REALISM AND ABSTRACTION IN ECONOMICS (william)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Added on Monday, March 12, 2012, 01:01 AM
6Here one must make the qualification: unless its being pulled downward causes it to encounter a countervailing force it would not otherwise have encountered—e.g., colliding with an obstacle and so rebounding in the opposite direction. A similar qualification applies in the economic case: if “an increased supply of tomatoes (accidentally) causes an increase of demand for these tomatoes,” then “it is not necessarily the case that the tomato price is lower than it otherwise would be” (Hülsmann 2003, p. 74, p. 77, n. 24). Yet even if this means that ceteris paribusclauses cannot be eliminated entirely, their scope is certainly narrowed. As for the case of gravity, the above qualification incidentally provides an answer to an objection raised by an anonymous referee: if an object (say, a book) is resting on a table, can we still say that the object ends up five feet further downward than it would have without the influence of gravity? Yes, in the following sense: the downward force that the book exerts on the table is exactly offset by the upward force that the table exerts on the book. If the book were to encounter that same upward force without the downward force, than after the relevant interval it would be five feet higher up than it is now. However, in this case the book would not have encountered the upward force were it not for the downward force; hence the above-mentioned qualification.
