Dewey, Pragmatism, and Economic Methodology by Khalil Elias L

Author:Khalil, Elias L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

A metaphysical view can hardly undergo either confirmation or refutation through empirical methods. Precisely because a metaphysical doctrine must abstract itself from specifics … in an effort to probe what undergirds all specifics of any sort, it retains its lesser or greater cogency, regardless of the ways any specific facts … have turned out.

(Kramer 1992: 7)

The cogency it does have for those persuaded of it is a philosophical or theoretical cogency, a cogency fashioned in the course of philosophical argument where the typical questions are, “What is the nature of reality?” or, “Where do facts come from?” – questions the answers to which will not be found in the observable facts; when the answers are found (to the satisfaction of one or more of the participants) the observable facts will have been explained (at least within the framework of particular general theses), but they will not have generated or confirmed or falsified the perspective that explains them. For example, the doctrine that a benevolent God presides over all things will not be disconfirmed by the existence of poverty, war, oppression, injustice, genocide, and so on, for it is precisely the claim of the doctrine to account for these and other facts in its own terms (which typically will include attendant doctrines such as the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the mysteriousness of God’s ways), and that claim will be made good (if it is) by abstract theoretical arguments and not by empirical investigation. Someone defending the benevolence of God in the face of the Nazi Holocaust will be trafficking in theological concepts like sin, redemption, retribution, suffering, patience, the last days, and so on. He will not be considering whether its perpetrators were the unique products of a virulent German anti-semitism or exemplars of a bureaucratic mentality found every-where in the modern world; he will not be poring over diagrams of gas chambers or assessing the effects either of resistance movements or of the failure to resist. His is a thesis not about how a particular thing has happened but about how anything – of which this particular is an instantiation and an example – happens, and happens necessarily. His job is not to precipitate an explanation of the event out of the examination of documents and other sources but to bring the fact of the event into line with an explanation already assumed and firmly in place. (The master teacher of this skill is Augustine who, in his On Christian Doctrine, advises those who find biblical passages that seem subversive of the faith to subject those passages to “diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced” (Augustine 1958: 93).) He is, in short, a theologian, maintaining and elaborating an ultimate perspective, and not a historian who has set himself the disciplinary task of relating a historical, mundane occurrence to its contingent and multiple causes. (I know that there are those who argue that the Holocaust is not an appropriate object of

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