“If the government on the one hand would desire to use the results of scientific advice for its budget process, and on the other hand would not opt for an Economic Supreme Court, then its definitions would be logically inconsistent, and it would thereby tend to create a cause for dishonesty and improper manoeuvreing and thereby corrupt its processes.” (above)
While the above relies on structural models, the property can also be modeled in the reduced form. Chapter 40 uses information indicator I
{0, 1}.
Another application is to the methodology of science. Methodology should harness this human property, and clarify when it is useful and when it is misleading.
Science aspires at a more unbiased approach. This unbiased approach also means the deliberate creation of cognitive dissonance, by creating new concepts and by looking hard at the evidence till it doesn’t go away anymore.
The evolution of knowledge can be described in terms of an ever increasing power in the concepts used.
The introduction of a new definition is not simple. The questions always are: does the definition cover the facts as we know them, does the definition not introduce hidden aspects that cause confusion and prevent advancement ? If a new definition wins out, it is, apparently, only so because it is believed to have passed the test. Though, we should be critical of this assumption. Only if the environment is ‘critical’, then we might presume a ‘survival of the fittest’ for concepts. (And all this is reminiscent of Dawkins’s ‘memes’.)
Definitions can be devious in quite vulgar ways. In the English economics literature, ‘perfect competition’ is defined as the situation when no agent can affect the price, i.e. all agents are price takers. The Dutch word for this case is ‘full competition’. The English definition forces English economists to use the word ‘imperfection’ for all other cases. Even quite reasonable cases, in the normal state of human life, when agents have market power but balance at some social optimum, would be ‘imperfect’. Also a natural monopoly would be an imperfection - even if one could not conceive the situation differently since the monopoly is a natural one. It would be better if the English economists would adopt the Dutch definition, so that the words ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ could be used in their proper sense depending upon circumstance. This is just a vulgar example of how definitions can lead one astray.