Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Schumpeter and his surroundings: an overview
- 3 The scope and methods of Schumpeter's research program
- 4 The sociology of science and Schumpeter's ideology
- 5 The economic methodology of instrumentalism
- 6 Static economics as an exact science
- 7 The theory of economic development as a midpoint
- 8 A methodology of economic sociology
- 9 Economic sociology as an evolutionary science
- 10 The historical world of economics
- 11 Value judgments and political economy
- 12 Conclusion: Schumpeterian synthesis
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
4 - The sociology of science and Schumpeter's ideology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Schumpeter and his surroundings: an overview
- 3 The scope and methods of Schumpeter's research program
- 4 The sociology of science and Schumpeter's ideology
- 5 The economic methodology of instrumentalism
- 6 Static economics as an exact science
- 7 The theory of economic development as a midpoint
- 8 A methodology of economic sociology
- 9 Economic sociology as an evolutionary science
- 10 The historical world of economics
- 11 Value judgments and political economy
- 12 Conclusion: Schumpeterian synthesis
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
Summary
What is science?
In part I of the History of Economic Analysis (1954a), Schumpeter gives several versions of the definition of science before launching into an investigation of the history of economic analysis over a period of more than two thousand years. The first definition reads as follows:
(1) A science is any kind of knowledge that has been the object of conscious efforts to improve it.
(1954a, 7)By this definition science and other kinds of knowledge are distinguished. In order to talk about “conscious efforts to improve,” it is necessary to make explicit which rules the scientific efforts should follow and by what criterion the scientific improvement can be judged. Schumpeter mentions two distinctive characteristics of the rules of procedure in empirical science:
[The rules of procedure] reduce the facts we are invited to accept on scientific grounds to the narrower category of “facts verifiable by observation or experiment”; and they reduce the range of admissible methods to “logical inference from verifiable facts.”
(1954a, 8)This description represents a broad viewpoint of positivism in that the rules of procedure in science are essentially based on empirical observation and logical analysis. If the rules of procedure are only relevant to the investigation of scientific activity, the nature and progress of science will be judged exclusively by those rules.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Schumpeter and the Idea of Social ScienceA Metatheoretical Study, pp. 54 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997