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Philosophers and Accountants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Colin Lyas
Colin Lyas
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster
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Extract

At first sight the activities of professional accountants might seem tooffer little that could interest philosophers. Accountants, it is widely believed, report in various ways on what is the case, where what is the case is unambiguously and objectively ascertainable by reference to determinate facts. It is not clear what interest a philosopher might have in that activity.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 227 , January 1984 , pp. 99 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 Robert R. Sterling, Toward a Science of Accounting (Houston: Scholar's Book Company, 1979), 8, and ‘Accounting at the Crossroads’,Journal of Accountancy (August 1976).

2 Edward Stamp, ‘Why can Accounting not become a Science like Physics’, Abacus 17 (1981), 14.

3 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1972), 141.

4 Anthony Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers (London: Duckworth, 1982), ix.

5 Sterling, op. cit., and Stamp op. cit., see also Stamp, Corporate Reporting: Its Future Evolution (CICA: Toronto, 1980).

6 Stamp, Corporate Reporting, 40.

7 A. L. Thomas, The Allocation Problem in Financial Accounting Theory (Florida: American Accounting Association, 1969), and The Allocation Problem Part Two (Florida: AAA, 1974).

8 Peter Winch ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly (1964), and The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

9 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1967), 8f.

10 Stamp, Corporate Reporting, 80-81.

11 I David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ in Essays: Literary, Moral and Political (London: Ward Lock, undated), 135-136.

12 Stamp, Corporate Reporting, 10.

13 See, for example, R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1980), and F. N. Sibley, ‘Aesthetics and Objectivity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Suppl. vol. (1968).

14 Corporate Reporting, 81.

15 Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: NLB, 1978), and Against Method (London: Verso, 1975).

16 Russell Keat and John Urry, Social Theory as a Science(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). Part One, Chapter I, covers themain areas of contention.

17 See Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge University Press, 1958), and Keat and Urry op. cit., Chapter 3.

18 Stamp, Corporate Reporting, Chapter 9 reviews the matter.

19 For more on such examples see H. L. A. Hart, ‘The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1948/1949).

20 An analogy used by Neurath. It is quoted as a motto to W. V. O. Quine's Word & Object (Cambridge, Mass: MIT i960), and discussed in the text, e.g. pp. 3 and 124.