Search results for "Rational reconstruction"

Defense versus Opulence? An Appraisal of the Malthus-Ricardo 1815 Controversy on the Corn Laws

2015

This article proposes a rational reconstruction of the arguments of Malthus and Ricardo in their 1815 essays, Grounds of an Opinion and An Essay on Profits, whereby a policy of free corn trade was repudiated and endorsed, respectively. Malthus envisaged defense and (trade-induced) opulence as two mutually alternative options and, if required to make a choice, he had no hesitation in choosing the former. By contrast, Ricardo excluded any such trade-off, arguing that even in the case of war or poor domestic harvest, foreign agricultural countries would be seriously damaged if they opted for restrictions on their corn exports to Great Britain.

Rational vs historical reconstructions. A note on Blaug

2003

The paper focuses on Blaug's distinction between rational and historical reconstruction within the historiography of economics. Blaug's distinction is shown to be sterile and misleading and his definitions of no avail to clear thinking. Historical reconstruction (as defined by Blaug) is en empty box for reasons which are basically theoretical and not simply practical (as Blaug seems to hold). Moreover, Blaug's primary polemical target is Whig historiography and not rational reconstruction: the two concepts coincide only by means of an ad hoc definition. Blaug's criticism does not apply to other uses of the concept of rational reconstruction such as that proposed by Lakatos.

El dilema de la lechuza ¿Qué relación debe tener la filosofía con su historia?

2020

Resumen La historia parece tener una importancia especial en el campo de la filosofía, en pocas disciplinas encontramos tantas referencias a los autores y problemas del pasado. Sin embargo, esto puede ser una simple cuestión de hecho: hasta ahora hemos creído que enseñar la historia de la filosofía era formativo para los futuros filósofos, pero tal creencia puede cambiar. También podría ser una cuestión de puro interés profesional: algunos estudiamos la historia de la disciplina, y tratamos de justificar esa dedicación alegando que ésta puede ser útil, en cierta medida, para los pensadores contemporáneos. En este artículo, sin embargo, abogaré por una comprensión de nuestra historia como al…

A rejoinder

2003

Economic Logic with Internal Consistency (and Not Only Formal Rigour)

2022

As is well known, during his life Sraffa never published a work explicitly devoted to epistemological issues. This fact should not be interpreted to indicate Sraffa’s lack of interest in such concerns. From Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts – kept at the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and from the books of his personal library – we see that Sraffa had a strong interest in questions of philosophy of 8science (Kurz and Salvadori, 2005). Therefore, a reconstruction of Sraffa’s epistemological theory can only be conjectural and must not leave out of consideration his unpublished manuscripts. In a previous work (Salvadori and Signorino, 2007), we analysed a specific aspect of Sraffa’…

SUBJECTIVITY AS A NON-TEXTUAL STANDARD OF INTERPRETATION IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

2010

Contemporary caution against anachronism in intellectual history, and the currently momentous theoretical emphasis on subjectivity in the philosophy of mind, are two prevailing conditions that set puzzling constraints for studies in the history of philosophical psychology. The former urges against assuming ideas, motives, and concepts that are alien to the historical intellectual setting under study, and combined with the latter suggests caution in relying on our intuitions regarding subjectivity due to the historically contingent characterizations it has attained in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the face of these conditions, our paper raises a question of what we call non-textual (as…

“Piero Sraffa: economic reality, the economist and economic theory. An interpretation”.

2007

We carry out a textual analysis of Sraffa's main published contributions to pure economics in order to elaborate a rational reconstruction of an aspect of Sraffa's implicit methodology which has not yet been duly investigated. We refer to the threefold relationship between ‘economic reality’, ‘the economist/observer’ and ‘economic theory’. We elucidate the constraints which, for Sraffa, should bind the economists' arbitrariness and we trace the elements of continuity and evolution from the 1925–6 critique of Marshallian economics to Production of Commodities.

Mark Blaug revisited: a rebel with many causes

2022

We clarify Blaug’s thought as well as Sraffa’s though on the relationship between rational and historical reconstructions we devote a section to the analysis of some of Sraffa’s unpublished documents concerning the reconstruction of Classical economics.