[lbo-talk] Highly ImPopper

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 17:00:42 PST 2006


I wrote: >>The Popperian biz about predictions is silly anyway. No social science can survive the Popper test. Maybe that's one reason why the philosophy of science people rejected it years ago. <<

JKS: > Well on the strict version of falsificationism, that there must be a crucual test in which the theory stands or falls, no scientific theory can survive if you are willing to make enough changes elsewhere. Thsi was Quine's point and Duhen's, but Popper actually picked it up pretty quick. <

WS doesn't seem to have picked it up. That was my point. Thanks for allowing me to clarify it. I was criticizing WS's application of the "Popper [falsification] test," not Popper himself.


> Although in fairness to Popper in physics, chemistry, and laboratory quite often there are crucial experiments in which a theory stands or falls... You get grants ... by having your experiments NOT fail. <

this is unfortunate, in that it creates the incentive to fudge the results. In econ, there's a big & systematic problem of people only publishing research that fits with their theory and not that which knocks it down.


> ... Popper's insights have not been altogether rejected, and if you design a scientific theory so that it is immune to disconfirmatory test, that is going to be looked upon as a scientific flaw....<

that part makes sense. I wonder if WS's pronouncements could ever be falsified?


>the ... [Lakatos] version of Popperianism, which suggests taht is
you have a research program that fails to generate new preductions to test and spends all its time twisting itself around making adjustments elsewhere to deal with disconfirmatory ones (think of Marxian value theory, sorry, Jim), you are not deal with a progressive and promising scientific enterprise. <

this critique fits the standard discussion of the so-called transformation problem. My view is that that debate is silly, since Marx was never developing a theory of prices. So I present a _new_ view, which transcends the eternal and seemingly Manichaean battle between the Ricardians (and their neoclassical allies) and the fundamentalist Marxists. Maybe in the long run, it will turn out to be as sterile as say, neoclassical economics or the "transformation problem" debate, but so far I think that it allows a clearer notion of how capitalism works.

BTW, I wonder if the proposition that "Marx's labor theory of value was designed as a theory of prices" can ever be falsified? The lack of a statement by Marx himself that the purpose of the LTV was to explain prices doesn't seem to have taken any steam out of belief in that proposition. -- Jim Devine

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin



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