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    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Limits to Certainty

The Limits to Certainty

Giarini, O.
Stahel, W. R.

Hardcover

Series: International Studies in the Service Economy, Book 4

EconomicsManagement

ISBN10: 0792321677
ISBN13: 9780792321675
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: Apr 30 1993
Pages: 271
Weight: 1.39
Height: 1.08 Width: 6.50 Depth: 9.54
Language: English
I consider it a privilege to have been invited to write a preface for The Limits to Certainty. It is however paradoxical that a theo- retical physicist be asked to write about a monograph dealing mainly with service economics. Notwithstanding, I am delighted to do so. Indeed, it is striking that two so widely different fields like physics and social science, and more especially economics, can interact in such a constructive way. There is no question here of reductionism. Nobody claims to be able to reduce social scien- ces to physics, nor to use patterns of social interaction in order to formulate new laws for atoms. What is at stake here is more im- portant than reduction; the age-old separation between the so-cal- led hard and soft sciences is breaking down. This separation has a long history. First, one should recall the influence of Newton's achievement on the formulation of scienti- fic goals. This influence led to the formulation of equilibrium mo- dels for supply/demand adjustment. As was noticed by Walter Weisskopf: the Newtonian paradigm underlying classical and non-classical economics interpreted the economy according to the patterns developed in classical physics and mechanics, in analogy to the planetary system, to a machine or clockwork: a closed auto- nomous system ruled by endogenous factors of a highly selective nature, self-regulating and moving to a determinate, predictable point of equilibrium (The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance (1984), Vol. 9, no. 33, pp. 335-360).

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