My book, Capital as a Social Kind: Definitions and Transformations in the
Critique of Political Economy, is scheduled to go to press tomorrow, Friday,
and will be released in a couple of weeks in the Routledge series, Frontiers
of Political Economy. I hope all of you will do what you can to encourage a
library near you to order it. The book is a little unusual. Here are the
first sentences:
"In the pages that follow I study capital as a social kind. I argue Marx's
object in Capital was to study capital as a social kind. Thinking in terms
of kinds refers to the way we sort the things of the world into
categories -- water, for example, is a natural kind -- and references to
natural kinds in the Western philosophical tradition reach back to the
ancient world. But the extension of this tradition to the study of social
life has hardly begun."
Thinking about natural kinds and about our ability to give real definitions
of them (the real definition of water is H2O; we use the chemical formula to
pick out the molecular structure that accounts for what water is, how it
behaves, and for the information we have about it) have become quite
sophisticated in the last couple of decades, so the effort here is to extend
this approach to the study of social kinds and to argue in addition that
Marx's analysis of capital in fact foreshadowed contemporary paths and
concerns.
The first chapter is methodological and I discuss themes that have figured
in list discussions since Ian's mention of unobservables a couple of weeks
ago. I discuss the object of capital, mind independence in the study of
social life, and whether the project of extending natural kind methodology
to the study of social kinds is possible at all. Necessarily if capital is
a social kind and is the object of our study then we have to explain how we
may study the sensuously unobservable, and I devote a small section to
discussing this. I've attached a copy of that section plus an extra
paragraph that reflects back on it. I've also attached the publisher's book
description and also the table of contents. The book discusses the real
definition of value and of capital and on this foundation considers how the
causal structures that characterize these become the foundation for
investigations of law and morality. A last chapter considers how the
transition to socialism is a moving beyond capital as a social kind to
social life characterized by a different social kind.
The url for the book is as follows:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415776912/
thanks,
howard
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Cockshott" <William.Cockshott@glasgow.ac.uk>
To: "Outline on Political Economy mailing list" <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 6:40 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE] Models and Marx
Dave wrote
When I wrote 'model' before I didn't mean a formalized model. Instead it
was a carefully chosen analogy, in that theories *model* underlying
causal mechanisms. As such all theories are models of reality.
---- I am not sure that this is correct on several counts. 1) Theories are not quite the same as models 2) Even if they were, not all theories succeed in modelling reality, some theories are just plain wrong - the theory that life is due to some spirit, breath, Ki, or pneumena for example. Why do I say that theories are not models and theories do not model reality? A scientific model is a machine for predicting how part of reality will behave. We tend to think of models in an abstract conceptual sense, I think we should look at them in a very concrete material sense. We have the world and we have models of it. The model is, at one level a ’black box’ which gives us answers about the world. Given some initial observations we can feed them into the black box and it comes out with predictions. The predictions are not necessarily predictions in time, they may be predictions about other things in the real world that we have not yet observed. If we make the other observation we can then compare what the model predicted with what has actually occurred. At a global scale our model might be a general climate model predicting the long term path of climate under CO2 emission forcing. The initial observations could be the trends in CO2 emissions, and the predictions could be ones about future average temperatures and rainfall. When building such a model one could take past periods say 1900 to 2000 as the initial observations and have it make predictions about climate for the period 2001 to 2009. Generally we work on the rule that the closer the predictions to the other observations, the better is the model. Are models ‘ideas’ or or theories or are they machines? The term model is used in two rather different senses. On the one hand we speak of a model as something physical. A model boat may server as an adult’s toy, but for a shipyard it also has a serious predictive value. In a wave tank the model tells us something about the performance of the finished boat. Measurements from models were, in the past, used to guide the construction of actual steel plates. So it is clear that models in this everyday meaning of the word, have a real pragmatic use. On the other hand a model is used to refer to something conceptual. One talks of the Newtonian model of the solar system as opposed to the Ptolemaic one. In this case we think of the model as something abstract, an idea not a thing. And this gives rise to all sorts of questions about how it is that a conceptual or mathematical model can be so good at predicting the real world. Wigner complained about the ’unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, Hamming asked how simple maths could be so effective. If we think of things in this way, as a correspondence between two quite different domains – that of thought and that of reality – the whole process seems so remarkable as to tempt one to ascribe some mystical properties to mathematics. But it is not the theory of Newton or of ptolemy that makes the predictions. To make predictions you have to construct a model guided by the theory -- the Antikythera device was a physical model based on the theory of Hiparchus or perhaps fo Ptolemy and would have had the ability to predict lunar eclipses and solar eclipses. The difference between the theory and the model is that the theory needs to be materialised and activated as a physical model before any predictions emerge. A theory is more abstract than a model, it tells you how to go about constructing a model, but until you have built the model and activated it you get no predictions out. This was harder to see in the past since the computations required to model the mechanics of the solar system according to Newtons laws were done by people using papers and pencils so the model in the sense of the computing system that produced the results, was distributed over the notebooks, the clerks who did the menial calculations and the directors like Laplace who developed the high level equations. A model now can be physically localised in an appropriately configured universal computer - and we at times abstract from the computer itself and say that the software package, independent of the hardware, is the model. But such a model is still something concrete, with a material existence and more importantly, a specific parametrisation. The general theory of celestial mechanics is not a model, but part of the means of production of models. The theory can be used to produce a multiplicity of models -- of different planetary systems, of galactic dynamics, etc. A model may be built in accordance with a theory, and if the theory allows a large number of models to be built, all of which models turn out to have a good predictive ability we say that the theory is a law. If we turn to Ians model, I think one can say that the theory of prices of production was a condition of the model's production, and it is quite a considerable achievement on his part to produce codes that, when executed, behave well and reproduce the results that the theory says should be produced. But it seems to me that the relationship between Ian's model and Marx's theory is somewhat different from that between Newtons theory and the mathematical models Laplace's celestial mechanics. In the case of Ian, the condition of that the model aims at is being able to reproduce what Marx says should happen. In the case of Laplace, the condition of validity was the ability to reproduce ex ante the positions in which the planets would later be observed. Also, Newtons equations, directly guided, after suitable elaboration and transformation, Laplace's own ones. In he had to invent equations that would reproduce Marx's final result -- much more had to be filled in as Marx did not provide precisely formulated 'laws to which Ian's micro dynamic equations had to be subject. Beyond that, it can not count as a model of the capitalist economy as it generates counter factual conclusions. It is a model for Marx's theory, not a model for a capitalist economy. Its function is to reproduce in numerical terms what Marx's theory describes in general qualitative terms. If I understand it correctly, its utility lies in showing that given certain simplifying assumptions and given certain mathematical form for various dynamical processes, then the general result described by Marx's theory in vol 3 of capital can be reproduced. The counter factual nature of the predictions though, shows that the model is not yet a good description of real capitalist economies. But this shortfall is not something that is limited to Ian's model, it is a shortfall of the less formal account given by Marx as well. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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