pp. 41-55: Solomon M. Stein

Knowledge and Coordination presents an argument that economics ought to be reconsidered and placed into the realm of the humanities, and that doing so will improve the rhetorical force of liberal arguments regarding both economics and morality. This paper argues that, despite the ambition of this project, the combination of the positive and normative leads to misunderstanding and weakness in both. In particular, this leads to the imposition of normative significance onto areas of theory where none can be valid, as well as to an underspecified moral standard. These problems are most obvious when considered in light of two central elements of Knowledge and Coordination, the notion of concatenate coordination and the role of the allegorical social coordinator ‘Joy’.

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