Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 12:14:46 -0400
Subject: Re: BHA: updates- an suggestion?


Hi Bwanika,

One suggestion I have is to be more careful in separating the methods of a 
discipline such as economics or political science from the practices of 
buyers, sellers, politicians, and citizens.  Any knowledge generated by 
someone using the methods of a social science might have some influence 
upon economic and political practices, but the degree to which the 
knowledge influences the practices is itself a question for systematic inquiry.

Dick

At 05:30 AM 07/25/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>Economics is bound to politics and said to be a surrogate for the other. 
>How far true is this assumption? Methodology should be self critical in 
>qualitative and quantitative economics , as a parent to politics and 
>question it too. Economic methods are basically econometrics, a 
>sub-division of probabilistic and mechanical statistics.
>
>Societies and social agents are not probabilistic or mechanistic in their 
>actions. Actions, social agents and societies have a historical mirror 
>under which they?ve got a reflection of the intrinsic properties as matter 
>of facts in their practical, natural and social life. Nevertheless, facts 
>besides natural and some practical one, are not figuratively quantitative, 
>but they?re rather aggregation of time-space; idiosyncratic behaviours, 
>arrays of events which are at sometimes times  random and /or may not 
>generate a web of social and agents meaning, the economic methods will put 
>forward.
>
>What I want to argue is the fact that economic methodology is a 
>physicalist discourse immersed in re-describing historical facts to 
>generate new facts hence also a sub-division of the hermeneutic circle a 
>form, of poetic linguistic turn or to be precise logic.
>
>If we were to suppose that economic methods was a reflection of the facts 
>of social and natural order as its claimed, then human needs and wants 
>wouldn?t  basically and always be the same as reflected in desires, needs 
>and wants. It implies too that economics delving in econometric fictions, 
>would not be re-conceptualising and re-contextualising from empirical data 
>but rather the new state (s) of society generated thereupon from new 
>desires, wants and needs. Society most probably will be generating the 
>means and ways by which economics will re-describe the intersection of 
>natural, social and practical order to generate a new science i.e. a 
>paradigmatic shift in economics and subsequently political processes.
>
>Its evident therefore that economics method is in a state of statis,  when 
>we take space-time arrays in place and distance in regard to social being 
>and nature. There is certainly and undoubtedly a yearning for social 
>transformation - accrued from human encounters yet social science for 
>example does not provide a nameable causation and substantial pattern 
>which allows its possibility to happen. Moreover the changes within 
>society, social agents and their action does not imply, the intrinsic 
>nature of being and social life does fundamentally change but rather the 
>appearance which is an extrinsic property of what economics is actually 
>about1. As a matter of fact, economics simplistically ground facts of 
>society, social agents and their actions, as ethnographic hence an 
>elaboration of sound re-definition of the two separate instance 
>(structures and appearance) as necessitated to validate the econometrics 
>difference in the two communities e.g. one fishing village on the polar 
>circle and another on the equator as extrinsically different but 
>economically roundly the same.
>
>I have elaborated on structures, but change in structure as in the three 
>forms of water doesn?t readily imply that implicitly the nature of water 
>molecules have changed. So is society, social agents and their actions; 
>change in language (redefinition); conceptually and contextually might 
>generate transformation in the appearance of structures and social systems 
>but not their basic algorithms and constituents. It?s therefore my feeling 
>that economic methodology is transformative laden but hides the other 
>patterns, meanings and mechanism antecedent to the constitution of natural 
>kinds and the ways things of nature behave.
>
>E.g. in the so called advanced societies, urban misery transposed to less 
>advanced society suffering and inadequacy crosses out the scientificity of 
>economics methodology as being a quasi social action shrouded in mundane 
>political methods they generate thereof.
>
>It is within the same vein, I wish to state that the economic paradigm 
>based on econometric methodologies are ethnographic in and by nature hence 
>evolving around ?blitzkrieg? in order to validate what it is, it is 
>about.  I need to elaborate on this further: say a fishing community on 
>the edges of the polar circle will be assumed to slightly behave based on 
>past experience of economic method in the same manner as the one found in 
>the oasis of the desert. Since data and basic material observable is the 
>relation between the fishermen and their trade fishing, it might be 
>assumed the same characteristic rules under similar economic conditions 
>yet for matter of evaluation have dismissal data content. The sort of 
>variation sorts and configures the economic action in response to observed 
>patterns, hence the econometric narrative account for interpretative work 
>to be acted upon depicted as a social fact.
>
>Economic method makes it possible to ethnolograhicies its methodologies in 
>that to this science or art, structure is equivalent to intrinsicality- 
>i.e. there is no difference between appearance and content, therefore 
>causation is the same or equivalent as /to transformation as an applied 
>science (or social practice), irrespective of dispositional properties 
>intrinsically or extrinsically i.e. cognitive material resources, 
>historicity, social practice or scientificity, natural order etc,. Such 
>problems are not limited to economics but rather to the entire social 
>sciences and speculative sociology too, which discovered solace in class 
>sociology as an inoculation against such social ills, as if societies and 
>social agents are incapable of an upward and downward movements in their 
>social parameters.
>
>It should be noted hence that context in which research is by an type or 
>status a researcher might have, has socially practical and natural affects 
>on the production of research knowledge in the way such projects have to 
>be viewed in the public eye.  Because of the social impact research should 
>not be taken as interpersonal difference, disciplinary antagonism or 
>methodological bias. In fact politicians, journalist and the general 
>public the consumers of economic products should be wary of the 
>accomplishments of logical empiricism (econometrics) in their attempt to 
>locate social ideologies. The question in his respect is not to divorce 
>moral and ethical discourse from the factuality of society properties and 
>the nature of being which, by the way is fundamental and has got a 
>historical trajectory. Economic logic has a propensity to linguify reality 
>in a stochastic manner (cinematic society), in pretension of creating new 
>meanings which actually do not exist. It is by way of making facts 
>represented as symbolic, to interpret what economics might term as a new 
>order without grounded incredulity about the very origins of human behaviours.
>
>
>--
>
>
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