critical rationalism blog

Update on progress with a proposal for a book on Popper and the other Austrians. If all else fails this can be done as an Amazon e book which Amazon would promote to all their customers who look at  books on similar or related topics. For books priced under $10 the author receives about 70%. Presumably this is because no homo sapiens in Amazon actually has to do anything much apart from installing a robot that puts up the ebook and makes the  necessary connections. So Amazon gets $3 per sale by re-directing a lot of electrons – no editorial input, no printing and distribution of solid objects. Wow! And $7 for the author who has complete control over the content but has to do the formatting which will require some facility with html. If the book is priced over $10 the royalty is much less so you have to do some entrepreneurial speculation about how much readership you will lose at the higher price.

Target:  Graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy and methods of economics and the other social sciences.

Size: Modest, 200 pp or 80,000 words maximum.

Theme/Synopsis: Must avoid dispersing efforts over too many themes.  Starting with four problems:

1. The divorce between economics and sociology, over-specialization and fragmentation generally.

2. The dominance of positivism (scientism) in economics.

3. The problems of historicism and essentialism in sociology and the soft social sciences and humanities.

4. Limited real-world and policy-relevance in much of economics and sociology (like who saw the GFC coming?)

Peter Klein has pointed out that historicism is not really on the radar these days, the issue in the current socical sciences is POMO.

There are two subtexts that need to be woven in without causing distactions.

1. The debacle of philosophy in both the analytical and “Continental” strands after Wittgenstein derailed the analytial strand (which in turn branched into positivism/logical empiricism and language games) and Heidegger did the same for the Continental tradition.

2. The window of opportunity in the 1930s/40s when Talcott Parsons in sociology, von Mises in economics and Popper were all promoting a very similar framework for investigation in the social sciences. Parsons after 1937 went the wrong way and Popper did not maintain a serious interest but there was the possibility of an alliance across the disciplines of sociology, economics and philosopohy of science to resist the disastrous fads and fashions that captured both economics and sociology after WW2.

In short, potential solutions to the problems can be pursued with a revitalized form of Austrian economics or the distinctive contribution that the Austrians contribute to good economics.

The revitalizing principles are a cluster of  philosophical ideas in metaphyiscs and epistemology, with methodological implications.

These ideas support current best practice (indeed all-time best practice), that is to say, the work of “Mr Jourdains” who have been speaking in prose all their lives.

Ane the best statements of these ideas can be found in the work of Barry Smith and Karl Popper.

Jeffrey C Alexander is a leading sociologist in theUS, an ambitious and industrious scholar who set out to make a serious mark in the business. He wrote a four-volume opus early in his career to lay the foundations for more philosophically and methodologically sophisticated work in sociology.

The title of the whole work is Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1980) and Volume One is Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies.

He realised the need to operate across the full range of components of theoretical development, from what he called the Metaphysical Environment to the Empirical Environment, passing through General presuppositions, Models, Concepts, Definitions, Classifications, Laws, Complex and simple propositions, Correlations, Methodological assumptions to Observations.

One of his first lines of argument aimed to establish that the old form of empiricism or positivism was out of date due to developments in the philosophy of science. Some will appreciate that by 1980 when this work was published, Popperian critical rationalism had rendered positivism “old hat” in 1935 with the publication of Logik der Forschung. Much of this work was done at Berkeleyand Alexander took the opportunity to pass the manuscript to Ian Jarvie who was working there at the same time. It seems that many mistakes remain in the book which Jarvie would have identified in the manuscript.

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1. The falsifiability criterion is about meaning.

2. Failure to draw the distinction between falsifiability (a matter of logic and the form of statements) and falsification (a practical matter).

3. Scientists don’t practice falsification.

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Giddens on the postpositivistic philosophy of science in Bottomore and Nisbet (eds) A History of Sociological Analysis, Basic Books, 1978. In the Questia library.

