Identity, Tolerance and Backwardness: An Aspiration towards an Undisciplined Discipline
Prof. Ali Khan: I continue to be conflicted by the qualitative-quantitative divide in what the French call les sciences humaine et sociales: the consonance and the dissonance between the languages of mathematics and those of the everyday. This divide can perhaps also be expressed as a conflict or a compromise between two movements: an upward movement characterizing mathematical economics whereby a loose everyday intuition can be given a precise formal meaning, one that may or may not be refutable with statistical data; as opposed to a downward movement characterizing applied theory (in the modern vernacular) whereby the hypotheses and the consequences of a theorem can be interpreted, described and pushed further in everyday English usage with or without statistical data.
In this talk, I trace the relevance of the word backwardness, and its imbrication in the affiliated words identity and tolerance, for the discipline of political economy. Towards this end, I project the word backwardness to two different registers and its two constituent theoretical sub-registers: Walrasian [ADMA (Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie-Aumann)] general equilibrium theory and Cournotian [VNH (vonNeumann-Nash-Harsanyi)] game theory. For both of these investigations, questions of identity and tolerance constitute an important ambient subtext that is conspicuous by their absence. Whereas the talk avoids reference to specific topical concerns, its basic commitment and underlying point of departure is an understanding of theory and theorizing.
