DEFINITIONS STATED BY J. FAGG FOSTER

ANARCHIST is one who denies the validity of institutions as such--all exercise of discretion

            over others, confounding power with authority.

 

APPLICABLE THEORY.  “... what we mean by applicable theory is theory which does bring into

            intellectual availability alternatives which in fact resolve the problematic situation.  If

            they don’t,  that is what we mean by erroneous theory--theory which does not permit

            you to get at the right evidences or arrange them for analysis.  The arrangement is the

            structure of the theory. 112 above

 

ARCHITECT is the person who has the function of applying aesthetic theory to the

            technological function of structures.

 

ARTS.  FINE ARTS have the central function of communication, while the central function of

            INDUSTRIAL ARTS is the facilitation of other functions.  Not the distinction between

            work and leisure. 100 above.

 

AUTHORITY is the exercise of discretion over others with responsibility to them; validated

            by comparative ignorance.  Distinguish from POWER.

 

BAD is that which destroys the ability to participate in other activities. 

 

BARBARISM is the organized use of predation to provide means of life. 

 

BRUTALITY is the irrational show of coercive force without instrumental validity.

 

CAUSE.  “... no item in the continuum that is human life can be regarded as a cause alone--

            it is both cause and effect, and it has no peculiar nature as a cause.  There can be

            no nature of a cause.  ‘Cause’ applies only to the interconnectedness of the run

            of the facts.”  Journal of Economic Issues, 1981:894-5.

 

CIVILIZATION is the relative development of the arts and sciences; it is never plural and

            can't be lost; change or loss is in power structures. 

 

COMPROMISE usually means both sides abandon some part of their position.  It never

            solves a problem because it is concerned with "how much" is abandoned rather

            than "what," the identification of which requires a criterion of judgment.  

 

CONSCIENCE is the sum of comprehensions of validity in one's own behavior; awareness

            of degree of integrity.

 

CONSUMPTION is destruction, in the sense of elimination from inventory, but not destructive.

            This would seem to be corollary to the definition of investment as variation in aggregate

            inventory.

 

CONTINUITY does not mean long life.  It means continuous in causal terms, cumulatively

            developmental.

 

COST in instrumental rather than business terms is a function of values--the destruction of

            values.

 

CULTURE is a particular application of the arts and sciences. 

 

DEFENSE.  SELF-DEFENSE is the only instance in which one validly has a choice between

            life and death.  In all other situations, there are other alternatives that will maintain the

            social process.

 

DEMOCRACY is the process by which the people decide; the popular determination of

            public policy.  

 

DIGNITY is the outward expression of integrity. 

 

DISCIPLINE is often equated with obedience, but the frontier experience led the founders of

            the United States to mean by discipline self-control in trying circumstances.

 

ECONOMICS is the study of how the means of life are provided. 

 

EDUCATION is the provision of opportunities to comprehend the arts and sciences and their

            applications to the everyday lives of everybody.

 

EQUALITY.  “In the instrumental sense, Justice and Equality are different words for the same

            thing.  They describe conditions of inquiry maximal to constant experiment in human

            experience.  They describe a condition of human affairs in which the individual as part

            of society can make a maximum contribution, given his individual uniqueness and

            talents and shortcomings, to the efficient carrying on of the life process of all men.” 

 

ETHICS is the study of the difference between right and wrong. 

 

FASCISM is a system in which power is the theory and the criterion of value.

 

FEUDALISM is a system in which function and status are determined by inheritance. 

 

FREEDOM means absence of prescription to most of the world’s peoples, who have

            constantly experienced power-imposing institutions.  To North Americans, who

            experienced over two centuries of frontier life without power-imposing institutions,

            it means the area of discretion over one's own behavior. 

 

FRONTIER “is an area of land which is outside the control of  a judicial establishment and

            outside the market process.” 164 above.  A frontier economy is one in which one

            or more factors of production do not enter into accepted accountancy.

 

GOVERNMENT is the organized exercise of sovereignty. 

           

HABIT is a pattern of behavior learned by repetition in situations in which it appears  to satisfy

            functionally the requirements of the situations.  "Habits are applicable where solutions

            to particular kinds of problems have been attained with sufficient accuracy to permit

            continued operation without serious infringement of the continuum in question." 96

            above.

