6 - Stabilizing dynamics
from Part II - From history to interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
Almost no one has had the courage to do a careful anthropological study of formalism. The reason for this lack of nerve is quite simple: a priori, before the study has even started, it is towards the mind and its cognitive abilities that one looks for an explanation of forms. Any study of mathematics, calculations, theories, and forms in general should do quite the contrary: first look at how the observers move in space and time, how the mobility, stability and combinability of inscriptions are enhanced, how the networks are extended, how all the informations are tied together in a cascade of re-representation, and if, by some extraordinary chance, there is something still unaccounted for, then, and only then, look for special cognitive abilities. What I propose here, as a seventh rule of method, is in effect a moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology.
Bruno Latour (1987, pp. 246–7)The usual history of stability analysis in economics, as presented in, for example, the text by Arrow and Hahn (1971), suggests the following:
1. The economic analysis of the early to middle 1930s that was concerned with dynamics and dynamic problems contained a rich and full range of arguments, ideas, concepts, and language that expressed the variety of what were called dynamic theories.
2. Simultaneously, the mathematical literature had developed a full and detailed language, a formal structure, for discussing and analyzing dynamic systems.
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- Stabilizing DynamicsConstructing Economic Knowledge, pp. 113 - 127Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991