Abstract

As a concrete extension of analyses of scientific method and social study already undertaken in the pages of this journal and elsewhere, the present article will endeavor to clarify certain long-standing preconceptions in classical and neo-classical economic doctrine which still persist and which, in the light of 20th century methodology, can be given no other label than that of pseudo-scientific. These preconceptions revolve primarily about the ideas of “value,” “cost,” “utility,” and “price,” which ideas have suffered little change to the present day and which even early writers recognized as being vague and ambiguous.