PK epistemology (was: "Harvard rejects...")

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

I share with Ted a sense of déjà vu having tried to raise these
questions myself before in different ways.

1. What *is* PK epistemology? How do claims of “realism” and “real
world,” which I take, perhaps wrongly, to imply some kind of inductive
knowledge-making, link to deductivism?

2. Am I mistaken in thinking that Paul D and similar theorists assume a
priori:

   (a) a technocratic state of the kind that might be susceptible to PK
   advice
   (b) a clearly bounded nation-state
   (c) a clear internal division within that state between public and
   private sector
   (d) a sort of Weberian-modern society with relatively disembedded
   individuals who are very much subject to that state

In other words none of these things is regarded as needing verification
via systematic and careful observation of the world. My own sense it
that they are simply asserted, often with the rhetorical cover of words
like “modern” or “developed” or “civilized” or "entrepreneurial," words
which essentially mean “those places which fit my assumptions.”

*Within* the aprioristic frame above, it seems to me, “realism” and
inductive claims are mainly limited to the enterprise sector and
financial markets.

3. Would I be wrong in regarding the tautology in Paul D’s work
identified by Ted here

http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pkt/2003II/msg00081.html

as an example of the more general species of tautology called
functionalism?

What is interesting is that of all the economic institutions one might
observe and try to understand in a particular place, money is pulled out
by many PKers and *pre-analyzed*: money meets needs created by
uncertainty. This is characteristic of functional reasoning in which the
effects of an institution (things it does) are also its causes (what
accounts for its existence). You can try to escape this logical loop via
social evolutionism, (and some of Paul’s writings do seem to invoke
evolutionist arguments), but that requies further assumptions.

Best, Colin