Pure logics lacks the core principle enabling it to self-evaluate its validity such as mathematical axiom. Therefore, there are multiple possible answers not unified under an axiomatic rule. In philosophy, philosophers define their theoretical criterion as the core foundation basing their logical consistency prior to configuring their theoretical architecture of logics. Natural science refers to the empirical evidence shown in the substantial world experiment basing their logical arguments.
By contrast, economics and the other social scientific subjects nowadays tend to ignore this fundamental argument on their theoretical validity. Since the 20th century, people have tended to treat economics and the other social scientific subjects such as sociology, political science, and psychology as the pure physical science by detaching them from a metaphysical foundation. Prior to that time period, those social scientific subjects were strongly tied up with philosophy taking account of metaphysics defining the fundamental principle of their arguments.
Unlike natural science, social science including economics seldom presents an empirical experience instantly proven with the substantial experiment. This is why they used to be more tied up with a philosophical perspective providing the guidance of their direction of experiment. For example, economic and social policies as well as psychological therapy must be related to ethics with its metaphysical background and its guiding base principle. Moreover, epistemology weighs on convincing people with these social scientific theories needing to convince people to trust in what these theories insist on. This is because their theoretical validity is hardly proven by the empirical experiment like natural science.
Despite this factor, people nowadays tend to be obsessed with the narrow-minded short-term objectives such as money making gaming and labelling individuals according to their conformance to the mainstream society. This tendency is notorious in financial economics and psychology related to sociology. Economists nowadays tend to focus on the market speculation and pedantically modifying the already existing theories. Social psychologists impose the cohesively unified theory authorised by the academic elite peer group to people with little empirical experimental evidence and little discussion among various perspectives. This is in fact a worrying phenomenon for individual people and their world environment.
The prisoner’s dilemma theory is the clear example indicating this worrying matter when individuals are motivated by following the pure logics without the philosophical principle while pursuing the narrow-minded short-term goal. The prisoner’s dilemma explains that the spontaneously equilibrium point is not always good; Its outcome can be actually bad! The original theory explains that each one of these two prisoners betrays each other to eventually induce themselves to the worst overall outcome in consequence although their cooperation would bring the best outcome. This is not due to their stupidity at all. Their rational attitude towards their pure logical thought process induces their action leading to the worst outcome. This analysis of the prisoner’s dilemma can be used as the analogy of the market speculation in economics.
In this case scenario, private economic agents seldom voluntarily cooperate together to divert their economy from the worst outcome. Instead, they often induce the worst outcome called the bad equilibrium without any forcible countermeasure against it. During the deflationary recession, their action perpetuates the deflation by saving more while investing less to the market although they had better cooperate to invest more to divert the deflation to overcome the recession. At the time of the economic overheat causing the surging price inflation, their action accelerates the inflation by investing more than the prudential level instead of suppressing it by being prudent.
This is why the authoritarian paternalistic government intervention is often desired to forcibly divert these worst outcomes. However, this officious government intervention often antagonises individual citizens thinking of their government as rather impertinent than compassionate. Furthermore, the government also often fail to achieve such an intervention due to their long complicated bureaucratic processes slowing the process down as well as corruption and incompetence discouraging it.
This market dysfunction is caused by the rational but over-speculative attitude of these economic agents. It is considered to be derived from their narrow-minded mentality without any philosophical principle. It reminds of the proverb “Reality is but a mirror reflecting your inner world.” which both Epicurus and Schopenhauer inferred in their philosophy at each contemporary time period. The world turns to be a chaotic game of speculation without any noble ethical principle.
Sum up, the reliance on pure logics without any guiding principle is unproductive as well as worrying. This can be the reason why the current world situation is in a chaotic state. Whilst the intelligence and the technology of applying more complex logics than the past, it still struggles to reach a productive and virtuous state. Hence, it must be the time to revise to evaluate the core principle basing logics foundation and enabling it to self-evaluate to verify its validity itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment