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