Callahan, ‘Economics and its Modes’ (2)

[Part two of a two three part commentary on Gene Callahan (2008), ‘Economics and its Modes’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 14 (2), pp.128-57. Part one is here, part three (in so many words) here.]

In this post, I will pick up and develop two things I more briefly noted in part one: the rather eclectic nature of Callahan’s philosophical authorities beyond Oakeshott and the obscurity of his conception of ‘translation’.

So, in part one, I suggested there was something fishy from an ‘orthodox Oakeshottian’ point of view about Callahan’s possibly unconscious slide from writing of ‘modes’ to writing of ‘idioms’: for, on the one hand, the former is more properly equated with the concept of ‘orders’ in On Human Conduct, and on the other, Callahan’s ambiguity here suggests as an unprincipled his claiming for the possibility of ‘translation’ between modes where he wanted it (in particular, from mathematical to logical economics, from the point of view of the logical economist), and ‘irrelevance’ otherwise (in particular, concerning the question of whether neurological research can in principle have any bearing upon the truth or otherwise of Misesian praxeology).

The various appeals he makes to philosophical authorities in the first third or so of the paper just compound this issue in my view.  For example, his appeal to Davidson might on the face of it seem quite apposite, since Davidson is a philosopher famous for both arguing against the idea that it makes sense to assert the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes (so, ‘translation’ between ‘idioms’ – words Davidson himself uses – is in principle possible), and arguing for the thesis that there is an ‘irreducible difference’ between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ concepts (so, the claims of praxeology are indeed not criticisable by neurologists…?).  On the other hand, before namedropping Davidson, Callahan appears to adopt wholesale the ‘neo-Kantian’ reading of Experience and its Modes – yet ‘neo-Kantianism’ (and in particular, the dichotomy between scheme and content, including when done in the terms of categories vs. statements) is a primary target of Davidson’s conceptual schemes paper. I am inclined to say similar things about other philosophers Callahan appeals to.  Even if I am correct in being uneasy here though, Callahan might only be thought guilty of over egging the pudding.  So, what of translation?

Well, the first thing to note here is an oddity: that despite Callahan emphasising the concept of translation in an article for whom Oakeshott is the master authority, Oakeshott’s own use of it is never mentioned.  Specifically, Oakeshott employs it in his philosophy of history, claiming a key task of the historian to be one of ‘translation’, and moreover, a translation from one mode (the practical) into another (the historical).  Here, the ‘translation’ done by the historian is to convert the normative, forward-looking utterances of her subjects into the components of a backward-looking, non-normative historical narrative – in other words, for an agent, statements of ‘what is’ are inevitably as much statements of ‘what ought to be’; the historian’s job, then, is to critically use them as evidence for what actually happened.*  For example, think of how in political debate, the assertion that a given politician is a ‘swindler’ is an assertion implying that that the accused should be considered a bad man, and that in being a bad man, certain things should follow (certain punishments for instance).  For an historian providing an historical account of the debate, however, these statements are just evidence for what the stater thought,** and in becoming ‘evidence’, they lose what normative implications they had had when originally uttered.

Is Callahan’s ‘translation’ between mathematical and logical economics like this?  Not really.  For, the relation between logical and and other forms of economics, I think, is of the former as a sort of ‘critique of economic reason’, identifying the principles and categories presupposed by economics as such in a manner that establishes the limits of valid economic reasoning (cf. both Callahan’s general appeal to Kant and his explicit characterisation of logical economics as a branch of the philosophy of action).  The difference with Oakeshottian historical translation comes out in how the results of logical economics, for Callahan, have a bearing upon the status of claims made in mathematical and macro-economics (albeit largely negative – ‘a mathematical economist overreaches if he claims such-and-so’), where the results of historical inquiry, for Oakeshott, have no bearing at all upon the status of claims made in the practical mode.  Where Oakeshottian historical translation does not deny the ‘irrelevance’ of one mode’s thinking to another, then, Callahanian economical translation does.

Of course, one might just say that this only validates Callahan’s decision to ignore Oakeshott’s concept of modal translation.  In cutting himself adrift from it though, Callahan ever more urgently needs to say what exactly he has in mind: for one thing his and Oakeshott’s conceptions share is a tendentious connection to ‘translation’ as we understand the concept in ordinary English.  For, in normal speech, a ‘translation’ has the aim of expressing certain intentions and/or emotions in a language other than that which they were originally expressed in – thus, a good translation of die Kritik der reinen Vernunft into the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, will as far as possible not alter what Kant was trying to say.  In contrast, in an historical ‘translation’, the original (normative) intentions are precisely the things done away with, and in an economical ‘translation’, the original intentions are at the very least transformed, the logical economist giving a new meaning to (and specifying previously unrecognised limitations of) the theories of mathematical and macro-economics.  If Callahanian translation ‘translates’ in neither in the ordinary nor Oakeshottian senses though, what exactly is the notion of ‘translation’ being alluded to?

* For sure, ‘what actually happened’ is hardly an Oakeshottian way of putting things.  There are occasions when you just have to break free of the discourse you are attempting to paraphrase though!

** They may also be evidence for the politician’s fate.  For instance, if a Party functionary had been publically labelled a ‘swindler’ in Stalin’s Russia and was never seen or heard of again, this labelling might be evidence for his having been shot by the secret police or transported to a prison camp.