G. L. S. Shackle

Epistemics and Economics : A Critique of Economic Doctrines

It is Shackles view that human conduct is chosen with a view to its consequences. But these are in the future, which cannot be directly known. Expectation will confine itself to what is deemed possible, but this leaves it free to entertain widely diverse and rival hypotheses. How can such skeins of mutually conflicting ideas serve the formation of individual or institutional policy? This is the chief question this book examines.

Time in Economics.

The author speculates upon basic themes in economics in order to shed light upon the background of logic in individual behavior.

The Bounds of Unknowledge

A question faces every one at almost every hour: what will the sequel be, if I do this, or if I do this? Whence can the answer to that question come, what form will it take, what force will it have, how will the questioner make use of it? The question admits of no escape, for even to sit silent and motionless is to take a course of action. What resources are at hand to help answer it? The individual has a conception of the technology of nature and of the capacities and propensities of human nature. Thus he has notions of the sort of thing that can take place. But when he sets himself to choose a course of action out of many which seem open to him, he may implicitly assume himself to be making history, on however small a scale, in some sense other than mere passive obedience to the play of all-pervasive causes. He may assume that his act of choice is in some respects an absolute origination, something not wholly implicit in antecedents, he may deem his thoughts to be not entirely determinate, but able to come in part ex nihilo. If choice can be of this kind, I shall call such an act of choice a beginning. It is a taking-place in some respects uncaused, yet it can help to shape its sequel. It is then an uncaused cause. A beginning in this sense is out of reach of foreknowledge. We cannot know in our present whether or when a beginning, a choice in part uncaused, may occur in time-to-come, or what may be its character.

To Cope with Time

In planning the use of its resources a company may be supposed to conceive a number of rival schemes, and to form for each of them some ideas of what would follow the adoption of that scheme. In general such ideas concerning any one scheme might compose a single-line history-to-come of the company’s affairs, that is to say, a history which gives no more than one answer to any question. Or, the ideas may lead to the forming, for each scheme, of a number of rival imagined sequels. Here, uniqueness of the envisaged sequel of a scheme, on one hand, and the readiness to study a plurality of rival sequels, on the other, make very different demands on the planner. If an unique history-to-come is validly to occupy by itself his thoughts of what some one scheme may lead to, the logical need is that every rival sequel that the planner imagines or might imagine be excluded, in his thought, by some discerned fatal obstacle residing in the posture and nature of things. By contrast, the readiness to originate and to examine critically a number of mutually rival suppositions about the sequel of any use of the company’s resources calls only for the exclusion, in a final audit, of those suppositions to which the planner discerns a fatal obstacle.