Speaking of Economics (Routledge, 2007) by Arjo Klamer makes sense of economists and their world in a persuasive and entertaining style.
www.speakingofeconomics.com | copyright © 2007—2010 susan b. macdonald | statcounter
| | Print date: Monday, 6 September 2010
www.speakingofeconomics.com | copyright © 2007—2010 susan b. macdonald | statcounter
Give up the metaphors of science as {mirror and logic} and {body of accumulated knowledge} as meta-conversations so urge; stop staring at propositions, statements and sentences as harbingers of truth; stop thinking of the individual as the wherewithal and start thinking conversation, or better, a bunch of conversations. I promise that encouraging vistas will appear on the horizon.
Inspiration may come from philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Aristotle, the Ludwig Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations (Tractatus had put him in the camp of the Vienna Circle, but Investigations proved he had grown with the times), the German hermeneutic philosopher George Gadamer, and American pragmatists Charles Peirce and John Dewey. There are more but we have to start somewhere. They all urge us to look beyond single propositions, to see that there is more in play than logic and facts, and to consider all that scientists argue in the context of conversations, or discursive contexts, as some prefer to say.
The ideas of pragmatist Charles Peirce (1839-1914) were buried during the reign of the Received View but after the turn to discourse and conversation, they are being unearthed. He draws attention away from the knowing individual towards the community of scholars; truth is what they come to agree upon after arduous research, vigorous argument, and lengthy deliberation. Truth, therefore, is a matter of opinion. Peirce also speaks of beliefs that turn into habits. His pragmatic point is that the truths or beliefs scientists hold must be good for something, must motivate one action or another. In his own words: "[T]he rational purport of a word or expression lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing on the conduct of life" (Peirce, 1878, p. 121). Does that make truth relative? That is a matter of perspective. The community of scholars judges each contribution to their conversation. They first determine whether the contribution is worthy of their joint attention (and we have discussed how slim those chances are) and then they subject it to their scrutiny, discuss it, and possibly refer to it or apply it in their work.
As Rorty would say, the value of a contribution does not follow from confrontation with the facts of the world out there (as the empiricists would have it) or with logic (as propagated by rationalists), but comes about in social situations. Science, therefore, is not a solipsistic affair in which, one by one, scientists uncover truth, but thoroughly social. As a scientist I am dependent upon the conversation in which I participate. Whether this particular contribution is worth anything is not for me to determine; neither will it be determined by the inevitable few who will kindly tell me it has changed their lives. The conversation in which the book is discussed will be the ultimate judge. The disciplinary character is self-preserving. When a community of scholars gets slack about its selection of contributions, it risks its reputation and may discourage new brains from entering their conversation.
Philosophers will be the first to point out that Peirce is not Dewey and Rorty is more a Deweyan than a Peircean. The pragmatic points stand: truth is established in deliberation within communities of scholars. But it is not only truth that matters in a conversation. More is involved in the assessment of contributions to conversations, and of conversations in their entirety.
BOX 5.1 NEAR HERE
BOX 5.2 NEAR HERE