Such a lucid and forthright paper as Mr. Buchanan's [James M. Buchanan, "Rational Choice Models in the Social Sciences," paper presented at the Symposium on Social Science Paradigms, University of Chicago, November 15, 1985] hardly needs a glossing kind of commentary, especially from someone like myself, who am familiar with the area of rational choice--both in theory and in practice--only as a kind of tourist (viz., my presence here today). But I do very much appreciate the fact that Mr. Buchanan's paper suggests a number of lines of thought from the point of view of someone like myself, someone whose empirical work consists in studying language and social action cross-culturally as systems of meaningful communication. Let me articulate some of these, or at least try to, to see if others here also have come to similar conclusions.

As I understand it from Mr. Buchanan's confessedly reluctant characterization, not endorsement--for that is the stance he takes--the theory rests on a general model of interrelated constructs that might be applicable to studying empirical situations, to the different degrees ints conditions are operationalizable. Like any model, it is "reconstructive and explanatory" of observation, in Mr. Buchanan's words, in that it purports to find, to whatever degree of accuracy, instantiation of the model in actual, investigable cases. That is, it presumes that if the model corresponds to fact, it merely describes those facts. The discourse of a theory in this technical sense purports to be a set of what we call "representative utterances," stating as true what is already the case. It would seem that the facts of this theory are that, to a certain degree of accuracy, all conscious human behavior ought to be represented as rational choice behavior, of a very specific sort. It is this empirical claim that we should think about.

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