Operationalisms and Economics

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[The author is not specified in the Paper.....I think it is by D. Wade
Hands]


http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=112364 [for full piece]
Association for Evolutionary Economics Dec 2004
Source: Journal of Economic Issues


On Operationalisms and Economics

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Although the following discussion constitutes little more than a few first
steps in an ongoing and much larger project concerning the reception of
positivist ideas-and the corresponding demise of pragmatist ideas- within
American economics during the interwar period, it does provide a very
different reading of the intellectual history of opcrationalism and in
particular how such ideas might be, well, operationalized in economics.
The discussion will focus on the variation among operationalist views
(hence the title), and even though the standard interpretation admits that
operationalism was more of a broad general framework than a single unified
position, I will argue that the variation was actually much greater than
commonly recognized. In addition, when we turn beyond the philosophical
literature to the question of how operationalism was interpreted within
the social/human sciences, then the variation becomes even more
pronounced. The bottom line is that certain supporters of Bridgman's
operationalism-John Dewey in particular- considered the main
operationalist message, and its methodological implications for the social
sciences, to be precisely the opposite of the message promoted by
Samuelson in economics and by mid- century behaviorists in psychology.

<.......>


According to the early logical positivists, scientific theories consist of
three main parts- logical, theoretical, and empirical-and each of these
three parts is couched in terms of its own separate vocabulary. The
directly empirical part of a scientific theory is restricted to the
observational vocabulary; the terms in this observational vocabulary are
considered to be directly, and incorrigibly, empirically observable. On
the other hand, the purely theoretical aspect of the theory involves
exclusively the logical and theoretical vocabularies; it consists of a set
of theoretical propositions constructed from various components of these
two different vocabularies. Since these theoretical propositions are
nonobservational, there must be a tight linkage, a transmission mechanism,
that allows such propositions (and the terms in the theoretical vocabulary
more generally) to hook up to the empirical domain: the terms and
expressions within the observational vocabulary. A fourth component of the
positivist view of scientific theories-correspondence rules-performs
precisely this necessary linkage. The correspondence rules translate the
terms in the theoretical vocabulary into the observational vocabulary and
thus into the incorrigible empirical basis of science.

[snip]