[This post is dedicated to Scaliger, for whom Mary Trivers lives forever.]
"A dragon lives forever but not so little boys/Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys./One grey night it happened, Jackie paper came no more/And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar./ His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain/Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane./Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,/ So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave..."
When I became a father I expected to sing this song to my son, but he prefers Buddy Holly, so I share my thoughts with you. ("Philosophy, the un-song songs," ch. VII)
When confronted with magic dragons truth-obsessed philosophers are inclined to invoke the category of falsity, or when they are more flexible, fiction. But while these categories have their uses, they don't quite do justice to the significance of intentional objects and how we relate to them. Some such objects become shared among us, and can take on a life of their own (e.g., borders, currencies, perhaps mathematical objects, etc), sometimes aided by the persuasion that is derived by border-guard bullets (but not all of social reality relies on brute force). When that happens it is not very helpful to think in terms of fiction or make-believe.
If one wants to understand, say, economic bubbles the fate of puff in this song has more to teach us than General Equilibrium Theory (which in its canonical formulations has no place for money, has become caught up in assumption of no-arbritage, etc; recall this, this, and this.) GET deploys plenty of intentional objects (recall my treatment of contingent commodities), but while making plenty of modal bets, it lacks a meta-theory (or metaphysics) about the ways of being of these objects and, in particular, its own role in generating such intentional objects.
Now, part of this point is appreciated by the distinguished Finnish philosopher of economics, Uskali Mäki, who (in this article) draws a distinction between causal and constitutive independence. Uskali thinks that while granting that economic theories can causally influence social reality, he can save the realism of economics by insisting that "Saying so makes it so – this is the principle of constitutive science-dependence that scientific realism must deny." It is true that writing the equations of GET on a black-board does not make them so.
In fact, only in a complete tyranny (or the imagination of little boys and girls) does saying so make it so. (This is not to deny that there are lots of social facts and obligations that depend, in part, for their existence on prior utterances--promises, vows, etc. Uskali recognizes such performativity in the paper.) But the impact of and the way of being of intentional objects are not solely the immediate effects of utterances. As the fate of puff makes us realize, sometimes not-showing-up can utterly destroy the potency of an intentional object without saying anything (e.g., the implosion of a bubble).
Rational expectations theory, where "the agents inside the model assume the model's predictions are valid," went some way to acknowledging these facts about intentional objects. But, of course, it never faced up to two inconveniences: a) the modelers may have incentives that distort their judgments (and this was never put inside the model); b) agents inside the model may rebel against the model--something that poor puff failed to realize.
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