A Structuralist Reconstruction of Marx’s Economics

Abstract

1. The so-called structuralist movement in the philosophy of science — which has nothing to do with the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and related authors¹ — can be traced back to Patrick Suppes and his collaborators, who developed a set-theoretic method of axiomatizing theories of mathematical physics. The main work, however, was by Joseph Sneed in his book The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics which appeared in 19 71 and was the genuine starting point of the structuralist movement. Sneed added an informal semantics to the Suppes approach which enabled him to solve the ‘problem of theoretical terms’, that is to formulate the empirical content of physical theories which contain quantitative concepts whose values cannot be determined without presupposing the theory itself. In the following years Wolfgang Stegmüller and his co-workers did much to refine and elaborate this approach² which later was called’ structuralism’ (following a proposal of Y. Bar-Hillel)³. Stegmüller also tried to construct certain traits of Thomas Kuhn’s account of the history of science in a structuralist way⁴.