What is it about?
It's about how everything appears to be a certain way according to common sense or initial appearances - for example, the sun 'rising' - and how everything is actually the opposite according to science - for example, the earth moves, not the sun. The paper argues the same contrast occurs in economics, and that Marx, in particular, emphasized the contrast in relation to the transformation problem - how value can be transformed into prices. A more relevant analogy is gravity. Value is to price as gravity is to the motions of the planets. The transformation problem thus becomes a question of how an abstract theory, postulating unobservables, could explain observable, concrete, and unsystematic appearances. But if so, it follows that the transformation problem reduces to the general problem of how any science can explain appearances.
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Why is it important?
This paper is the first to argue that the transformation problem reduces to the problem of choosing between Aristotelian and Galilean sciences. Aristotelian sciences systematize appearances; Galilean sciences explain appearances, often negating them, via abstraction. Marxian economics is a Galilean science that attempts to explain appearances in terms of abstract theoretical entities (like value) that cannot be observed. By contrast, modern economics is largely a descriptive (Aristotelian) science. This abandons the explanatory problem that initiated classical economics, namely, why are some nations more wealthy than others? It cannot simply be because some nations desire more goods than supply allows, although such desire obviously affects pricing. The paper is important, not just for Marxian economics (a new interpretation of the transformation problem) but also for the general science of economics (what might an explanatory science of economics look like?).
Perspectives
Believe it or not, this paper actually arose from thinking about the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer and Jerry Fodor. Both of these philosophers had a very stratified conception of the sciences - their idea being that they form a non-reductionist hierarchy. The implication is that reality (or ontology) exists at many levels of abstraction. Fodor's article 'Special Sciences' in particular got me thinking about what economics (one of Fodor's special sciences) might look like, as a science distinct from sociology and psychology, not to mention physics and chemistry. Of course, you'd have to have counterfactual supporting laws and causal relations - but Schopenhauer adds the idea that there are principles at the basis of every science that are not explained by that science (and thus can only be explained metaphysically). For example, in physics this principle, inter alia, is gravity. I realized that Marx analogizes value to gravity. I inferred that the principle of economics is value. So like gravity, value is not an appearance but an underlying reality which we cannot observe and is not explained by the science of economics itself. Just as gravity is a 'fundamental' force, so is value. As a result, the effects of gravity or value we can only approximate via an abstract theory that assumes their unobservable existence. At this point, I had an insight from Chomsky: physics does a better job at approximating its level of reality than economics because physics is a simpler level than economics. This allowed me to think that the transformation tables, apparently indicating that profits are independent of value creation from labor, are hiding a complex reality that does not necessarily contradict the abstract theory. This in fact is what Marx assumes, and he argues that we either must assume this with him or else abandon all hope of science at this level of reality. I think that the modern discipline has in fact chosen the latter path, but I do not think this backsliding into Aristotelianism is unique to economics - I think it can be observed in psychology and many other disciplines as well. It is perhaps justified, since not every special science is guaranteed to be successful, by rationally transforming into a full, explanatory theory.
Jesse Lopes
Boston University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Phenomenology, Scientific Method and the Transformation Problem, Historical Materialism, November 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-12342035.
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