From: paul cockshott (clyder@GN.APC.ORG)
Date: Mon Nov 17 2003 - 08:05:16 EST
Ian wrote: Hello Ajit, >If you are referring to Sraffa's book, then, of >course, Sraffa is not developing any causal theory >there. In its typical form it's a constraint-based theory, in the sense that it defines a set of logically possible configurations of an economy given the assumption of reproduction and information regarding technical constraints between commodity types. I agree it is not a causal theory. The fact that mathematically it is expressed as solutions to a set of simultaneous equations (i.e, constraints on possible values of variables) is a sign of that. --------------------------------------------------------- Paul Comments Such constraints based theories are also commonplace in physics. Both quantum and classical mechanics have the same structure at the level of abstraction you define. One has to be careful when one suggests that cause is something other than constraints plus boundary conditions.
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