Pete Boettke often impresses on his students that idea that formalism and rigour are distinct - in other words, don't fall for the seduction of mathematics. This isn't to say that formalism can't improve rigour, but that it's not a necessary condition. He impresses this because the dominent attitude within the economics professions (perhaps encapsulated nicely by Greg Mankiw here) is that stating theoretical concepts in formal language is *more* rigorous than natural language.
So I was intrigued to notice the following part of The Economist's review of the new Stephen Hawking book:
The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous—like “A Brief History of Time”, it has no formulae—but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion.
In other words the *lack* of formulae increases the rigour of the book. It's obviously quite possible that we're using terms in different ways, but something for social scientists that favour natural language to remember - the challenge is to convince your audience that such work is more rigorous than mere symbols.
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Posted by: MBT Shoes | July 14, 2011 at 11:11 AM