IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jinter/v2y1987i2p83-89.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A.N. Whitehead’s Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Examples from Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Herman E. Daly

    (Economics Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA)

Abstract

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is considered, following Whitehead, as a general difficulty in abstract conceptual thought. A connection to economic theory was made by Whitehead himself, although that was not his primary reason for investigating the fallacy. More recently Georgescu-Roegen has identified misplaced concreteness as the cardinal sin of standard economics. This article develops these points, and offers specific examples of this fallacy found in the works of several leading economists. In conclusion some rules of thumb for avoiding the fallacy of misplaced concreteness are offered.

Suggested Citation

  • Herman E. Daly, 1987. "A.N. Whitehead’s Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Examples from Economics," Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, , vol. 2(2), pages 83-89, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:2:y:1987:i:2:p:83-89
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jie.sagepub.com/content/2/2/83.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:2:y:1987:i:2:p:83-89. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.