REALISM AND ABSTRACTION IN ECONOMICS (william)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Added on Monday, March 12, 2012, 12:29 AM
The important question for us is: in what circumstances could one say that one had understoodthis sort of behaviour? . . . Weber often speaks as if the ultimate test were our ability to formulate statistical laws which would enable us to predictwith fair accuracy what people would be likely to do in given circumstances. . . . [But] we might well be able to make predictions of great accuracy in this way and still not be able to claim any real understanding of what those people were doing. The difference is precisely analogous to that between being able to formulate statistical laws about the likely occurrences of words in a language and being able to understand what was being saidby someone who spoke the language. . . . [A] man who understands Chinese is not a man who has a firm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in the Chinese language. (Winch 1990, p. 115)
