Re: Backed Money-Sproul/Tomasson re. Ricardo/Bentham

["Harry Veeder" <veed0001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: Backed Money-Sproul/Tomasson re. Ricardo/Bentham

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From: Ted Winslow <winslow@xxxxxxxx>
To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Backed Money-Sproul/Tomasson re. Ricardo/Bentham
Date: Tue, Mar 21, 2000, 6:26 am

<snip>
>Keynes no where argues against the importance of logical coherence.  He argues against >"foolish consistency" not against consistency per se.  The Ricardian vice has to do with >"foolish consistency" and with the mistaken identification of formal logic with ontological >atomism.  The latter mistake shows up as Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced >concreteness" (i.e. the neglect of the fact pointed to by Marshall that "man himself is in a >great measure a creature of circumstances and changes with them" - Whitehead himself >makes this point in criticism of classical economics in, among other places, Adventures of >Ideas, chap. 6), as forms of deduction which treat interdependence as atomic rather than >organic, and as "scholasticism"  - "the treating of what is vague as if it were precise and >could be fitted into an exact logical category." (X, p. 343)  (These last two points are also in >Whitehead.)
<snip>

Can anyone state the differences between atomic and organic systems
without hand waving? I suspect the differences have yet to be formally expressed
as axioms.

Harry Veeder