The Sovereignty of Theory

It has been the posture of science that there is truth to be found. Science has made it a virtue to be concerned only with impressions which, supposedly, can be shared and are public. The world is divided into the part which lies inside the human mind and the part which provides the mind with a stream or field of impressions from outside itself. Human conduct must surely be formed by a confluence of all the needs, interests, institutions and intellectual speculations of the human being. To treat some sub-set of these influences as a separate subject of enquiry is to compound the basic autonomy of theory-making by a further freedom to select the influences. Whatever theory is then devised will exist by sufferance of the things which it has excluded. Such is the position of economic theories. But since it is the position of all economic theories, none can in general claim superiority on these grounds.