 

HEDONISM is the doctrine that pleasure is the sole or chief good and that moral duty is

            fulfilled in the gratification of pleasure seeking instincts.

 

IDEA is a comprehension of the consequences of some activity and always precedes action.

 

INDIVIDUALISM is the theory that assumes that the only source of validity for an individual's

            behavior is the convicted accreditation of that individual.

 

INFLATION. True inflation exists when price level increases themselves cause further

            increases; partial inflation exists when a rising price level does not eventuate in

            further price increases. 

 

INSTITUTION is a prescribed pattern of correlated behavior.  Its prescriptive power is by

            virtue of habit.

           

INSTRUMENTAL THEORY OF VALUE identifies problem solution as the criterion of judgment.

            It is universally applied but seldom recognized.

 

INVESTMENT is the rate of variation of inventory of a community (for Keynes, inventory of

            business); the difference between the rate of production and the rate of destruction.

            "In the classical tradition, increasing capital accumulation is good, but increasing

            inventory is     bad, in that it leads to decreasing investment and income. In Keynes,

            capital accumulation is inventory and is good, leading one to question the proper

            character of inventory."

 

ISM is that which stands for or represents a body of theory, the validity of the assumptions of

            which is based on the theory itself.  It is always teleological, demonstrating how to

            achieve a preconceived end outside of the life process. 119 above

 

JUDGMENT is a connection between the present and the future; it is a hypothetical projection

            of choices within one’s area of discretion into combinations which are not yet.  If the

            combinations exist now, you aren’t making that judgment; it has already been made.

            94 above.

 

JUSTICE.  "In terms of the instrumental theory of value, the concept of justice becomes

            identical with the problem of welfare--progress.  It disappears as a separate problem." 

            From Gladys Foster’s notes printed in the Journal of Economic Issues  25 (December

            1991):1155-60.  Cf. EQUALITY above.  Price theory is the equational theory of justice

            applied to the economic process: price = cost.  Same for Marxist theory of exploitation. 

 

LAG.  The cultural lag hypothesis advanced by Ogburn, Social Change, 1922, denotes

            something inherently different between culture and technology.  Institutional adjustment

            is assumed to lag behind technological change.  We do have institutional problems

            brought about by change of industrial arts, but this is very recent, only since science

            has adopted the instrumental value theory.  It used to be the opposite: the family,

            government, the market were invented before the wheel.  

 

LEISURE. "Leisure is an attribute of employment, it is not an alternative to employment.  It's

            an alternative to working when you are employed.  It's an alternative available to those

            who have placement in the institutional structure we call employment."   136 above.

 

LIBERAL is one willing to alter the established institutional order to solve problems.

 

LICENSE is institutional enforcement of improper choice.

 

LOVE is the integration of two personalities.

 

MAN is a social animal; social life consists of integrated patterns of behavior.

 

MISSING MIDDLE.  Foster’s characterization of a bifurcation or assertion of an ontological

            difference in kind.  His name is taken from the canon in formal logic of conjunctive-

            disjunctive relations among propositions: something is either A or non-A.  Cf. Dewey’s

            Logic, pp. 343ff.  Foster rejected many popular assertions of a missing middle:

            between pleasure and pain, science and philosophy, fact and value, means and ends,

            cause and effect, theory and practice.

 

MODEL is an alternative methodology to theory: deductive logic going from general to specific;

            axiomatic, tested not by evidence but logical consistency with assumptions--beyond

            which one cannot go.

 

MORES PRINCIPLE is that habits constitute institutions.  “Institutional structures are con-

            constituted by mores and folkways (by habits of thought and action); i.e., the behavior

            patterns that constitute institutions are habits.  In application it is usually assumed that

            institutions are not only constituted by but also determined by habits.  That assumption

            is false.”  109 above

 

PACIFISM has no foundation in fact.  While aggression is always invalid, defense is always

            valid.

 

PHILOSOPHY is the deliberate effort to think coherently over the entire field of human

            experience, i.e., a deliberately rational effort 1) to build generalizations which are

            inclusive of the whole of human experience and 2) to verify and/or negate these

            generalizations by observing singular applications.  It is generic with science, the

            only difference being in universes: philosophy is the all-inclusive science, and

            the sciences are singular applications of philosophy.  The same difference

            exists between mathematics & arithmetic. 88 above.

