PKT message, Follow-up on 'squiggly lines'

Further to earlier exchanges on 'squiggly lines'.

John Stuart Mill was of the view that advent of a "satisfactory theory of mind" was required before economics could come of age as 'science'. Mill's point is lost on most contemporary scholars, whose economics was heralded by the advent of the Computer Age.

In reviewing related developments in theoretical physics in the 1920-30s, Cornell Philosophy Professor E. A. Burtt concluded, inter alia, as follows:

"We have observed that the heart of the new scientific metaphysics is to be found in the ascription of ultimate reality and causal efficacy to the world of mathematics, which world is identified with the realm of material bodies moving in space and time. Expressed somewhat more fully, three essential points are to be distinguished in the transformation which issued in the victory of this metaphysical view; there is a change in the prevailing conception (1) of reality, (2) of causality, and (3) of the human mind. First, the real world in which man lives is no longer regarded as a world of substances possessed of as many ultimate qualities as can be experienced in them, but has become a world of atoms (now electrons), equipped with none but mathematical characteristics and moving according to laws fully statable in mathematical form. Second, explanations in terms of forms and final causes of events, both in this world and in the less independent realm of mind, have been definitely set aside in favour of explanations in terms of their simplest elements, the latter related temporally as efficient causes, and being mechanically treatable motions of bodies wherever it is possible so to regard them. In connexion with this aspect of the change, God ceased to be regarded as a Supreme Final Cause, and, where still believed in, became the First Efficient Cause of the world. Man likewise lost the high place over against nature which had been his as a part of the earlier teleological hierarchy, and his mind came to be described as a combination of sensations (now reactions) instead of in terms of the scholastic faculties. Third, the attempt by philosophers of science in the light of these two changes to re-describe the relation of the human mind to nature, expressed itself in the popular form of the Cartesian dualism, with its doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, its location of the mind in a corner of the brain, and its account of the mechanical genesis of sensation and idea.

"These changes have conditioned practically the whole of modern exact thinking. Today new theories on each of these matters are in the making, theories which are more promising than earlier modern attempts to refute the metaphysics of science because they are born of an age in which physical science itself has been forced to break away from its Newtonian moorings and to consider its foundations afresh. In time, out of the clash of these theories will be created a new scientific conception of the world which may last as long and dominate human thinking as profoundly as the great conception of the medieval period. In view of present rapid transformations in the fundamental ideas of the sciences the formation of this new picture in detail cannot be wisely anticipated - it must take its own time to arrive. Yet it ought to be the prime lesson of the present historical study that attempts to formulate this new viewpoint by the mere synthesis of scientific data or the logical criticism of its assumptions are bound to be inadequate in any case. It is of the first importance that they be supplemented by a sound insight into the major factors which have conditioned the rise both of the medieval metaphysics and of its mathematico-mechanical successor which is now seen by all thinkers to demand thorough critical overhauling. Without such insight the new metaphysic, when it arrives, will be but the objectification of the mood of an age, perhaps fitful and temporary, rather than the reasoned _expression_ of the intellectual insight of all ages. Unless we can approximate more closely than has yet been done this generalized interpretation, the new cosmology will hardly be worth the effort required for its construction." (The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Doubleday Anchor Book, 1954, pp. 303-304)

In the case of modern mainstream and monetarist economics, "the new metaphysics" born of "the objectification of the mood of [the computer] age", while suspect on intellectual grounds from the outset, has been under (terminal?) attack by the harsh facts of experience for several years, including the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the current Wall Street Meltdown.

Gunnar