I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.
While that’s mostly true today after several centuries of work, Newton would have been hard pressed to explain what a force was without resorting to something that sounds like mysticism. Also calculus was only placed on a firm mathematical footing by Weierstrass two centuries after Newton had invented it and based his physics on it.
That’s not a good comparison. Every physical theory postulates the existence of some fundamental constituents of reality that cannot be reduced further. (And a practically useful theory may well treat that way concepts that we in principle know how to reduce to something more fundamental, but it would be impractical to do so.) The concepts in economics that I’m attacking are a completely different case: they consist of quantities defined in arbitrary ways, whose arbitrariness is then forgotten—leading to their treatment as objective properties of reality that should be calculated and studied in their own right, far beyond the limits of their actual usefulness, and without the ability to work back through the logic of their use as a reality check.
I can’t think of anything comparable in the history of modern physics, from Galileo till present day. I simply can’t imagine a physicist similarly incapable of grasping with the logic of physical theories and their connection to reality.
Every physical theory postulates the existence of some fundamental constituents of reality that cannot be reduced further.
I’ve heard one that doesn’t. It was agnostic on the subject and speculation on what the reason was for having indefinite layers of ‘more fundamental’ was outside the scope of the theory (like a ‘first cause’). It did qualify as a physical theory (but certainly isn’t mine.)
While that’s mostly true today after several centuries of work, Newton would have been hard pressed to explain what a force was without resorting to something that sounds like mysticism. Also calculus was only placed on a firm mathematical footing by Weierstrass two centuries after Newton had invented it and based his physics on it.
That’s not a good comparison. Every physical theory postulates the existence of some fundamental constituents of reality that cannot be reduced further. (And a practically useful theory may well treat that way concepts that we in principle know how to reduce to something more fundamental, but it would be impractical to do so.) The concepts in economics that I’m attacking are a completely different case: they consist of quantities defined in arbitrary ways, whose arbitrariness is then forgotten—leading to their treatment as objective properties of reality that should be calculated and studied in their own right, far beyond the limits of their actual usefulness, and without the ability to work back through the logic of their use as a reality check.
I can’t think of anything comparable in the history of modern physics, from Galileo till present day. I simply can’t imagine a physicist similarly incapable of grasping with the logic of physical theories and their connection to reality.
I’ve heard one that doesn’t. It was agnostic on the subject and speculation on what the reason was for having indefinite layers of ‘more fundamental’ was outside the scope of the theory (like a ‘first cause’). It did qualify as a physical theory (but certainly isn’t mine.)