From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Mar 19 2007 - 15:53:49 EDT
Hi Jerry, I was thinking tonight after expending my working capacity more like, how about: Oh, where have you been, my Marxian gun? Oh, where have you been, my darling young sum? I've stumbled on the side of twelve organic compositions, I've walked and I've crawled on six simultaneous equations, I've stepped in the middle of seven price-value deviations, I've been out in front of a dozen labour-values, I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a constant capital, And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard, And it's a hard rate of profit gonna fall. When I studied philosophy of science, I learnt that a "model" is an proto-theoretical analogy or isomorphism, which explores the interrelationships of salient aspects of the object of study, in advance of a comprehensive theory that can explain it in causal or stochastic terms. We make a model, precisely because we lack a comprehensive theory that reveals the inner determinisms of the object. According to Stachowiak, a model needs to possess three features: a mapping feature - a model is based on an original; a reduction feature: a model only reflects a (relevant) selection of the original's properties; and a pragmatic feature: a model needs to usable in place of the original, with respect to some purpose (Herbert Stachowiak. Allgemeine Modelltheorie. Springer-Verlag, Wien and NewYork, 1973 York, 1973, cited in Thomas Kuhne, "what is a model?" http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2005/23/pdf/04101.KuehneThomas1.Paper.pdf ) Marx does provide a comprehensive theory, but it is pitched at a high level of abstraction, it reflects tendencies abstracted from historical experience. This raises the important question of to what extent the theory applies empirically, and really to understand its empirical applications we would have to introduce quite a number of mediating links or qualifiers. There's different ways to go with it, and so you get different schools of thought. TSSI is one school of thought - whereas you don't have to agree with all of it, you could also acknowledge that it has identified some implications of Marx's theory that were previously obscured, and that may be useful. Suppose you are an essentialist. Then you would say something like, that there are unobservable causal forces which explain the observable phenomena. And that could be true, but the question you have to answer is then where you get your notion of specific unobservable causal forces from. Seems to me that the only reasonable answer to that is to say they are implied by observables. The trouble though is that observables could imply any number of unobservables, why these hypothesized causes, rather than any other? If I seek to reason from some known premises to a known conclusion which is not yet logically entailed by the known premises, any of a large number of additional premises could be adduced to make the conclusion logically valid, without any in the set of logically possible additional premises being anymore "logical" than the other candidates in the set. But you're right, if you wanted to model the levelling-out of profit rates ultimately according to quantities of labour-time worked, then as I said you would need a model with a very large number of variables, insofar as you wanted to do it realistically. That's why I suggested one option - not by necessity the best option, but an option - is to regard Marx's theory as a sort of ideal type, and then investigate actual empirical trends using the ideal type as a heuristic device, in search of an explanation of those empirical trends. This is more or less what Kozo Uno suggests. You wouldn't of course necessarily have to agree with Weber's neo-Kantian comparativism, insofar as you could argue that the abstractions in your ideal type were abstractions arrived at in a disciplined way from investigating the historical experience of the real world, and from a critical assimilation of what previous theorists had made of it. But as I suggested, the ideal type as heuristic device may not actually lead to any particular concretization of it, and it may be difficult to show that a more specific theory is logically related to the pure theory. Regards Jurriaan
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