Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 05:25:16 -0400 Subject: BHA: Methodology or what is it? Listers help with adjustment of the text and ideas too. Bwanika ---------------- Economic quasi Political Methodology 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 economics methodology 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 are there is a reflection of the intrinsic properties as matter of facts in 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 time random and /or may not to 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 as it is 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 into human encounters yet social science for example to 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 about. 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 & appearance) as necessitated to validate the econometrics difference in the two communities e.g. one fishing village on polar circle and another in on the equator as extrinsically different but economic roundly the same. I have elaborated on structures, but change on structure as in the three forms of water doesn’t readily imply the implicitly 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 nature 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. 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 these similar economic conditions yet for mater of evaluation have dismissal data. The sort of variation sorts and configures the economic action in response to observed patterns hence the econometric native as an account to the interpretative work to be acted upon. Economic method make it possible to ethnologies its methodologies in that to this science or art structure is equivalent to intrinsicity- therefore a causation to transformation as an applied science irrespective of dispositional properties intrinsically or extrinsically i.e. cognitive material resources, historicity, social practice or scientificity, natural order etc, take as given. In the next chapter I will focus on how we can solve this problem. -- ____________ Bwanika url: http://www.uganda.co.ug e-mail: dbbwanika-AT-netscape.net __________________________________________________________________ Your favorite stores, helpful shopping tools and great gift ideas. Experience the convenience of buying online with Shop-AT-Netscape! http://shopnow.netscape.com/ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Mail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/ --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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