Record Detail Back
Markets, Money and Capital
- Share to:
One important premise of Hicks’s theoretical framework is the distinction between the structure of reality and the purpose-oriented arrangement of human actions. There are reasons to believe that, at an early stage of his development as an economist, Hicks came across the distinction between an ‘order of being’ and an ‘order of doing,’ as discussed by Maffeo Pantaleoni (Pantaleoni, 1925). As a matter of fact, Pantaleoni (in a passage carefully read and annotated by Hicks) had written:
Ancient logicians distinguished between a causa fiendi and a causa essendi, then between an ordo fiendi and an ordo essendi. In modern language, we have reserved the term cause to phenomena related to one another by a necessary order of occurrence in time, and the term joint occurrence of conditions to phenomena of necessary and contemporaneous co-ordination. A causal process is not a reversible one. On the contrary, a system of co-ordinated conditions may be looked upon starting from any one of its points; it has no order; it shows simultaneity. Now, economic phenomena show sometimes the former, sometimes the latter property. In any practical case, it will be easy not to get lost. (Pantaleoni, 1925: 71–2)
Pantaleoni’s dissection of causality concepts continues with the discussion of alternative classes of phenomena
Roberto Scazzieri, Amartya Sen and Stefano Zamagni - Personal Name
1st Edtion
-13 978-0-511-48091-
NONE
Markets, Money and Capital
Management
English
Cambridge University Press
2008
USA
1-467
LOADING LIST...
LOADING LIST...