‘Truth’ and ‘Discourse’ in the Social Construction of Economic Reality: An Essay on the Relation of Knowledge to Socioeconomic Policy

  • Warren J. Samuels
Chapter

Abstract

From time immemorial human beings have desired confident,1 if not absolute, knowledge. One is tempted to say that there are two types of people, those who require determinacy and closure, and those who can tolerate ambiguity and open-endedness. Most people seem to be of the former type, notwithstanding the views, first, that the desire for absolutes does not conclusively guarantee that an absolute actually exists, and second, that what people take as ‘fact’ may not actually constitute ‘reality’. This desire for confident knowledge has at least three sources: (1) the belief that action and policy based on knowledge should be predicated on truth rather than error; (2) the use of belief (assumed to be true knowledge) for purposes of social control, to either retain or change institutional arrangements and practices; and (3) the role of belief as psychic balm, to assuage the anxiety consequent to our living in a world of radical indeterminacy (uncertainty) in which, among other things, our importance as individuals and as a species in the universe seems problematic.

Keywords

Social Construction Discourse Analysis Social Reality Economic Reality Logical Empiricism 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    The present essay is a sequel to my Introduction to Warren J. Samuels (ed.), Economics as Discourse (Boston: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 2a.
    See also Samuels, ‘A Critique of the Discursive Systems and Foundation Concepts of Distribution Analysis’, Analyse & Kritik, vol. 4 (October 1982), pp. 4–12;Google Scholar
  3. 2b.
    Samuels ‘The Idea of the Corporation as a Person: On the Normative Significance of Judicial Language’, in Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller (eds), Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (Westport: Greenwood, 1987), pp. 113–29;Google Scholar
  4. 2c.
    Samuels‘An Essay on the Nature and Significance of the Normative Nature of Economics’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 10 (Spring 1988), pp. 347–54;Google Scholar
  5. 2d.
    Samuels‘Determinate Solutions and Valuational Processes: Overcoming the Foreclosure of Process’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 11 (Summer 1989), pp. 531–46;Google Scholar
  6. 2e.
    Samuels‘The Methodology of Economics and the Case for Policy Diffidence and Restraint’, Review of Social Economy, vol. 47 (Summer 1989), pp. 113–33;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. 2f.
    Samuels and review of the philosophical entries in ‘The New Palgrave’, in Economics and Philosophy, vol. 6 (October 1990). pp. 301–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 5.
    Robert M. Solow, ‘Economic History and Economics’, American Economic Review, Supplement, vol. 75 (May 1985), p. 330;Google Scholar
  9. 5a.
    Robert M. Solow, and ‘Comments from Inside Economics’, in Arjo Klamer, Donald N. McCloskey and Robert M. Solow (eds), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 30ff.Google Scholar
  10. 6.
    Jack Hirschleifer, ‘The Expanding Domain of Economics’, American Economic Review, vol. 75 (December 1985), p. 53.Google Scholar
  11. 7.
    George J. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 94.Google Scholar
  12. 8.
    Martin Bronfenbrenner, ‘Instead of a Philosophy of Life’, American Economist, vol. 32 (Fall 1988), p. 4.Google Scholar
  13. 9.
    Karin D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981), p. 42.Google Scholar
  14. 10.
    Thus, when I introduced the idea of a ‘legal—economic nexus’, I stipulated that the ‘weak form of the argument affirms the legal—economic nexus as a mental construct to help explain certain phenomena. The strong form of the argument affirms as fact that the legal—economic nexus — the sphere of what is really going on at the deepest levels of social existence — is the level at which both polity and economy are continuously and simultaneously (re)formed in a manner that negates any conception of their independent self-subsistence’, that is, that the legal—economic nexus is more than a mental construct, it exists. Samuels, ‘The Legal—Economic Nexus’, George Washington Law Review, vol. 57 (August 1989), p. 1558. The latter also means that I did not intend the idea of the legal—economic nexus to be understood as a mere fabrication of my own mind, to affirm that it exists even if no one recognizes it; but the former also means that the idea is one among many, and that how we discursively conceptualize the relevant subject-matter at the deepest level has an effect on our analyses and implications — altogether signifying that unlike the solar system, how we conceptualize it has an effect on the social (re)construction of political and economic reality.Google Scholar
  15. 11.
    Pareto was one of the greatest theorists of the role of belief in the social (re)construction of reality; see Warren J. Samuels, Pareto on Policy (New York: Elsevier, 1974).Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Warren J. Samuels 1992

Authors and Affiliations

  • Warren J. Samuels
    • 1
  1. 1.Michigan State UniversityUSA

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