Re: Theory-laden observation

["Alan G. Isaac" <AISAAC@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Herb,

I'll respond first to your closing question, and I
hope others on the list will offer addtional
suggestions. I find Richard Rorty
to "make sense". If you haven't already, try _Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth_. If you already like this and are
demanding an example more concrete, less epistemological,
and more sociological, let me know. If you already hate this,
I may be at a loss.

Who do you find both reputable and terrible? (Leave out
the continentals.)

But finding sensible discussions of the role that our
peculiar historical, cultural, and personal situations
play in shaping our knowledge claims is, I grant you
ahead of time, different than showing that our work
as economists should in any way be affected. In particular,
I cannot offer any general argument that it should
i. affect our struggle to understand how the world works, or
ii. affect our vision of how the world should work.
Rather, we consider a few examples and see if anything
useful comes from them.

My reference to Sen's argument was not intended to say
that it was valuable because it opposed behaviorism
but rather because I believe it _refutes_ behaviorism
by uncovering an internal inconsistency. In contrast,
Freudianism is simply a competing framework for
investigation, and I do not see any interesting way
in which it "refutes" behaviorism. If you find
behaviorism obviously wrong, a refutation may not
interest you. Since I find the explicit behaviorism
of economists of the 30s, 40s, and 50s still lingering
in contemporary literature, I found it useful to have
a clear statement of one of its defects. (Not that this
is Sen's first presentation of this argument, but it
is the most likely to be read.)

More generally, however, my desire to understand how
the world works extends to the generation of knowledge.
Whether or not I find immediate applications in my
own work or own vision, I am interested in the
general content of the sophisticated statements
because they persuade me and seem enlightening,
beginning with Marx's discussions of ideology.
For example, I found MacIntyre's links between
English translations of Homer over the centuries
and social context of the translations to be fabulous,
even though on its own it is just an anecdote.
(Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p.17)

For a mundane application, I find startling many
of the things my students "know" about welfare
recipients. Of course we don't need a sociology
of knowledge to criticize their knowledge claims,
but we might need it to understand how they come
to make such knowledge claims. And this may
be useful.

Finally, for a potential application to our own profession,
I find it fascinating that many economists (and others)
grant the pursuit of narrow self-interest such unique
legitimacy in modeling human behavior.
I suspect this is due more to "sociological
influences" than to "scientific progress".

Would you disagree?

--Alan