by From Asad Zaman When we think about epistemology (theory of knowledge), then we are doing meta-thinking. That is, we are thinking about thoughts people have, which they think is “knowledge”. Because there are many many wrong ideas, and very few right ideas, we must learn to think critically. Unless we do so, our thoughts will be captured by the enormous amounts of fake news which circulates on social media these days. Thinking about thinking, or Meta-Thought, is very different from the standard education which students receive. Instead of asking about the “models” in use, and assessing adequacy or failure of their “assumptions”, at the meta-level we ask how economists began to use these models instead of others, what kind of thoughts are promoted by such models, and what kinds of
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from Asad Zaman
When we think about epistemology (theory of knowledge), then we are doing meta-thinking. That is, we are thinking about thoughts people have, which they think is “knowledge”. Because there are many many wrong ideas, and very few right ideas, we must learn to think critically. Unless we do so, our thoughts will be captured by the enormous amounts of fake news which circulates on social media these days. Thinking about thinking, or Meta-Thought, is very different from the standard education which students receive. Instead of asking about the “models” in use, and assessing adequacy or failure of their “assumptions”, at the meta-level we ask how economists began to use these models instead of others, what kind of thoughts are promoted by such models, and what kinds of thoughts are blocked, because the models are incapable of expressing such ideas. This kind of higher-level thinking is completely missing from conventional textbooks.
To highlight the differences, we consider as an illustrative example, how Martin Osborne begins his textbook on game theory, and explains what game theory is about: read more