From the History of Astronomy to the Wealth of Nations: Wonderful Wheels and Invisible Hands in Adam Smith’s Major Works

Re-reading Jevons’s Principles of Science – induction redux

“…The negation of (5), i.e, [(X^ Y ) _ (Y^ X)], is a universal proposition -it can express every proposition (in the predicate calculus) as strings of itself -in the same sense in which m (:) is a universal prior 12 . Even more importantly, every learning machine must include a component, in its architecture, to enable it to identify such a string, so long as the proposition is non-trivial.…”

“…"It is by false generalisation, again, that the laws of nature have been supposed to possess that perfection which we attribute to simple 1 It is a striking fact that Adam Smith, Stanley Jevons and Maynard Keynes , who each developed a distinct framework of economic analysis, were also codi…ers and innovators in the philosophy of science. Smith's History of Astronomy ( [16] and, for a …ne and comprehensive essay on this important work by Adam Smith, see also [12]) was, after all, an early attempt at codifying a framework to study the epistemology of scienti…c practice; Jevons's TPOS could even be read as a distant forerunner of Popper's Logik der Forschung, as emphasised, correctly I believe, by Mays ([13]), at least from a methodological point of view. As for Keynes, the Treatise on Probability (cf.…”

A economia e a filosofia moral de Adam Smith: uma abordagem integral de seus escritos

“…Baseado nesse argumento, Smith estabelece o conceito de cadeia invisível, regida por leis naturais, que liga as ações humanas e conduz a sociedade ao melhor dos mundos. De acordo com Luna (1993), Smith usou essa simbologia como um artifício de retórica e como uma expressão para representar um esquema funcional que resolve os problemas econômicos definitivamente. Bianchi e Santos (2007) afirmam que tal metáfora é, simultaneamente, consagrada na economia e fonte de grande controvérsia.…”