Kenneth L. Pearce — George Berkeley and the power of words

John Locke's epistemological realism versus George Berkeley's linguistic constructivism. Subsequent findings favor Berkeley's view. Human's participate in the construct of their reality through the way they express themselves about it and their relationship to it.

Short and worth a read.

OUPblog — Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World
George Berkeley and the power of words

Kenneth L. Pearce | Ussher Assistant Professor in Berkeley Studies (Early Modern Philosophy) in Trinity College Dublin

Cameron K. Murray — Micro-foundations don't escape Lucas Critique

The fundamental flaw in conventional economic (econometric) modeling is the assumption of regularity that is supposedly supplied by microfoundations. "Microfoundations" assumes rationality and it is rationality that gives individual behavior regularity across individuals. It is the basis from assuming a representative agent as the totality of agents, disregarding supposedly irrelevant differences. Since all agents act rationally, it can be assumed, for example, that they are utility maximizers, and operate regularly irrespective of policy change and institutional difference.

This assumption is contradicted by empirical research in social science. The relationships of elements of a system, in this case individuals, are as important or more important than the individuals themselves in determining system outcomes. Murray cites a report of recent research by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, The Weirdest People in the World, that calls into question the suitability of economists making assumptions based on personal introspection about rationality or even relying on psychological research on a limited population. "

As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?”(pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

 Fresh economic thinking
Micro-foundations don't escape Lucas Critique
Cameron K. Murra

Also, as Rumplestatskin, The basic flaw in all economic modelling

The question then becomes, is conventional economics descriptive or performative? Is neoliberalism assumed in the assumptions as a norm?

 

Lars P. Syll — What is an explanation?

One of the most important tasks of social sciences is to explain the events, processes, and structures that take place and act in society. But the researcher cannot stop at this. As a consequence of the relations and connections that the researcher finds, a will and demand arise for critical reflection on the findings. To show that unemployment depends on rigid social institutions or adaptations to European economic aspirations to integration, for instance, constitutes at the same time a critique of these conditions. It also entails an implicit critique of other explanations that one can show to be built on false beliefs. The researcher can never be satisfied with establishing that false beliefs exist but must go on to seek an explanation for why they exist. What is it that maintains and reproduces them? To show that something causes false beliefs – and to explain why – constitutes at the same time a critique of that thing.
This I think is something particular to the humanities and social sciences. There is no full equivalent in the natural sciences, since the objects of their study are not fundamentally created by human beings in the same sense as the objects of study in social sciences. We do not criticize apples for falling to earth in accordance with the law of gravitation.

The explanatory critique that constitutes all good social science thus has repercussions on the reflective person in society. To digest the explanations and understandings that social sciences can provide means a simultaneous questioning and critique of one’s self-understanding and the actions and attitudes it gives rise to. Science can play an important emancipating role in this way. Human beings can fulfill and develop themselves only if they do not base their thoughts and actions on false beliefs about reality. Fulfillment may also require changing fundamental structures of society.

Understanding of the need for this change may issue from various sources like everyday praxis and reflection as well as from science....

This cuts to the core of the Western intellectual tradition that began in ancient Greece. Aristotle said that speculation begins with wonder. The satisfier, he concluded, was a causal explanation. This launched the investigation into causal explanation that is still very much underway.

Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle's teacher, Plato, famously said that a life not reflected upon is not worth the living. Human life should be a critical process if one is to live up to one's potential as a human being whose goal is to live a good life in a good society with others of good will. This doesn't just happen naturally since humans have tendencies they share with other animals that are instinct-driven as well as controlled by selfish desires like lust, anger, and greed, as well as rational tendencies that are driven by intellect and modulated by noble desires like love and the altruism it leads to.

Lars goes on to show how closed systems cannot adequately represent social reality, which requires open systems since human behavior is reflexive, adaptive, and emergent — in other words, complex. Moreover, social behavior is culturally and institutionally influenced.

With a non-reductionist approach we avoid both determinism and voluntarism. For although the individual in society is formed and influenced by social structures that he does not construct himself, he can as an individual influence and change the given structures in another direction through his own actions. In society the individual is situated in roles or social positions that give limited freedom of action (through conventions, norms, material restrictions, etc.), but at the same time there is no principal necessity that we must blindly follow or accept these limitations. However, as long as social structures and positions are reproduced (rather than transformed), the actions of the individual will have a tendency to go in a certain direction.

