Search results for "Behaviourism"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Frank H. Knight, pragmatism, and American institutionalism: A note
2009
This note deals with the debated question of whether, and to what extent, Frank Knight's epistemology was consistent with the general philosophy of American pragmatism. First, in accord with recent interpretations, I provide new evidence illustrating that Knight's views on science, knowledge and related philosophical topics present some important similarities with the pragmatic tradition. Second, I attempt to demonstrate that Knight's unsympathetic reading of Dewy and pragmatism was, to a relevant extent, a consequence of his aversion to the so-called scientific wing of American interwar institutionalism. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.
Was Frank Knight an institutionalist?
2005
This paper critically examines Geoffrey Hodgson's recent provocative claim about Frank Knight as being a member of American institutionalism in the interwar years. In the first section of the paper the authors attempt to provide a definition of institutionalism and to emphasize its meaning from a historiographic point of view. The second and third sections analyze the two main methodological struggles between Knight and the institutionalists, namely, the debate during the early 1020s over the use of instinct theory as an explanation of economic behavior, and the subsequent campaign led by Knight in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the behaviorist wing of American institutionalism à la…