Science of Economics--论文代写范文精选

需要了解更多的世界秩序和规律。尽管有许多事情，在本质上是单数和无与伦比的,然而他们设计配合不是很符合。从现实来看，培根的经验主义的立场更有吸引力比弗里德曼的理性主义。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Introduction
Much scientific thinking and thinking about science involves assumptions that there is a deep and pervasive order to the world that it is the business of science to disclose. A paradigmatic statement of such a view can be found in a widely discussed paper by a prominent economist, Milton Friedman (a paper which will be discussed in more detail shortly): 
 
A fundamental hypothesis of science is that appearances are deceptive and that there is a way of looking at or interpreting or organizing the evidence that will reveal superficially disconnected and diverse phenomena to be manifestations of a more fundamental and relatively simple structure. (1953/1984, p.231)On the other hand, the person sometimes described as the father of modern science, Francis Bacon, wrote: 
 
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them conjugates and relatives which do not exist. (1620/1960, p. 50).

I myself find the empiricism of Bacon's position much more attractive than Friedman's rationalism. Assumptions of the kind Friedman's remark illustrates lead naturally, almost inevitably, to philosophical doctrines such as reductionism (of various kinds) and determinism. In a recent book (Dupré 1993) I have argued at length against various doctrines of these kinds and, more generally, against the assumption of underlying metaphysical order with which they are inextricably connected. In the concluding chapters of that book I suggested that more modest and defensible views of the prevalence of order in the world would have important consequences for our general understanding of science, and even for the practice of science. More specifically, I proposed that certain scientific projects might be seen to be quite misguided when deterministic or reductionistic assumptions about the domains under investigation were abandoned. And finally, the rejection of such assumptions suggests a much greater role for antecedent value judgments in scientific investigation than is generally allowed.

In the previous work just mentioned, the arguments against reductionism and determinism were developed mainly in relation to a discussion of biological science. Although biological ideas, through their relevance or alleged relevance to conceptions of human nature, have important implications for normative questions, further investigation of the relation of values to science may more readily be pursued in relation to some part of the social or human sciences. A particularly suitable candidate is the science of economics. The complexity of the phenomena investigated by economics is such as to make claims of fundamental lack of order at least superficially plausible; and how, if at all, social or political values relate to economic investigation is a question of obvious importance. This paper provides a sketch of the argument that economics does indeed provide an illustration of the need for normative input in the investigation of a domain with quite limited preexisting order. In the course of developing this thesis I shall touch on various more specific objections to aspects of economic theory. None of these objections are new: they have existed since the beginnings of neoclassical economics in the late nineteenth century, in the writings of Weber, Veblen, Commons, and numerous successors. Where the skepticism developed in the present paper goes beyond this critical tradition is in the suggestion that the failures of economics derive not merely from excessively simplistic assumptions, crude theories of human nature, and so on, but rather from a fundamental mismatch between the kinds of phenomena with which economics is concerned, and widely held conceptions of what it is for an investigation of any realm of phenomena to be genuinenly scientific. It is this mismatch, I contend, that raises the question whether a science of economics is possible.

I should emphasize that I use the word "sketch" advisedly. One part of the picture that is in particular need of filling in is the question of the extent to which there is empirical support, particularly predictive success, for the broad theoretical claims of economics. Though the skeptical position I adopt in the paper does not seem to me unreasonable, clearly it is in need of more detailed investigation. At any rate, one of the aims of the present paper will be to assess the relevance of such further investigation to the general thesis I am developing. Another point that needs to be stressed at the outset is that throughout the paper I am addressing the foundational, abstract, and typically mathematical theories of economics rather than local, generally qualitative knowledge of specific economic systems. I do not know how the actual labor of professional economists is divided between efforts that fall (roughly) into each of these categories. Arguably much of the work of, for example, labor economists, development economists, and even econometricians, has little connection with this supposedly foundational core. But it is surely the articulation of the formal and abstract core of economic theory that is the most conspicuous and prestigious aspect of the activity of economists.

In the first section of this paper I shall be concerned with economic methodology. In particular I shall criticize a conception of economic methodology that might serve to defuse the worries about the lack of empirical success in economics that have been so widely emphasized by critics of economics. The second section addresses the relevance of questions of underlying order to the prospects for the development of economics, and the third section explores the consequences of skepticism about underlying order for the relation of economic fact to value. I shall argue that the most plausible escape from pressing doubts about the possibility of a scientific study of economic phenomena, is to recognize a much greater interpenetration of science and value than is generally recognized. 
 