 

POLITICAL ECONOMY is the pattern of institutions through which the  character and level

            of real income are determined.  

 

POLITICAL FUNCTION is the process of determining public policy.

 

POWER is the exercise of discretion over others without responsibility to them.  Distinguish

            from AUTHORITY.

 

PRINCIPLE.  "Etymologically, the word principle refers to an inclusive and continuing

            operational proposition to which there are no exceptions." 

 

PROFIT is the ratio of unobligated proceeds (beyond costs) to investment as time rates; 

            net proceeds/net costs.

 

PROGRESS is the advance of civilization; it is sometimes defined as the rate of capital

            accumulation, since accumulation is necessary for invention.

 

PUGNACITY is a human capacity, a temporary circumstance raised by some historians to

            the level of a principle.

 

PROPERTY always implies the right to the return from the use of an asset; it can include

            discretion over use.

 

PUBLIC UTILITY is an enterprise regulated as to price and product, but privately owned.

 

REASON is the human capacity exercised in selecting alternatives in problematic situations

            in which habitual behavior fails to satisfy the requirements of the situation. 

 

RELIGION is the search for the nature of cause beyond ordinary experience.

 

REPUBLIC is one institutional structure used to carry on the democratic process.

 

RESPONSIBILITY is accountability for one's behavior.

 

RIGOR is a sudden and painful dislocation in an otherwise orderly process.  Latin stiffness

            or severity, from rigere, to be stiff.

 

SABOTAGE, PEACEFUL is the intentional, willful, deliberate, planned curtailment of the

            provision of the means of life.

 

SCIENCE is a matter of arraying facts in causal terms, in line with a theoretical formulation,

            which is a theory of value, a criterion of judgment. l) building generalizations, and 2)

            constant verification and/or negation through singular applications of those gen-

            eralizations as working hypotheses.  The two steps are separately identifiable

            but not separable operationally, since the first is accomplished through the

            operation of the second.  88 above.

 

SIGNIFICANCE is applicability to real problems.

 

SOVEREIGNTY is that resolution beyond which there is no appeal.

 

SPECULATION is the effort to gain by changes in price levels.

 

STYLE is the individual character of the use of tools.

 

SUBSIDY is a payment which wouldn't have been received if real cost were the limiting factor. 

 

SYNDICALISM is the system in which function and status are determined by economic role. 

 

TECHNOLOGY is the application of theory (the arts and sciences) to physical fact, to the social

            process, to the use of social and physical tools. 

 

TELEOLOGY is an outside-of-the-process directional determinant or directional identification.

 

THEORY is the identification of significant data and hypotheses about relationships. "The

            function, and therefore the significance, of scientific theory is twofold: it identifies

            pertinent data, and it specifies the arrangement of those data for analysis in order to

            find answers to problems."   It is an alternative methodology to modeling, going from

            specific to general: if first is true, next is probably true.  At least one statement must

            be empirically verifiable. 

 

UTILITY.  “Some things give more pleasure or pain than others, and people make judgments

            about them.  But those traits do not explain how things come to be judged desirable or

            undesirable.  A criterion of judgment is still needed.”   117 above.

 

UTILITY THEORY OF VALUE identifies want satisfaction as the criterion of judgment.  It is

            almost universally assumed but cannot be applied because it is irrelevant to the

            causal continuum of human experience.  “It is impossible to apply an

            erroneous criterion.” 93 above.

 

UTILITARIANISM is the doctrine that the useful is the good, and that the determining

            consideration of right conduct is the usefulness of its consequences; especially the

            doctrine that the aim of moral action is the largest possible balance of pleasure over

            pain or the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

 

VALUATION is the process of applying a value  when judging comparative worth.  "Now,

            valuation as such is the selection of proper behavior, as choosing among alternatives,

            alternatives which are available in the sense that they may be chosen but which are

            not yet operative." 97 above.

 

VALUE is the criterion, end, or referent of judgment. 

 

VALUES usually mean things we hold dear.  They are never continuing factors; they refer to

            temporary situations rather than to continuing conditions, and thus cannot serve as

            grounds for judging what is good and what is bad economically, i.e. VALUE.

 

WAR never solves problems, but does determine who will make policy after it is over.