From: Andrew Brown (A.Brown@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Thu Dec 01 2005 - 06:17:50 EST
HI Paul, You ask, "I think it might help me here if you were to give an example of a premise that was necessarily interrelated to the rest of the world, and show how this is different from the method of successive approximation." I reply: I think the point is rather less grand, it is that things and hence their concepts have necessary relations, not that any one thing is necessarily related to absolutely everything else in the rest of the world! Relations of prime interest are systemic ones. For example, the necessary relations between commodities, value, money, and all the other aspects that constitute the capitalist system. The system is very complex but we know that it self-reproduces and self-develops which means it does have some order, a set of interrelations of its parts. We therefore need to grasp the functions, and dysfunctions, of its parts within the reproduction of the system as a whole. If we are Keynes we might discover that one part, wages, while initially appearing to be a cost, draining the system, actually turns out to be a key part of aggregate demand, vital to systemic reproduction. If we are Marx we discover that commodities function as representations of social labour, and that profit functions as the outward form of exploitation: profit, exploitation, social labour, commodities are all necessarily related in the system as a whole [we also discover Keynes was wrong because of his one-sidedness]. So I'm quite surprised that you ask me the question really: economists above all deal with a system of necessarily related parts. As Howard said, there are many other system, such as the human body. You will not grasp any one organ of the body properly only by interrogation of the inner structure of the organ, you also must understand the function (or dysfunction) of the organ within the reproduction of the human body overall. In this way heart, brain, bones, feet, etc. are necessarily interrelated in the system that they constitute and within which they function. The method of successive approximation simply says 'start simple, get complex', so far as I know - it says nothing one way or another about systems of internal relations. You also wrote "The kind of work that Ian Wright is doing involves rigourously applying a few simple fixed rules and investigating the implications of this - deriving for example the law of value from such simple assumptions. I also think that paradoxically Marx's method of exposition with the circuit notations in Capital is actually very similar to formal syntax. One should not be so ready to dismiss formal synatax." I reply: Actually, I was careful not to make any such dismissal. I said scientific theory cannot be solely based on formal systems, not that they are useless. [I admit that it is easy, when pursuing my line of argument, to find oneself falling into the trap of making sweeping dismissals.. thus I actually spent some time re-drafting the email to which you replied, removing any such dismissals!] Marx indeed studies pure forms in exchange - but his theory is not solely based on such study, nor does he present his study of exchange forms explicitly according to rules of syntax (in the manner you give by way of example below) - though I am interested to see how you have done this latter. But Marx only does this analysis of form after having spent much effort uncovering the relevant aspects of content, viz. value and all that. His critique of Ricardo is precisely that Ricardo remains at the level of formal abstraction and never bothers to fathom the nature of the labour that constitutes value. Regarding looking at the interrelation of form and content you asked: "When you 'look at their interrelation' as you put it, is this: a) a heuristic for investigation b) a didactic tactic for explanation c) a rigourous procedure to be followed in investigation" I reply: Basically, it is simply a recognition that they are interrelated and so must be comprehended as such. However, of course there is more to dialectics and dialectical logic than this, which I presume is what you are getting at. But rather than talk about this in the abstract, without space or time to do it properly, then I think it better simply to say that there is nothing imposed upon the investigation or the presentation, no set formula or pattern that must be evident, no way of sneaking anything in, because anything you put in must be scrutinised for what it is, and for how it relates to other aspects. Prior knowledge of philosophical aspects of dialectics can be very helpful for social science but one may not need the help, or one might not find it helpful. This is true of any philosophy or methodology - would you agree? Many thanks, Andy
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