Reality is not an aggregate of abstractions

By -
T.M. Knox addresses the idea that scientific economics might be supplemented with what we might refer to as sociological studies in order to make it more applicable to reality. He is skeptical: “It maybe he doubted, however, whether the nature of economic science is such as to permit of an appendage of that kind. For if we want to know about the nature of space we go to a geometer; if we want to know about the nature of money we go to an economic scientist. But in each case we are being told the truth about an abstraction, which has the reality only of an abstraction. Concepts like ‘money’ are human actions or experiences frozen into immobility for the purposes of scientific analysis… [But] reality is not an aggregate or sum of abstractions.”  -- T.M. Knox, "The Study of Economic Activity," Philosophy, 1936

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 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
Read more