The necessity for a clear understanding of the dual character of scientific method and of its applicability in social study as in the physical and biological sciences, can hardly receive too much emphasis at the present stage of development. Such an understanding, however, merely provides the proper beginning or orientation in the organization of any scientific discipline. That which is a common element in all scientific procedure can hardly serve to differentiate one science from another.

The analyses thus far undertaken of cost theory and utility theory have viewed these doctrines as they originally were, namely, as the contentions of two conflicting groups of value theorists. And had the two rival groups been allowed to continue to match strength on the plane on which Macvane, for example, contended, the result would probably have been the destruction of them both. Underneath surface conflicts, however, the rival theories had much in common. As the twentieth century got under way, (...) this state of affairs was discerned, with the result that in the end there was hand-shaking and backslapping all around and the inauguration of a live-and-let-live policy. Although at first regarding each other as mortal enemies, these two groups of price-determination theorists later came to see in one another something resembling blood kinship. But are the underlying assumptions which classicism and neoclassicism have in common any more realistic and scientific than the specific assumptions already examined? This is a question to which we now turn. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

If there is an essential difference as suggested in a preceding article, between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social studies on the other, in the sense that man has the power to change, and has repeatedly changed, existing social organizations, whereas he has no such power over natural phenomena, the meaning of social science must in this respect at least differ substantially from that of natural science. Elsewhere the present writer has designated society an “artificial creation,” (...) much as the automobile or a steel mill is, i.e. made by the artifice of man. The artificial automobile or steel mill is of course fabricated in the light of the natural laws of physical science. Its construction would be impossible without a knowledge of these laws. There are also certain natural laws and tendencies in human nature and animal behavior which must serve as a foundation for any scientifically fabricated society, i.e. constructed on the basis of observation and verification of these tendencies on the one hand and a rigorous use of theory and analysis on the other. In short, despite any essential difference, as suggested, between natural and social science, the scientific method is apparently just as applicable in the one field as in the other. There is still much confusion on this score. But before pursuing further the significance of the distinction, artificial versus natural, it will be well to have before us more of what opposing schools of methodological thought in the social studies have to offer. (shrink)