Where I disagree somewhat with Lars is over his contention that reality is independent of mind and that through a properly scientific approach, we can approach "reality" in our explanatory theories. Being a constructionist and pragmatist, I take "reality" to refer to experience rather than "things in themselves." Human construct their reality in groups and tend to associate in groups that validate their experience. Humans structure their experience in terms of an overarching model or "worldview" (Weltanschauung). Social reality is different from individual reality as personal experience, in that groups influence the way that people experience, interpret their experience, and construe it linguistically. See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1996).

There is a great deal of divergence in worldviews even within overarching worldviews such as the Western worldview in contrast with the Chinese worldview, the Islamic worldview and the Indian worldview. While a single worldview is emerging with globalization it will take considerable time to develop into a coherent worldview. A great deal of the present political and economic turmoil is a result of the attempt to impose a Western and specifically American worldview on globalization.

A person that would be regarded as insane, superstitious or ignorance in a group seldom either associates with such a group other than out of necessity or else conceals one's real views from those who do not share them, and especially when this would result in a disadvantage.

Science is not merely a method of observation and theory construction. It takes place within a social milieu with an established culture and institutions, using ordinary language. Wittgenstein showed in his later work that ordinary language embeds a worldview (Weltbild). The use of "Bild" emphasizes that this is a model constructed in logical space.

To use a metaphor from physics, humans don't act as simply cameras recording objects existing in relation to each other in absolute space. Rather, humans experience in terms of a field having certain affects some of which are objective, e.g., sense data, but much of which is imposed subjectively, e.g., norms. While there is a great agreement based on sense data, as shown by the inter-translatability of languages, there is also not a one to one correspondence, also shown by the difficulty in translating many concepts precisely owing to nuance of context and construction.

Cognitive science has since supported this view. See, for example, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), as well as Metaphors We Live By (1980). We think in terms of conceptual models built from metaphors traceable to experience. These metaphors are both cognitive and affective.

The issue is that while sense-experience is more or less the same for all humans given the shared physiology, the agreement stops there for the most part. Even the "facts" are often in dispute in that the same data is structured differently as information. The quality of the signal is then compared not only with the data but also with the worldview in which experience is embedded. The same input can be construed in many ways and there are no absolute criteria independent of worldviews.

Therefore, the criterion is "experience," which is not only the fundamental criterion of science but of naive common sense. But as history reveals, naive common sense has often been wrong about the seemingly the most obvious things like the sun rising and setting. Coupled with the religious teaching of the centrality of Earth, it was a logic step to conclude that Earth is the center of the universe. While "science" subsequently showed the error in logic, how to be sure that contemporary science is not subject to similar errors.

For example, the worldview of mystics the world over is radically different from that of science, which takes the reality of ordinary experience to be actual reality. Mystics report exactly the opposite based on their non-ordinary experience, and those who follow spiritual paths report having similar experiences. Some of these have been or are scientists. Some Western scientists who do not assert such experience have also held that this view makes the most sense. Who is correct? How to decide?

What is an explanation?
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

David F. Ruccio — Class and essentialism

I have worked for over three decades in a theoretical tradition, born at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and associated with the journal Rethinking Marxism, defined by a revitalization of Marxian class analysis (in relation to the appropriation and distribution of surplus labor) and a critique of essentialism (in both methodology, such as economic determinism and humanism, and epistemology, including rationalism and empiricism). What this means is that we tend to see class processes as neither essentialist determinants of economic and social outcomes nor the phenomenal form of some essential cause but, rather, as the overdetermined cause and effect of history and the myriad—economic, political, and cultural—dimensions of society.

But we have never really looked at the class determinants of essentialist views of the world. As it turns out, Dacher Keltner (whose research I have discussed before, here and here) has (with coauthor Michael W. Kraus) done just that. And the results are fascinating.

What psychologists Keltner and Kraus (behind a paywall) find is that social class is correlated with both essentialist conceptions of class and beliefs in a just world—and that the belief in a just world, in turn, reinforces essentialist conceptions of class. In other words, they found that upper-class individuals (as measured by subjective ranking rather than so-called objective criteria, such as income) were more likely to endorse the idea, first, that social class is an inherent, stable, and biologically determined social category and, second, that society is fair and just relative to their lower-class counterparts. Those on the other end tended to view the world through a different, social constructivist lens, that is, the view that “social class is based on changeable, external social forces.”

Occasional Links & Commentary
Class and essentialism
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

The essentialism versus constructivism dichotomy is extremely important logically, ontologically, and epistemologically, with implications for ethics and social and political philosophy as well, hence, philosophy of economics. Understanding this is central to understanding the foundational differences in many fields, including politics, social studies, and economics. So please ask questions if anything is unclear. There is no such thing as a stupid question.