Re: Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley wrote:

> I would associate "rigor" with "logical" and
> "consistent."   Properly done deductivism is
> rigorous, but it is possible to be rigorous
> without being deductivist.  And much deduction
> is empty.  Rigor is no guarantee of a serious
> argument.  It may be empty rigor, rigor mortis.

Whitehead's point is that the axiomatic method itself - "deductivism" -
is limited in its applicability by the ontological fact of internal
relations.  It isn't just that the axioms may be false; it is that to
produce clearly defined axioms you need to be able to abstract from
internal relations since the weaving by argument from these axioms of
"novel compositions," i.e. changed relations, may invalidate the axioms
on which the argument rests.  In social theory this applies to any
argument which takes the "identities" of the individuals whose
behaviour is being theorized as fixed.

Keynes's monetary theory provides an example.  It can't be captured by
an analysis that axiomatically fixes the identities of agents because
it assumes that in certain circumstances, those that produce a monetary
crisis, these identities change.   Conditions of stress can lead to
nervous breakdown.

"Why should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to use money as a
store of wealth?
	"Because, partly on reasonable and partly on instinctive grounds, our
desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree
of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the
future.  Even though this feeling about money is itself conventional or
instinctive, it operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our
motivation.  It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more
precarious conventions have weakened.  The possession of actual money
lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part
with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude."  (XIV, p.
116)

Here is a description by Keynes of an actual crisis:

"the most strking feature of the immediate situation is the
extraordinary disparity between yields in London and yields in New York
of comparable securities.  It seems to me quite impossible that the
present situation can long persist.  And I should have supposed it to
be probable that the readjustment would be brought about by a
substantial rise in prices of prime fixed-interest securities in New
York.  The present may be the chance of a lifetime for the purchase of
the latter.  Obviously everyone in New York is scared so stiff as to be
unable to move.  But that may be the opportunity of others away from
any unsettling influence of the local atmosphere.  No serious risk can
arise unless the existing financial system in America is going to peg
out altogether.  I suppose that that is just possible, but I cannot
believe that it is probable." (XXI, p. 113)

How can the idea of individuals as able in certain circumstances to
become "scared so stiff as to be unable to move" be taken account of by
an approach that axiomatically fixes their identities.

I know that Keynes could not have been awarded the economics "Nobel".
My point was that economics has become a discipline in which Keynes's
insights into human nature and human psychology, such as the one to
which I've just pointed, are misunderstood, marginalized and
disregarded while the ideas of John Nash about the same things are
treated as the work of genius, of a "beautiful mind."

Ted