================= HES POSTING ======================= I am a great fan of Weintraub & Mirowski's 1994 essay "The Pure and the Applied: Bourbakism Comes to Mathematical Economics" _Science in Context_, 7 (2): 245-272. Anyone who has yet to read this is in for a real eye-opener -- and a significant contribution to our understanding of the roots of the contemporary explanatory failure of the formalist project in economics. But I must object to Roy's suggestion that this is the beginning and the end of our understanding of the notion of 'formalism' in mathematics or economics. I might point folks to Michael Friedman's excellent little essay "Philosophy and the Exact Sciences" in _Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations_ edited by John Earman, Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1992, for a richer account of the history of formalism in mathematics and science. As Friedman tells the story, the modern vision of formalism begins with the modern logic of Frege, and its replacement of the old picture of logic inherited from Aristotle, along with Frege's dissatisfaction with the lack of rigor in 19th century mathematics. Frege's project was itself part of the replacement of the previous effort at providing a 'rigorous' foundation for mathematics and science in the Kant/Newton picture of math and physics. The Frege program, when combined with the new picture of science inherited from Comte and Mach, was viewed as a more rigorous replacement of the Kantian system, and its various Neo-Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, historicist, hermeneutical, and phenomen- ological varieties. This replacement was percieved as necessary in light of the refutation of the Kantian system with the development of Non-Euclidian geometry and the theory of Relativity -- counter-examples to Kant's picture of synthetic apriori knowledge. Frege's program, along with the Mach program, grew as an explicitly formalist program, and this formalist program had tremedous influence in all branches of the special sciences and humanities. Aspects of this formalist revolution can be tracked into economics directly through the influence of folks like Carnap, Schlick, Popper, and others on the work of Hutchison, Friedman, Wald, Hayek, and even Samuelson and Schumpeter, among others. The full context of this formalist revolution in logic, mathematics, and the social sciences must be understood, however, in the context of the German debates in the Neo-Kantian tradition -- a point made in part by Friedman, and also by Nancy Cartwright, et al in their _Otto Neurath_ Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1996. This history would include an account of the key roles of Menger, Windelband, the various schools of Neo- Kantianism, in the picture of knowledge debated in Germany during this time, as well, in the later period in economics, of the key role of the influence of Mises on folks like Robbins, Hayek, and Hutchison, both the way that the Mises picture of value changed the topic of economics for folks like Robbins and the role of the value construction, and how folks like Hayek, Hutchison, and Friedman, among others, reacted against Mises attempt to hand on to the dated picture of synthetic apriori knowledge inherited from Kant and the neo-Kantians. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask] http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]