PKT message, On Scientific Method

My following Gang8 message of today's date may be of interest.

Gunnar

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I could not find anything germane on E. Peshine Smith on the Internet.

However, his proposition that Ricardo's "theoretical assumptions" were "wrong-headed" is predicated on a view of the relationship between "theory" and "real world" which, beginning with Newton, scientific minds of first rank (that is Newton and Einstein!) reject as epistemologically untenable.

Here, for example, is Newton on how the Gravitational Equations of Principia should be construed:

"I likewise call attractions and impulses, in [a certain] sense, accelerative, and motive; and use the words attraction, impulse, or propensity of any sort towards a centre, promiscuously, and indifferently, one for another; considering those forces not physically, but mathematically: wherefore the reader is not to imagine that by those words I anywhere take upon me to define the kind, or the manner of any action, the causes or the physical reason thereof, or that I attribute forces, in a true and physical sense, to certain centres (which are only mathematical points); when at any time I happen to speak of centres as attracting, or as endued with attractive powers." (Definition VIII)

In other words, PLEASE DO NOT CONSTRUE MY EQUATIONS AS "EXPLANATORY" IN ANY MANNER, SHAPE OR FORM!

Yet, that is precisely what Laplace did - and, when they attempted to reproduce Newton's "success" in the field of Political Economy, 19th century economists swallowed that construction hook, line, and sinker, mistaking mere modeling of phenomena generated by Nature's Invariance with explanation of such phenomena.

That was one - but only one - reason why E. A. Burtt could without fear of contradiction speak of "the metaphysical barbarism of a few centuries" when summing up the epistemological aspects of modern physical science.

In the neo-classical tradition in economics through Samuelson and Lucas, the like metaphysical barbarism has reigned triumphant - sort of - since the last third of the 19th century.

And so it did in Keynes' General Theory model - and the like metaphysical handicap afflicts every last one of contemporary Post Keynesian models.

Gunnar