After a lengthy account of the progress of positivism in the philosophy of science from theVienna Circleof logical positivists to logical empiricism Giddens moved to the “postpositivistic” attack on the “orthodox model”. He named several authors involved in this attack (Toulmin, Feyerabend, Hesse, Kuhn) and then noted that Popper had preceded them. Some of the positivists confused the issues by insisting that Popper was really one of them, due to the interest in science that they shared, so his differences were internal to the movement. Consequently Giddens found  “The points at issue are not easy to disentangle…one should mention…his complete rejection of induction and his concomitant rejection of “sensory certainty”…his substitution of falsification for verification…his defence of tradition which, in conjunction with the critical spirit, is integral to science; and is replacement of the logical positivist ambition of putting an end to metaphysics by revealing it is nonsense  with the aim of securing criteria of demarcation between science and pseudoscience”.

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When Popper’s longtime NZ friend Colin Simkin became seriously ill in the late 1990s a man flew into Sydney to interview him for a Popper biography. Brian Boyd came too late because Simkin was too ill to see him. A few years later at the Popper conference in Vienna there was talk of Boyd’s biography but without any news on progress. Boyd’s major achievement was a massive and highly acclaimed biography of Vladamir Nabakov.

And now it is all happening, after a decade in cold storage the project will be funded by three-year grant of $600,000.

In the late 1990s Professor Boyd travelled to 16 countries to investigate archives and locations and interview over 90 Popper associates from politicians (like Helmut Schmidt) to philosophers (like Isaiah Berlin).

“I find Popper’s thought marvellously exciting and fertile, and the best defence I know against what John Searle calls ‘the attacks on . . . objectivity, rationality, truth and intelligence in contemporary intellectual life’.”

Professor Boyd has previously penned biographies on the great Russian novelist Nabokov, which were credited with contributing to the Nabokov revival. Boyd seeks to ensure the Popper biography has a similar impact.

More on Boyd.

Thanks to Dave Lull for the links!

This year the Review of Austrian Economics did a retrospective on  Don Lavoie and the “hermeneutic” or “interpretive” turn that he initiated in the mid 1980s. Peter Boettke and David Prychitko explained why this was important and why 1985 could have been a turning point in modern economics. The bottom line is that it was not a turning point because the profession at large stuck with positivism and formalism.

I am thinking about a piece with the working title “Third time lucky?” to suggest that the first  opportunity for a turning point was just after WW2 if only Talcott Parsons, Ludwig von Mises and their followers could have formed a united front to push the views that they shared (or the views that Parsons held in 1937 anyway).

The “second time” was when Lavoie and his colleagues  were on the case, if only they had taken not been diverted by Gadamer and Bernstein but promoted the  common approach of the early Parsons plus von Mises and Popper, beefed  up with input from the Critical Rationalists in the Popper school like Agassi, Albert, Boland, Birner and Jarvie, plus Popper’s later work on objective knowledge and metaphysical research programs.

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For some time I remained staunchly agnostic on the science of climate change, fortified by the fact that nothing that Australia does will make a difference, either directly to the climate or in leading the world. In some ways we are leading the world, driven by a coalition of two parties who can be best described as the Trade Union Party and the New Communists. 

A leading scientist in Australia has written a book that gives a good handle on the science, the history and the pressures acting on scientists that have led to what he calls The Climate Caper. That is the name of his book, which I have summarised on line.

It provides some more dots to add to the pattern sketched by a previous book that could have been called The Anti-Nuclear Power Caper.

This is a summary of the policies of the New Communist Party in Australia.

We do not have direct experience of physical things: evidence is theory-laden. That is well-understood and generally regarded as true. Much less appreciated is that we do not have direct experience of abstract things either: self-evidence is theory-laden too.

The empiricist intuition is that as we approach the things of which we have “direct experience,” our beliefs become more certain, obvious, and less prone to error. It is ironic, then, that at the very end of this chain are qualia, perhaps the only things we could be said to “experience directly,” and they are among the least understood phenomena of all.

Critical rationalism is sometimes mistaken to be little more than a call to be critical. Some object that advocacy of the critical attitude is hardly unique to critical rationalism; every first year philosophy student is instructed to be critical of themselves and others. However, critical rationalism is about a lot more than just an attitude.

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Thanks for the feed from Daniel Barnes who said to read a great article here. It  is the site of our new contributor ‘d’. Welcome to the party d! Keep an eye on this site!!

Good to have the disgusting exchange between Strauss and Vogelin on line.