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Introduction
The project of this book is to provide structuralist rational reconstructions of some economic theories in order to show their logical structure and address their methodological issues. By ‘structuralism’ I understand here a family of meta-theories of the sciences originated in what Muller (2011) has described as the model revolution at Stanford. Muller attributes the paternity of this revolution to Patrick Suppes, but there were prophets that anticipated it.
Actually, just after World War II, the theoretical activity of several economists and logicians at Stanford departed from the standard positivist conception of theories as sets of sentences (typically conceived as sentences of a formalized theory in first-order logic), a conception that can be conveniently labeled the ‘-View’. The motive of the departure was not of an abstract philosophical character, but rather the urgency of formulating with precision mathematized theories relevant to the demands of military intelligence. As Mirowski (2002) reports, Kenneth Joseph Arrow, Samuel Karlin, and Charles Chenoweth (“Chen”) McKinsey, just to mention some of the best-known names, were associated with the work of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. As a matter of fact, Stanford’s relationship with Rand was so tight that when the latter tried to part with the Douglas Aircraft Company, in 1948, Stanford’s Department of Economics made a bid to absorb Rand (Collins and Kusch 1998: 294 n.; quoted by Mirowski 2002: 299, n. 74). Actually, Mirowski (2002: 299) refers to the Stanford of that epoch as the “major West Coast outpost of military-academic research”.1 What is of utmost importance for this story is that the standard logical methodology of the Stanfordite theoreticians working in military projects was Alfred Tarski’s, as almost all of them were his disciples.
To begin with, Arrow took a course on the calculus of relations with Tarski during the year in which the great Polish logician taught at the City College in New York (1940). Olaf Helmer, who came later to be in charge of recruiting formal logicians in order to do operations research at Rand, translated Tarski’s textbook, while Arrow was in charge of reading the proofs of the translation. There is no doubt (by his class notes) that his way of approaching the preference relation comes from there (cf. Mirowski 2002: 297).
In the autumn of 1950, the young Patrick (“Pat”) Suppes, who had just finished a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University, began to teach at Stanford. Shortly thereafter he met Chen McKinsey, who became his postdoctoral tutor. McKinsey taught Suppes the set-theoretical methods that would eventually make him justly famous but, reports Suppes:
It was not, however, just set-theoretical methods as such that McKinsey taught me but also a passion for clarity that was unparalleled and had no precedent in my own prior education.
(Suppes 1979: 8)
McKinsey told Suppes (with some exaggeration) that “he had learned everything he knew from Tarski”, and encouraged him to attend the seminar that Tarski was giving at Berkeley. Suppes described Tarski as a “ruthless taskmaster” but, above all,
as one of the great examples of the Polish school of logic, […] unwilling to go forward on a single point unless everything covered thus far was completely clear – in particular, unless it was apparent to him that the set-theoretical framework within which the discourse was operating could be made totally explicit. It was from McKinsey and Tarski that I learned about the axiomatic method and what it means to give a set-theoretical analysis of a subject.
(Ibid.)
It was with McKinsey and A. C. Sugar that he wrote his classical paper “Axiomatic Foundations of Classical Particle Mechanics”, which was presented in a rather patronizing way by Clifford Truesdell – a distinguished physicist, above all by his great modesty – who had no qualms in referring to Newton’s crowning achievement ...
