I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Are you saying people don't like mises because he is:
ReplyDelete1. Too blunt?
2. His tone is too sure and not acceptable in academia?
3. He is wrong (in too many academic's opinion)?
Right. Basically, "Who the heck does this economist think he is, lecturing mathematicians on probability and physicists on what the uncertainty principle 'really' means?!"
ReplyDeleteWell, I can totally see them doing that...but, is he right is a more important question they should be asking.
ReplyDeleteWe must not forget that Mises' brother, Richard, was a mathematician--perhaps a little extra jab at a sibling?
ReplyDeleteAnd Ludwig may have been kind to his brother. At Wikipeda, I just came across this quote about Richard by one, Aleksander Ostrowski:
ReplyDeleteBecause of his dynamic personality his occasional major blunders were somehow tolerated. One has even forgiven him his theory of probability.