Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University
Important in terms of philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and philosophy of economics, which examine assumptions about subject matter and methodology, as well as the meaning of key terminology in which assumptions are imbedded. Keyes was well aware of these issues that conventional economics avoids or ignores because it makes the scientific enterprise much more tenuous and less amenable to precise measurement owing to complexity and emergence that involve ontological and epistemological uncertainty. As physicist Mark Buchanan has pointed out, this affects natural science as well as life and social science, but life and social science much more owing to adaptability, and social science even more owing to reflexivity, feedback, and learning.
A fundamental issue is essentialism versus contextualism, and structuralism versus functionalism. Essentialism and structuralism assume a level of invariance and regularity that can be determined precisely, independently of context and function. Contextualism and functionalism assume that knowledge of invariance is often much more limited and that essentialists and structuralists are deceived by generalizing from simple cases that are only special cases. Moreover, they see the most significant issues being contextually determined by function rather than being determined by underlying patterns that humans can discern and model mathematically.
Then there is the difference between quantity and quality. Science is essentially quantitative and the arts and humanities essentially qualitative. However, it would be a fallacy of the excluded middle to picture this dichotomy as black and white, either-or. Cognitive science has discovered that quantity and quality are both embedded deeply in the functioning of the brain to the degree that it is not possible to completely disentangle them. Scientific method was developed to overcome the vagaries of subjectivity, but there is a limit to the degree of objectivity that humans are able to obtain through it. Whenever we peer deeply enough into the given, we find ourselves looking back at us.
Keynes summarizes the problem in the Treatise of Probability, exemplified in a quote that Lars provides in the post.
A fundamental issue is essentialism versus contextualism, and structuralism versus functionalism. Essentialism and structuralism assume a level of invariance and regularity that can be determined precisely, independently of context and function. Contextualism and functionalism assume that knowledge of invariance is often much more limited and that essentialists and structuralists are deceived by generalizing from simple cases that are only special cases. Moreover, they see the most significant issues being contextually determined by function rather than being determined by underlying patterns that humans can discern and model mathematically.
Then there is the difference between quantity and quality. Science is essentially quantitative and the arts and humanities essentially qualitative. However, it would be a fallacy of the excluded middle to picture this dichotomy as black and white, either-or. Cognitive science has discovered that quantity and quality are both embedded deeply in the functioning of the brain to the degree that it is not possible to completely disentangle them. Scientific method was developed to overcome the vagaries of subjectivity, but there is a limit to the degree of objectivity that humans are able to obtain through it. Whenever we peer deeply enough into the given, we find ourselves looking back at us.
Keynes summarizes the problem in the Treatise of Probability, exemplified in a quote that Lars provides in the post.
The kind of fundamental assumption about the character of material laws, on which scientists appear commonly to act, seems to me to be [that] the system of the material universe must consist of bodies … such that each of them exercises its own separate, independent, and invariable effect, a change of the total state being compounded of a number of separate changes each of which is solely due to a separate portion of the preceding state … Yet there might well be quite different laws for wholes of different degrees of complexity, and laws of connection between complexes which could not be stated in terms of laws connecting individual parts … If different wholes were subject to different laws qua wholes and not simply on account of and in proportion to the differences of their parts, knowledge of a part could not lead, it would seem, even to presumptive or probable knowledge as to its association with other parts … In my judgment, the practical usefulness of those modes of inference … on which the boasted knowledge of modern science depends, can only exist … if the universe of phenomena does in fact present those peculiar characteristics of atomism and limited variety which appears more and more clearly as the ultimate result to which material science is tending.
A fundamental assumption is that of atomism as an extreme version of methodological individualism in which the elements of a system determine the behavior of the system based on the invariance their types of relationship, all of which are knowable and quantifiable as "laws of nature." This is essentially the Positivist point of view that views unified science as built on atomistic physics. So it is not surprising to find conventional economics modeled in terms of this metaphor.
General systems theory, complexity theory, evolutionary theory and consciousness studies call that view into question as being not scientific but rather an ideological and methodological assumption that is unrealistic.
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