Author: Curt Doolittle

MORE ON HUMAN SCALE

You know, empiricism (observation) and instrumentalism (instrumental observation) are demarcated by the limits of our sense perception. But the process is essentially the same.

I would prefer to get the point across that the reason we require instrumentalism is that once we pass beyond our sense perception, we also pass beyond human scale.

I consider economics to be instrumental : a discipline for measuring that which is directly unobservable, and therefore only indirectly observable.

Just as I consider all logics to be instruments, and any human action that does not require such instruments within human scale.

This distinction turns out to be terribly important once we realize just WHY Bridgman was so concerned about operationalism, why Poincare so concerned about mathematical platonism, why Brouwer was so concerned about mathematical operationalism and intuitionism, and why **I** am so concerned about both verbal operationalism and testimonial truth, and it’s opposite: the use of verbalisms (obscurant analogies), loading and framing.

Because we have been systematically applying the methods, including mathematical methods, but more importantly, the philosophical methods, that we developed during the era of human scale where we could reason without instruments, to the era of post-human scale where we cannot sense perceive without instruments. And there is a vast difference in the properties of human scale and post-human scale measurements.

Most important of these, at least in economics, is morality. Morality is a local phenomenon and macro economics is NOT. Just as we cannot apply the morals of the famly to the extended order, we cannot likewise apply the rules of the extended order to the family.

Now, if we apply the rules of the family to the extended order our efforts will be non-predictive. That is merely an empirical or perhaps epistemological criticism. But when we apply the rules of the extended order (non-moral) to the rules of the family and tribal (moral) then we commit suicide.

Macroeconomics as I understand it is merely a secular christian crusade against aristocracy by the Cathedral. It is not we who are conquering the cathedral. But the out-group nations who understand that the cathedral’s immorality is socially destructive religion, both for it’s hosts (us) and everyone touched by it.