises, a process which is itself non-logical. Further, logic is only a test of validity, not of truth; it can only tell us whether conclusions are properly inferred from the premises, but not whether the premises are themselves true. Logic by itself can eliminate transformation errors but can never establish a truth. That comes from a different process altogether. The belief in a purely "logical" economics comes, I believe, from Nassau Senior, but Senior's four fundamental premises were blatantly political and hardly fundamental at all. John C. Medaille