Re: uncertainty

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Hello Mat:

It's also worth going back to Keynes' _Treatise on Probability_ plus the
more recent literature on it -- Fitzgibbons and others.  This is not to
suggest that there is one PK position, but if there is merit to
theorizing from ontological uncertainty, as I think there is, the issues
have to be specified and drawn out with a lot of care.

Hicks' later work is wonderfully clear on this e.g.

Hicks, J.R. 1985. ?Time in Economics? pp. 282-300 in in Hicks, ed. Money
Interest and Wages: Collected Essays on Economic Theory, Vol. II.
Harvard University Press.

What comes out in this, and in Paul's work, is a very close relationship
between historical time, ontological uncertainty, and what you might
call the molecular structure of the economy-in-time -- the financing
relationships and other through-time commitments that people and firms
have to each other.

Ontological uncertainty is connected with the notion that the nature of
the national economy changes over historical time.  Obviously it is
possible to translate any particular result or insight gained via
ont-unc into one or another varieties of epist-unc.  The more
interesting issue is how a given starting point generates questions and
insights. (Ontologies of course cannot be proven, but they are
fundamental to how people theorize ... how can anyone move usefully
between two or more paradigms *without* being acutely aware of their
ontological differences?)  I doubt though that this is something we can
settle via little e-mails -- a large part of the Pauline project, for
example, has been to argue for the merits of a particular set of
starting axioms by very carefully elaborating what they can produce.

Best, Colin