Re: PK epistemology

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Dear Fred,

Thank you very much for your paper. For what it's worth I’m much in
sympathy with the approach taken. If I can oversimplify for a moment,
you are working to minimize the number of assumptions made, and to put
in place a process by which, when we do make assumptions, we (a) remain
aware of that fact, (b) reflect critically on the assumptions, and (c)
remain willing at some point to drop or modify those assumptions if we
don’t think we are producing good explanations of the observable world.
More could be said about how difficult this is, particularly in
discovering the properties of institutions. (Anthropology, which has in
ethnography a painstakingly worked-out and carefully-taught process in
which people spend literally years on the ground trying to map out and
understand institutions, has not resolved the problems of importing
ideologies and prefabricated categories.) But I have no disagreement
with you here – the fact that the process is difficult is also what
makes social science interesting. I do wonder how much existing
heterodox econ rises to the admirably high degree of reflective rigor
that you propose, and I wonder how many practicing PKers accept your
approach even as an ideal.

I would prod a little bit around the question of the stability and
solidity of the categories of “the economy” and the economic. As I read
the article as a whole, you would be very much open to the likelihood
that understanding an observable material phenomenon might require us to
consider political behavior, cultural meanings, and so forth – you
assume that society is an open system, and do not assume that society
consists of precise separable strata matching the academic divisions of
the social sciences. Given that openness, for me to question the
category of “the economy” may be unnecessary and even tiresome – it
might be a starting assumption, or a useful fiction, that we would later
return to and rethink. But, but – I still worry about the rhetorical
effects of naturalizing the “economic,” something that I think also
happens when heterodoxers define themselves by opposition to
neoclassicals in a way that pointedly does not question the separateness
and definability of “the economic.” The same thing strikes me when I
read the critical realist literature: there seems to be relatively
little interest in moving outside the boundaries of econ or questioning
why they are there and how they are made. But maybe I’m reading the
wrong stuff.

This question certainly arises *if* I am right that a lot of existing PK
work makes large consequential assumptions about social and political
institutions and makes those assumptions with only casual gestures at
evidence.

Best, Colin