Tuesday 26 February 2019

How to reconstruct Ambedkar's thought


It is usual, when speaking of a genuine thinker, to update his theory to take account of subsequent developments in the fields he had studied or contributed to.

It is foolish to apply wholly foreign, and false, ideas- no matter how modish- to 'frame' that thinker.

In the case of Ambedkar, we can easily reconstruct his thought by focusing on 3 separate, but related, present day fields of inquiry

1) 'Law & Economics' not just of the Coase/Posner type but as arising from a natural extension of Seligman & Beard's approach. This is quite different from standard 'mechanism design' because it accommodates mimetic effects of a 'moral Tardean' type and can have a description in actor-network theory.
By itself, this won't get us very far. However, the Buddhism Ambedkar was attracted to relied heavily on Darwin's theory of Evolution. This meant, when he was in America, he was influenced by

2) Baldwinian Evolution which in turn requires a Game theoretic description in order to gain tremendous explanatory power. I may mention Waddington's 1941 book, 'The Scientific Attitude' as one which influenced young Indian people who were keen to reject Eugenic explanations of the Caste System. This enables us to interpret Ambedkar in terms of 'costly signals' and 'separating equilibria' which in turn relate to coordination and discoordination games, involving canalisation or the damming up of evolutionary capacitance, as arising at every Schelling focal point. Markets can thus be understood as always involving hedging and regret minimization.

3) Buddhist Logic as Type theoretic and thus capable of univalent Foundations. This ties in with Dewey type Pragmatism.

Oh dear. I just bored myself. Nobody is interested in reconstructing Ambedkar's thought. We just want to use the imprimatur of his name to say the stupidest thing possible.

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