The Methodology of Economics
One obvious motivation for the question in the title of this paper is the remarkably widespread belief that the study of economics has failed almost totally in at least one of the traditionally central marks of science, prediction. (As Thomas Love Peacock put it: "Premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of it; and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that they must necessarily be erroneous." (Cited by Hausman 1984, p.1)) Of course it is not that no economist has ever said anything true about any future economic phenomenon, but just that economic theory seems to add little to the ability of a well-informed person in possession of average common sense to be right about such matters1. More broadly, this worry reflects a serious doubt as to whether economics is in any sense genuinely an empirical study. It is, at any rate, widely supposed that if economics were to be judged solely on the basis of the extent to which it has succeeded in making predictions about the future, then it would be seen to be a dismal failure. This empirical failure is all the more remarkable given the extent to which economics continues to be regarded as a model for the social sciences. To give just one example, Alexander Rosenberg, in a paper otherwise highly critical of the development of microeconomic theory, nevertheless describes this theory as "the most impressive edifice in social science yet erected" (1979, p.47). Apparently some other grounds of scientific excellence than predictive success is being supposed. My first aim in this paper is to consider the plausibility of the claim that any such grounds could compensate for the empirical failure just noted.

One very influential economist, on the other hand, apparently sees no serious weakness in the predictive achievements of economics. Milton Friedman, in an extremely influential article (1953/1984), argues that economics should be judged, not as is often supposed, by the truth of its premises, but rather by the empirical success of its predictions. And it is clear enough that Friedman thinks that this is a test that economics will readily pass. Nevertheless, it is striking how little he says in this article to justify complacence about the predictive powers of economics. Friedman compares, for example, the hypothesis that businessmen act as if they aimed to maximize profits with the hypothesis that expert billiard players act as if they were able to make all the appropriate mathematical calculations of the trajectory of a billiard ball. The value of this latter hypothesis is sufficiently demonstrated by the successful shots of the expert billiard player, and the psychology of neither the billiard-player nor the businessman is of any relevance to the evaluation of either hypothesis. But remarkably, rather than offer any empirical evidence that, just as expert billiard players generally make their shots, businessmen, whatever they may be intending, do in fact maximize profits, Friedman offers nothing but a broken-backed a priori argument for this conclusion. "[U]nless the behavior of businessmen in some way or other approximated behavior consistent with the maximization of returns," he writes, "it seems unlikely that they would remain in business for long." (p.223) But the implicit argument here has no force unless it is assumed that the competitors of the non-profit-maximizing businessman are profit maximizers, which is blatantly question-begging. If no businesses, or very few businesses, are profit-maximizers, there may be very little tendency for non-profit-maximizing firms to go out of business. Perhaps survival in business is largely a matter of luck, or of access to corrupt government officials. Distinguishing between these and many other possible hypotheses would require empirical evidence of a kind that Friedman neither offers, nor, apparently, sees the need for.

Another example Friedman offers is the hypothesis that a sudden increase in the money supply will produce a substantial increase in prices (p.216). Although the "evidence is dramatic" for this hypothesis Friedman admits regretfully that the issue remains highly contentious, an observation that might reasonably lead the external observer of economics to wonder whether this paradigm of empirical support could be quite that dramatic. It appears that in the end Friedman wants to appeal not to "any textbook list of instances in which the hypothesis has failed to be contradicted," (p.224) but rather to "experience from countless applications of the hypothesis to specific problems and the repeated failure of its implications to be contradicted. This evidence is extremely hard to document; it is scattered in numerous memorandums, articles, and monographs ..." (pp.223-224). In contemporary philosophy of science, where the constant apparent confirmation of the basic assumptions of a research programme, or a paradigm during normal science, etc., has become a commonplace, this appeal is unlikely to impress. Friedman's paradigmatic though pre-Kuhnian description of a Kuhnian paradigm becomes even more striking when we read that the ability to apply economic models in the right way requires considerable professional judgment. This "is something that cannot be taught; it can be learned, but only by experience and exposure in the 'right' scientific atmosphere, not by rote. It is at this point that the 'amateur' is separated from the 'professional' in all sciences and the thin line is drawn which distinguishes the 'crackpot' from the scientist." (p.226). Very likely, this is the way that all sciences work. But the fact that economists know how to make their models work is even less impressive in the face of such a frank statement of the judgment that awaitsthose who, for whatever reason, fail to do so. In short, Friedman's manner of endorsement of the empirical success of economics tends to argue rather for the opposite conclusion.（essay代写)

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