universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

242that concepts are less disputed and tend to attain greater stability than in linguisticsbecause of the general need of economists to be regarded as “scientific", “mathematical”(Klamer, 1987:166), and because of the specific nature of its object of study that hasdemanded with an increasing pressure an investigatory apparatus with mathematicalmodels ix . In economics, we can find the word “concept” employed in a manner thatimplies that its source is known by every practitioner, signaling greater consent than inlinguistics, as seen in the examples below:[E#2] Let me just say that, rather than believing Harsanyi when he tells them thatZeuthen's 1930 argument can be successfully updated, political philosopherswould do better to believe him when he tells them that the Nash bargainingsolution has nothing to commend it as an ethical concept.[E#6] Although some concepts and results, e.g., singular economies, are verywell explained and motivated, on reading the book, I have not always beenconvinced of the economic importance of some of the mathematical results (e.g.,equivalence results in Section 5.4).[E#9] It implies that the Walrasian equilibrium concept is much too abstract tosolve economic problems.[E#12] Anderson chooses to focus on the case where a home and foreign firmform 'consistent' or 'rational' conjectures about their rivals' competitiveresponses. Since the concept of consistent conjectures is widely perceived asproblematic (as Anderson himself acknowledges), and since the point that quotastend to have an anti-competitive effect can be made in a very wide range ofoligopolistic models, it is not clear to me what is gained by focusing on therational conjectures model.Even though concepts are referred to as ‘unethical’ ([E#2]), ‘unconvincing’ ([E#6),‘too abstract’ ([E#9]), or ‘problematic’ ([E#12]), their definitions are not explicitly