[lbo-talk] URPE Summer Conference -- Aug 15-18 -- REGISTER NOW! ORGANIZE A PANEL!

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Fri Jul 11 17:55:55 PDT 2008


On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:03:01 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
>
> On Jul 11, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Eric wrote:
>
> >> Toward a New Macroeconomics: From Criticism and Avoidance to
> Doing
> >> It Right.
> >> Session I: Growth, Technical Change and Transformation.
> >> David Laibman
> >
> > Even though I have no idea what this means, that won't stop me
> from
> > saying this sounds dreadful.
>
> David Laibman, editor of Science & Society, once told me I couldn't
>
> refute efficient market theory with empirical evidence. Only another
>
> theory could refute a theory. That's doing it right, I guess.

And many philosophers of science would agree with Laibman on that point. Almost any apparent emprical disconfirmation of a scientific theory can be evaded through the use of ad hoc hypotheses. And that in itself is by no means an illegitimate procedure. Otherwise, every time a freshman science student comes up with experimental data that appears inconsistent with the the law of conservation of energy, we would be forced to declare that law to have been empirically disconfirmed. Ad hoc hypotheses including the hypothesis of experimental error or even experimenter incompetence might be legitimately invoked to protect well established scientific laws from easy empirical disconfirmation. Falsificationists like Karl Popper would have argued that that all this would be legitimate as long as it was the case that the ad hoc hypotheses being invoked were themselves falsifiable, with Popper admitting in his later years that the judgment of whether or not a hypothesis has been refuted is not always easy to make. I think that even the older Popper would have conceded that in many circumstances, scientists are not likely to judge a theory to have been falsified unless there is an acceptable alternative theory that can take the place of the one that has been refuted. Other philosophers starting from the logical positivist Philipp Frank and the post-positivist Thomas Kuhn have made similar points as well.

Jim F.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
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>
>

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