[lbo-talk] David Harvey v. Brad DeLong

Charles Brown cdb1003 at prodigy.net
Fri Feb 20 09:33:35 PST 2009


Wojtek Sokolowski

[WS:] Also to the good old methodenstreit (historicism vs. determininsm,) no?. It is interesting to see how these old philosophical debates about the nature of the world and human knowledge of it never really die - they just repeat themselves endlessly. It seems that cognitive psychology can offer some insights here - determinism is a cognitive frame adopted by people who have low tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and contingency - they crave order and not surprisingly they find it. Historicims is a cognitive frame prefered by those who who are at ease with uncertainty and abhor rigidity of order (see for example the piece on "motivated cognition" summarizing literature in this area http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf.) and inf refuge in ambiguity and contingency.

Hence, the adherents of these two approaches are bound to talk past each other, because their differfences are not rational but pre-rational: they are grounded in their emotional makeup and cannot be solved through reasoning or facts.

Wojtek

^^^^^^ CB: Which of the two categories do the cognitive psychologists with this theory

fall into ? My guess is determinism. They favor determinism by the pre-rational state over free will. So, their pre-rational emotional state determined that they would come up with this theory , not examination of evidence ? (smile)



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