JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> < Yes, that crude empiricism again. David Laibman told me, after
> > hearing my criticisms of efficient market theory, that you can't
> > refute a theory with empirical observations, only with another
> > theory. I think that's silly, but I guess I'm just a crude empiricist.
>
>
> At the risk of being condemned as silly myself, lwhile I don't know if
> Laibman said this, I think it is a perfectly sensible thing to say.
It depends on what you think a theory should do and what the goals of theory should be. If you're a realist (I am) and truth matters, then theory should try and be a literally true description of the causal structure of the world. What else is a theory supposed to do? Empirical disconfirmations and puzzles then become important. While I don't think a single disconfirmation is enough to falsify a theory, a number of unexplained puzzles should make the theorist begin to look at the rival theories. There's always the inference to the best explanation which is important in economics and politics where no theory, except Marxism, has any explanatory or predictive power. Marxism has its problems but it is still the best theory compared to the others. Marxism is also the best bet for explanatory unification too, it explains the most amount of empirical phenomena with the minimum amount of hypothesis.
It is a
> central lesson of Kuhn and the no-longer-new philosophy of science. If you
> have a theory that is pretty deeply embedded in your work--not just anoither
> hypothesis within the framework of such a theory, then you will explain away
> apparent empirical counterexamples.
One of the problems in neo-classical economics is that it has no confirming instances, so the the practitioner of this theory must explain away *all of empirical reality*. I think even the most adamant non-Popperian would say that when the empirical counterexamples badly outnumber confirming instances, the theory should be junked whatever the alternatives are.
They will be unimportant, illusory,
> results of countertendencies.
In the case of NC economics, empirical reality itself is unimportant and illusory. Friedman himself said that truth value is unimportant, its predictions that matter. However, if the truth of the assumptions is not important, the theory will not even approximate reality. Then what is the point of the theory? (besides a legitimation of capitalist ideology.)
You will require, if you can be induced to give
> up the deep background theory at all, a theory that is at least as powerful
> and either explains the stuff your theory expalined PLUS the counterexamples,
> or offers a whole different way of looking at things that is more
> attractrive.
If I remember, one of Kuhn's ideas was that the empirical evidence used in counterexamples is dependent on the theory you are testing. So theory comparison and epistemic justification generally become a social, intersubjective thing rather than just a straigtforward comparison with the 'world as it actually is'. I think things start getting circular here.
Sam Pawlett