PKT message, Epistemology & Economics

Due to pressure of other business, I have not been able to revert to some of the methodological questions that were left hanging at the end of the exchanges between Ted Winslow and myself some time ago.

On doing so now, it occurs to me that the discussion might be directed onto a track of more immediate concern to all those on the PKT Forum who, as teachers or students of economics, must always bear in mind the point which Paul Samuelson once expressed as follows:

"...economics is by its nature a softer and less exact science than, say, conventional physics. Now in a hard, exact science a practitioner does not really have to know much about methology. Indeed, even if he is definitely a misguided methodologist, the subject itself has a self-cleansing property which renders harmless his aberrations. By contrast, a scholar in economics who is fundamentally confused concerning the relationship of definition, tautology, logical implication, empirical hypothesis, and factual refutation may spend a lifetime shadow-boxing with reality. In a sense, therefore, in order to earn his daily bread as a fruitful contributor to knowledge, the practitioner of an intermediately hard science like economics must come to terms with methodological problems. I stress the importance of intermediate hardness because when one descends lower still, say to certain areas of sociology that are almost completely without substantive content, it may not matter much one way or the other what truths or errors about scientific method are involved - for the reason that nothing matters." (Foreword to 'Foundations of Economic Analysis', 1964 - Atheneum, New York, 1979, p. ix).

Albert Einstein put the essential point at issue more (a) succinctly, and (b) properly as follows:

"Science without epistemology is - insofar as it is thinkable at all - primitive and muddled."

Curiously, when I proposed to do a Ph. D. thesis on "the epistemology of science in general and of economic science in particular" at the Harvard Department of Economics in 1979 (where I had taken the General Exam for the Ph. D. in 1965), then Department Chairman Dwight Perkins wrote back that he could not approve this thesis topic because there was NO FACULTY QUALIFIED TO SUPERVISE A THESIS ON THE SUBJECT MATTER.

My own subsequent research in the epistemological aspects of modern physics has persuaded me (a) that Samuelson's concept of economics as an "intermediately hard" subject is an oxymoron; (b) that the Harvard Faculty's innocence in the epistemological aspects of modern science is characteristic of both mainstream and monetarist scholars; and (c) that academic economics both is and will remain "primitive and muddled" until and unless its epistemological foundations are re-examined and re-constructed from the ground up.

Let me leave it at that for the time being.

Any comments pro or con?

Gunnar Tomasson