IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-12371-1_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

‘Truth’ and ‘Discourse’ in the Social Construction of Economic Reality: An Essay on the Relation of Knowledge to Socioeconomic Policy

In: Essays on the Methodology and Discourse of Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Warren J. Samuels

    (Michigan State University)

Abstract

From time immemorial human beings have desired confident,1 if not absolute, knowledge. One is tempted to say that there are two types of people, those who require determinacy and closure, and those who can tolerate ambiguity and open-endedness. Most people seem to be of the former type, notwithstanding the views, first, that the desire for absolutes does not conclusively guarantee that an absolute actually exists, and second, that what people take as ‘fact’ may not actually constitute ‘reality’. This desire for confident knowledge has at least three sources: (1) the belief that action and policy based on knowledge should be predicated on truth rather than error; (2) the use of belief (assumed to be true knowledge) for purposes of social control, to either retain or change institutional arrangements and practices; and (3) the role of belief as psychic balm, to assuage the anxiety consequent to our living in a world of radical indeterminacy (uncertainty) in which, among other things, our importance as individuals and as a species in the universe seems problematic.

Suggested Citation

  • Warren J. Samuels, 1992. "‘Truth’ and ‘Discourse’ in the Social Construction of Economic Reality: An Essay on the Relation of Knowledge to Socioeconomic Policy," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Essays on the Methodology and Discourse of Economics, chapter 1, pages 11-28, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-12371-1_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-12371-1_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rojhat Avsar, 2008. "A Critique of ‘Neoliberal Autonomy’: The Rhetoric of Ownership Society," Forum for Social Economics, Springer;The Association for Social Economics, vol. 37(2), pages 125-134, August.
    2. Elias Khalil, 1999. "Institutions, Naturalism and Evolution," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(1), pages 61-81.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-12371-1_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.