A rejoinder to Cook and response to Chao: Moving the Textbook/LSE debate forward

Abstract

The reply by Cook and comment by Chao demonstrate Kuhn's thesis that different scientists place different values on different components of their common discipline. This fact is demonstrated by first succinctly summarizing Cook's and my original points within the framework of a simple choice model. I then respond to Cook and Chao. I close by offering some suggestions on how the Textbook/LSE debate could be moved forward.

Keywords:

• Econometric methodology
• textbook econometrics
• LSE econometrics

Notes

Recall Keynes's (1940: 155) Septuagint analogy in his reply to Tinbergen, ‘It will be remembered that the seventy translations of the Septuagint were shut up in seventy separate rooms with the Hebrew text and brought out with them, when they emerged, seventy identical translations. Would the same miracle be vouchsafed if seventy multiple correlators were shut up with the same statistical material?’. Keynes' question is still applicable today by substituting ‘Textbook econometricians’ or ‘LSE econometricians’ for ‘multiple correlators’.

Van Fraasen states on the back cover of Suppe's (1989) book, ‘I have always found it essential to my own research to keep up with Suppe's work, and therefore had read a number of the papers that formed the preliminary basis for the present volume. But now this work has gained an additional significance, partly through the valuable amendments and additions that he introduced, but mostly from the fact that they are now set in a general philosophical framework, in which Suppe addresses the main issues in philosophy of science today’ (emphasis added).

The term ‘theory’ is being used here in its loosest sense: a theory is simply a reason for deciding what variables to include in the analysis and what variables not to include. Even the ‘exploratory analysis’ that Chao references implicitly invokes some type of theory.