Science and Values--论文代写范文精选

这个最著名的隐喻之一是现代科学机制。最好有一个独特的运作理论,正确的理论解释它如何工作。这样一个事实的结果是清楚解释的行为。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
In a suggestive article, Mary Hesse (1978) raises the question whether the criteria for scientificity generally associated with the natural sciences, especially the ability of science to facilitate prediction and control, might not be explicitly rejected by (parts of) the social sciences in favor of some more obviously value-driven goal. My suggestion that an economic theory capable of more than a quite limited degree of prediction and control might be precluded by the nature of economic, or more broadly social phenomena, provides a compelling ground for considering carefully the possibility Hesse explores.

The starting point for developing this idea is to note that given the view of a largely qualitative economics applied to a partially indeterministic domain of phenomena that I have advocated, there is no reason to think that there is any uniquely empirically best economic theory. This contrasts sharply with one of the best known metaphors for modern science, mechanism. There is one unique best theory of the workings of a machine, the theory that correctly explains how it works16. This is a consequence of the fact that it is (generally) entirely clear what is the behavior of a machine that calls for explanation, namely, the behavior which the machine was designed to exhibit. This is easily seen by thinking of cases where there is some departure from the normal use of the machine. Just as it is generally irrelevant to the theory of bicycles what color they are, so when the bicycle is raised off the ground and used as an exercising device it becomes irrelevant what is the condition of its tires. In more extreme cases, say the use of the bicycle as a structural element in a postmodern building, color might become the most salient feature.

The machine model often seems to be exactly what underlies pictures of the economy, and hence of the nature of economics. The economy is a machine that produces commodities. The parts of the machine are firms, consumers, and governments. Taxes or government regulations, we are often encouraged to believe, create friction and slow down the production of commodities. Ideally if we can engender enough greed to fuel the machine, and minimize all possible sources of friction, the machine will run at its best. My point here is not so much to criticize this picture--though certainly there is much to criticize--but to point to its optionality. If we reject the idea that this picture is simply descriptive--that's just what economies are for, like it or not--it is natural to see it as implicitly supporting the normative assumption that maximally efficient commodity production is what economics should be intended to promote. 

But if that is a correct interpretation, then surely we should object at once that it is far from obvious that this is a goal--still less the goal--that we should aim to promote. For some historical political economists, perhaps even economists such as Jevons at the beginning of neoclassical economics, this normative connection was explicit, with the economy as a generator of utility yoked to a theory of the good as utility-maximization. Nowadays, however, with economics concerned with utility solely in the sense of moving individuals on to ordinally higher indifference curves; with comparisons between social states generally limited to the identification of Pareto-improvements; and with moral philosophers, if not economists, widely skeptical even about genuinely substantive utilitarianism, there is no convincing possibility of providing a normative justification of the traditional economic machine. 

It is of course possible to undercut the need for such a justification by insisting that the machine is inevitable: that is just how things are. (This is the metaphysical version of the TINA defence.) And though such natural necessity is precisely what is often implied by the hard-headed advocates of positive economics, this is a metaphysical bullet, I have argued, that we have no reason to bite.

The myth of positive economics, an economics forced on us simply by the way things are, serves to deflect debate from the really important question, which is what goals we would like the economy to serve. Consider, for instance, the possibility of an economics premised on the assumption that the function of an economy was to maximize, and distribute as equally as possible, standard of living. Needless to say, a very substantial part of this discipline would be involved with the philosophical question what constitutes standard of living, though as Sen (1987) has made very clear, we can be sure that this is only tangentially related either to any standard account of utility or to the accumulation of wealth. 

It is of course possible that the best way to do such an economics would be to graft the normative conclusions on to very much the traditional economic account of the market economy, in the manner of much contemporary welfare economics. But it seems unlikely that things would be that simple. Once we recognize the possibility that an economy can be highly productive and growing fast in current economic terms, and yet thoroughly sick in the normatively significant sense of its failure to generate high standards of living for many of its citizens, we are likely to direct our attention to somewhat different measures of economic performance and individual motivations. Recalling the observation that training in economics has some tendency to generate economically "rational" behavior, it seems likely that an economy substantially under the control of economists will promote such behavior in many different ways among all or most segments of the community. I suggest that the only remedy for this situation is to recognize that the normative part of economics, far from being hitched on to the back of a putatively positive economics, must be seen as fundamental to, and epistemologically prior to, any acceptable science of economics.

The preceding discussion should, finally, answer the objection to the indeterministic metaphysical grounding of my claims suggested by Friedman's remark about the deceptivenss of appearance through which science aims to see, the insistence that methodologically it is sheer defeatism not to assume that there is some complete, empirically adequate, theory of economics. My reply is that there are great costs to error on either side of this question. Pursuing the current, empirically generally failing, theory of economics merely on the grounds that we must hold out the hope for a physics-like, mechanistic, and empirically sufficient theory of economics may very well stand in the way of seeing the need for an admittedly partial, indeterministic, qualitative, etc. account of economics, but one driven by truly worthwhile social or political goals. 

Though for the most complicated machines it may be appropriate to approach them in various different ways, as suggested by Dennett's well-known distinctions between the physical, design, and intentional stances that can be taken towards some machines, most notably computers (Dennett 1987).  Because even computers are highly deterministic we are inclined to see the physical stance as basic.  Perhaps this will be less compelling for the machines of the future, in which case the traditional associations of mechanism will have become misleading even for the understanding of machines. 

Conclusion
With a reminder that this paper is to be understood as provisional and in some respects sketchy, let me nonetheless venture some conclusions. I can best do so by returning to the question that provided the title of this paper. Though my tone has sometimes verged on the polemical, it is clear that my answer to that question is a qualified, Very probably yes. First, my skepticism has been directed to theoretical, especially mathematical constructs in economics. I do not deny that there may well be much useful, if generally loose, causal knowledge to be had in economics, though perhaps a good deal of this will be at a level accessible to no more than sophisticated common sense, and suspicions about the inductive projectibility of such causal knowledge will often be appropriate. Ultimately, my affirmative answer here may depend on some major revisions in what we take to be legitimate goals of science. 

Second, my skepticism about the one true economic story opens up the possibility that there might be numerous approaches to the investigation of economic phenomena, each capable of delivering partial, but nonetheless useful, insights into economic reality. And third, and most importantly, the preceding section suggests the possibility of a science of economics of real value to humanity, something which has only intermittently been true of the history of that science, and seems decreasingly true of it in recent years17. But the precondition of this, I have argued, is the recognition that fundamental value judgments must be made at the very beginning of the project. They cannot just be tacked on at the end.18

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