====================== HES POSTING ============================ I'd like to clarify and also add a bit of context to my recent comment on Wade Hands' HES EDITORIAL on "SSK as a resource for history of economic thought." First, I'd like to say that I think a discussion of SSK writings and approaches would be useful and healthy for economists and historians of economic thought. Getting some sense of the details of this alternative research approach in social science and history can help anyone in understanding and thus doing their own research. I'd also like to endorse the notion that explanatory strategies found in social theory, and insights into the logic of knowledge developed by workers thinking about such social phenomena as language and the market order are profoundly useful in thinking about science and the history of the development of knowledge. I have even carried out this research strategy in my own work, specifically in my paper "Science Without Planning: The General Economy of Science" (http://members.aol.com/gregransom/scienceplan.htm) and "Thomas Kuhn and the Differential Selection of Community Members Acting Upon Alternative Implicit Criteria for Theory Choice" (http://members.aol.com/gregransom/kuhnselection.htm), papers written for Alex Rosenberg and Larry Wright. (Comments and suggestions welcome at: [log in to unmask]). In the picture of science that I have developed however, there is a radical tension between efforts that focus only on the level of motivational or interest categories, e.g., the interests and motives of individuals and groups, and on the so-called 'construction' of belief and language categories, and a picture like that of Kuhn, Hayek, and Wittgenstein, which focuses on _non-intentional_ practices, doings, and built-in commonalities of human going on together, common ways of doing that are available to most any non-lunatic in the appropriate context. In this sense, the SSK agenda is actually radically _reactionary_, a rival to the advancement of folks like Kuhn, Hayek, and Wittgenstein who have moved beyond anthropomorphic categories and explanations exclusively in terms of intentional design that can be captured in public language. The sort of question-begging I mentioned in my early post arises exactly here, in that SSK is a brother (as Wands points out in his 1992 essay "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge") to belief- and desire-modeled strategies for explaining market phenomena -- which, on the account I have developed (see my HES "Hayek Myths" paper http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekmyth.htm), is a rival to the explanatory strategy of Hayek (and others) who have developed an account that begins with a problem given by patterns in our empirical experience, and that then provides an explanation in terms of the causal categories of learning and behavior imitation outside of the given categories of belief and desire states. In a way, SSK constructivism is as much a throw-back to explanation in terms of intentional states and designs as is anthropomorphism in biology, e.g., creationism and essentialism in the explanation of the existence and character of biological species. The tension between efforts to undermine and delegitimize the explanations of Charles Darwin in terms of 'social interests' and 'social constructions' which arise from the class interests and thinking of middle-class folks in early-industrial Britain has been a question-begging effort (and implausible to boot) because this effort has been undertaken in terms of categories that Darwin's explanatory effort rejects -- Darwin is dealing with problems generated by empirical patterns that are available to anyone who is a non-lunatic, problems that show themselves to consist of phenomena that are anything but self-evidently or necessarily products of motivational or interest categories of an individual -- or a social group. Darwin shows that it doesn't take the motivational, constructive, or interest categories of an individual or social group to produce the undesigned but design-like feature of organisms -- or the origin of species with individuals who display such features. The work of Kuhn, Polanyi, Hayek, and Popper, among others, shows, on my account, that the same is true in science, and, in the special case of Hayek, also in the explanation of the undesigned order manifest in the problem raising pattern of the market. Applying the categories of 'interest', 'motivation', 'negotiation', or 'construction' to the development of explanatory strategies which echew such categories, (as do Kuhn, Polanyi, Hayek, and Wittgenstein on my account) in order to undermine and delegitimize these strategies (Wands, 1992, p. 97) can't help but merely beg the question in the question of how to choose the most plausible or fruitful or best explanation of problem raising phenomena in our experience. Reference: D. Wade Hands, "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", In _New Directions in Economic Methodology_, edited by Roger Backhouse, London: Routledge, 1994. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]