From: JulioHuato <JulioHuato@aol.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 19:26:34 EST
Subject: A Note on Hegel

Dear Andy,

I found this piece in the New School's History of Economic Thought web site.
The author is Duncan Foley (Columbia University and New School).  I once took
a Political Economy course with Foley in the New School, and found him to be a
solid thinker.  The following passage made me send you the link below:

<The rational empiricist/analytical philosophical tradition seems to have no
language with which to come to grips with this decisive moment in theory
formation and scientific discovery. This sometimes has comical effects, as in
Popper's influential but inane account of science as a kind of medieval
tournament in which hypotheses ride into town like mysterious foreign knights
in order to challenge the existing champion through the joust of
falsification. The history of sciences, natural as well as social, reveals how
organic and endogenous the process of hypothesis and theory formation actually
is. Hegel's model of scientific discovery is much more helpful. Of course,
Hegel's model of discovery is not a cookbook for scientific advances, since it
describes only the form and not the content of discovery. It will always
appear to be true ex post, but can give us only formal guidance before
someone's insight solves the problem. After the discovery the owl of Athena
does take wing, and we say "of course, it's obvious that reconceptualization
solves the problem. How could we have overlooked this idea for so long?">

Hope you find it interesting,

Julio