ABSTRACT
Modern economists end up distorting social phenomena just to render them open to treatment by their chosen approach. The point of an experimental set up is precisely to isolate a stable causal mechanism from the influence of countervailing mechanisms in order to identify properties. If a reliance on functions is to be an appropriate way to proceed in economics, event regularities or event correlations must be a commonplace in the social ream. A language system is given at any moment and facilitates our speech acts. The primary objects of science are the underlying mechanisms that govern the directly perceivable events and states of affairs of the world. Deductive mathematics based on functional relations is the sort of mathematical system that economists have found easiest to handle. Economics can be both explanatorily successful and even scientific in the sense of natural science. Karl Marx stressed that in periods when profits actually fell there were likely countervailing forces preventing it falling faster.
