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| Program > Experiments |
| Programme > L'expérimentation |
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Margaret
Schabas
(University of British
Columbia) |
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Thought experiments became commonplace in the early modern period in the hands of Galileo, Harvey and Descartes, among others. It is still a matter of debate as to whether the understanding imparted by thought experiments stems from appeals to previously accumulated experience, or draws upon some non-empirical intuition. Thought experiments often commence with jarring counterfactuals and unfold without introducing any new empirical evidence. In principle, the demonstration of the thought experiment is so compelling that there is no need to repeat the experiment or seek greater approximation to the actual world, as one would in laboratory work. By exaggerating the dimensions of the relevant variables or creating a situation which is thoroughly fictitious, there is no confusion that it is the mind alone that is conducting the experiment. Moreover, the aim of the experiment is not that of measurement or identification, as is true of most laboratory experiments. Usually the aim is to establish a tendency, a pattern, and in that sense the experiment is more a demonstration than an open-ended inquiry. Most if not all cases of economic analysis involve abstraction, the distortion of reality either by idealization or by oversimplification, but these manipulations in themselves do not constitute thought experiments. Part of my efforts here will be to isolate those cases of genuine thought experimentation in economics during the early modern period. I will argue that David Hume (1711-76) was one of the first to conduct thought experiments in what we now call economics, notably on the subject of money and that these bear some resemblance to his thought experiments in his Treatise of Human Nature. In his essay "Of the Balance of Trade," for example, Hume supposes first that four-fifths of all money is annihilated overnight and then, in another experiment, that the quantity of money is increased fivefold overnight. In both cases, he spells out the consequences for prices given foreign trade and shows that the money would be restored to its original level (Hume 1985, 311). Here and in similar trains of thought, Hume employs unrealistic quantitative shifts so as to help the mind grasp that it is the relative proportion of money to prices, and not the absolute quantity of money, that matters. In other essays and letters, Hume entertains the complete and sudden annihilation either of gold or of paper money, arguing that the void would be immediately filled by silver in the first case, and foreign specie in the second (Hume 1985, 296, 320). Money thus abhors a vacuum as much as nature. The implication of this, for Hume, is to downplay the importance of money--it will flow on its own accord--and underscore the importance of people and industry. "A government has great reason to preserve with care its people and manufactures. Its money, it may safely trust to the course of human affairs, without fear or jealousy" (Hume 1985, 326). Hume's facility with thought experiments speaks to a skill he may well have inculcated from the study of natural philosophy.
Department
of Philosophy
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