Marx points out in one of he prefaces to _Capital_ that the method of historical study is _abstraction_ rather than experiment as in the physical sciences. (I will use "discipline" here rather than "science," which is a more disputed term.) If we find a discipline, then, corresponding to "literature" or "economics," it will not be a "physical thing" but an abstraction. My suggestion, then, is that it seems we cannot abstract from the total buzz and rumble of human activity an "economy" (or a "literature") which can be studied as an object of study in itself. And the abstraction we are looking for can be somewhat sloppy: human activity cannot be divided without sloppy edges, some cracking of the bones. As I understand it, "economics" as (more or less) defined by the "economists" has as one of its subjects providing and explanation of how prices are established. And wee immediately fall off the cliff into an abyss: clearly to explain prices we need a study of the whole of human activity in the present 'moment.' They are obviously not a purely or even mostly "economic" phenomenon. They belong to some study of human behavior for which we don't have a name it seems.
I'll stop here for now. I just wanted to emphasize that as we try to sub-divide the realm of human behavior into various "disciplines," (a) we are not looking for a "physical" object of study but, rather, a roughjly clean & definable abstraction from that realm and (b) we can't pursue this question if we assume what needsd to be demonstrated: that "economics" names anything.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Mike Beggs Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 4:13 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Does "Economics" have a Subject?
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> There are many pseudo-disciplines the subject of which cannot be
identified.
> My own field is an example. "Literature" does not name a coherent domain
of
> study; in effect, there is no such thing. The discipline of economics
seems
> to assume that there is a distinct entity, "The Economy," but this is
> obvious nonsense. It is an arbitrary abstraction from ongoing social
> relations, not one of which is a pure instance of an "economic
> relationship." To speak of economics as a separate entity is to violate
> Socrates' caution re the bad dialectician who breaks the bones rather than
> separates the joints.
So where is the Physical, as distinct from the Chemical? Are biologists foolish to study that arbitrary abstraction biology? All sciences abstract and they all blur with other disciplines.
> "Economics" is most interesting and useful when the text under
consideration
> would better be described as _history_. The same seems to go for the other
> pseudo-sciences such as Sociology, and Political Science. None has a
> distinct object of study, and work in each is intelligible only when it is
> quote obviously "something else."
If it's a historical object that makes something fall short of a science, biology, geology and astronomy fall short. It sounds like by 'psuedoscience' you mean 'social science'. There's a large literature on the distinction between social and natural sciences. They are different enough for various reasons (especially the reflexivity of the discipline on the object of study and the creativity of human actors) that you might want a new word. On the other hand, you still might want to distinguish between good and bad social inquiry in a way that raises the question of method, so you would end up with a replacement word to distinguish social science from social psudoscience.
Mike Beggs ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk