==================== HES POSTING ===================== I suspect that one reason for the silence regarding Professor Mirowski's editorial is that it says things that practically everyone who is familiar with the other non-hard sciences would agree with. The historicism, institutionalism, and scientism that tempted individuals seeking status as professional economists also tempted individuals in all of those social science enterprises where newly hired university teachers sought legitimacy by establishing a profession. And this more or less covers the field of the social and human sciences. In the non-social sciences like biology and ecology, mathematical modeling and simulation played important roles, while there was obviously little use for historicism and institutionalism. In the social sciences, as in economics, these developments naturally met opposition from would-be praxeologists. So if one wants to discuss the history of a profession, he may benefit from noting such similarities. But this enterprise strikes me a bit like trying to understand the performance of a football team by studying the interaction of the players while they are off the field. One would find similarities between the behavior of the players and the behavior of truck-drivers, stockbrokers, members of the sewing circle, and historians of economic thought. Such a study might be interesting per se, but we would be stretching matters to call it the study of football. So one can agree with Mirowski and wait until next month. Or one can try to shift the grounds of the discussion -- an enterpise that does not seem to interest most HESers. -- -- Pat Gunning http://stsvr.showtower.com.tw/~gunning/welcome ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]