Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Science may announce the probability of the recurrence of a certain measurement within the system of its own observations, but to demand more than this, to demand that a science of economics should predict categorically a slump or boom in trade, is to demand what, indeed, some economists have promised, but what an economic science could never afford." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 228

I open the book, and the first line is: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Here, I thought I would be reading great literature, and yet it opens with this cliché I have heard a thousand times!

"It is not because the particular observations of economics refer to living things, or to human beings, or to voluntary actions that their character is complex and obscure and their behavior variable; complexity, obscurity, and variableness are the characteristics of every particular observation by reason of its particularity... Moreover, although many economists assert economics to be concerned with man, and voluntary human actions, when we turn to their actual observations and generalizations we shall, I think, find not only that economics need not be concerned with these things… but also that economics actually is not concerned with them." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 225 What Oakeshott goes on to argue is that scientific economics deals with abstract quantities such as price, cost, utility, and disutility, where human beings as such play no part -- scientific economics could just as well treat exchanges between robots as between humans.

"Whatever cannot be conceived quantitatively cannot belong to scientific knowledge." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 221 Thus, the critics of ID are quite correct: there is no way to quantify the idea "X designed Y to be so," and thus "design" is an idea excluded from scientific discourse. That truth in no way implies that "design" is a nonsense idea: it just means that, in the world of science, which seeks to establish mathematical relationships between measured quantities, "design" has no place. As objections to this fact, I often have seen two cases offered: 1) Archaeologist detect design in their research. Yes, they do, but archaeology is an historical, and not a scientific, discipline. 2) SETI researchers look for evidence of intelligent design. OK, while this search has been conducted by scientists, is there any evidence it is scientific? I think not.

"Economics is a name which covers a variety of intellectual interests, and it may be doubted whether many of these have anything in common beyond this name. But to centre thought upon a mere name not only will never produce a homogeneous world of ideas, but it will also tend to establish in our minds a pseudo-relationship between sets of ideas which do not and cannot belong together; it will encourage argument to pass inconsequently from one world of ideas to another... Moreover, this is not merely the condition of things we might expect from such a haphazard bringing together of different sets of ideas, it is the actual condition of much economic thought at the present time. Economics, as we find it in the books of many of its most distinguished professors, comprises a meaningless miscellany of scientific, historical and practical ideas and arguments." -- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes , p. 220 This paragraph is about the best thing ever written to enable us ...

Is on line at the Review of Austrian Economics .

The world of science is an abstraction. It discovers that electrons stand in certain quantitative relationships to protons, and so forth. Whitehead suggests that this is because they "prehend" the proton and react to it in a certain way. This is a philosophical position, and science can have nothing significant to say about it, other than, "Whether or not electrons prehend protons, that is no part of the abstractions with which we deal." Similarly, science says nothing at all about what migraine headaches "really are." It traces out certain quantitative relationships in human physiology that occur before or along with a migraine. If someone suggests that these changes are the result of a demon entering the sufferer's body, all science can say is, "Well, the demon doesn't appear in our equations." But, of course, neither do the sights, sounds and smells of the real world. So not showing up in a scientific equation is no sign of irreal...