Economics as a Philosophical Science

by Gene Callahan

I happened to be reading R. G. Collingwood’s famous essay (at least famous in my circles!) with the above title. While similar in some ways to Mises’s philosophical analysis of the concept of action, there are some quite significant differences present as well, and I thought that Think Markets readers might enjoy a brief discussion of one of them.

Perhaps the most notable difference between Mises and Collingwood is that the latter denies the possibility of interpersonal exchange!

What is Science?

by Jerry O’Driscoll  

Some recent controversies move me to take up the topic within the limitations of a blog post.  Many years ago (1956), Fritz Machlup ably addressed the issue in an essay titled “The Inferiority Complex of the Social Sciences.”  He rejected limiting the term science to particular subject matters or methods.  He concluded that “there is no epistemologically defensible borderline short of the widest meaning of scientific method, defined in the Encyclopedia Brittanica as ‘any mode of investigations by which impartial and systematic knowledge is acquired.’”  

I endorse Machlup’s broad definition of science as any systematic study of a subject.  As he observed in a footnote, the German Wissenschaft is more inclusive: “the historians of literature, the philologists, the philosophers, the mathematicians, the sociologists, they are all scientists (Wissenschaftler).” In French, science is knowledge and one can speak of la science infuse, intuitive knowledge. La science de l’art is simply the systematic study of art.  

Against Magical Thinking

by Roger Koppl

The term “magical thinking” has different meanings, most of them involving something like extrasensory perception or the efficacy of spells.  Here I define it as an argument, one of whose steps requires something impossible.  (Larry White helped me with this definition, but gets no blame for it or anything I say here.)  It is not magic thinking if your argument has an unexplained piece.  Darwin knew didn’t have anything like Mendelevian genetics as a mechanism.  That was a hole in his theory, eventually filled by others.  No magic there.  Magical thinking exists when one fills the gap with something that is logically or physically impossible.

If you can show I have engaged in magical thinking, you have overturned my argument.  

Evolutionary Psychology

by Gene Callahan

I’ve just been re-reading John Dupre’s wonderful take-down of evolutionary psychology, Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Now, Dupre never disputes the obvious truism that, say, human ethics or religion evolved. But he notes that this is remarkably uninformative, since everything humans do so evolved, including their ability to write papers on evolutionary psychology! As Dupre convincingly demonstrates, ‘evolutionary psychology… offers us mainly simplifications and banalities about human behaviour with little convincing illumination of how they came to be banal… In relation to the illumination of the real complexities of human nature, the [research] programme may be declared bankrupt.’

All very true and worth noting, but what I really loved is how hard Dupre made me laugh at times. For instance, in considering the often bizarre animal analogies to human behaviour employed by evolutionary psychologists, Dupre notes that Buss claims that human strategies for keeping a mate are very similar to those of insects, and then Buss offers, amongst his examples, what ’sounds to [Dupre] distinctly unlikely as a human strategy, shedding their broken-off genitalia after copulation to seal off the reproductive opening of the female.’

Aaargh! If only I had thought of that one earlier!

Mises Was A Scientist

by Roger Koppl

Over at Division of Labor, Noel Campbell picks a fight with Austrian fans of Mises.  “I always conceived of Mises’ efforts as attempting to build a logically correct and (therefore) irrefutable description of human behavior. As such, I always viewed Human Action as a work of philosophy, not science.”   Noel hints that he doesn’t want to be answered with a lot of philosophy of science.  I might whine about how unfair it is to contrast Mises’ “philosophy” with “science” and then expect a response that doesn’t get into the philosophy of science.  But Noel seems to be a nice guy with a sincere question, so I’ll take a stab at it anyway.

Moral Relativism

by Gene Callahan

I’ve long been chagrined about the fact that, whenever someone points out that it was wrong, say, for the United States to annihilate a quarter of a million civilians in Japan in 1945, that person is accused, by some “patriot,” of “moral relativism,” as if condemning an act equally whoever does it is “relativism”! So I was very happy to see Glenn Greenwald making the same point today:

“Perhaps the ultimate confusion is that ‘the Left’ has long been accused of ‘moral relativism’ for pointing out the use of these terms when the essence of ‘moral relativism’ is judging an act not based on what it is, but on who is doing it. It’s the adolescent self-love of believing that ‘X, by definition, is good when I do it and bad when you do it.’”

Real History Versus Pop History

by Gene Callahan

My current research involves a lot of digging into Roman and American history. For the most part, along the way, I’ve been reading books by historians aimed at an academic audience. But I recently picked up Cicero by Anthony Everitt, the sort of “pop” history book that is made into a History Channel special. Let me tell you, after some time without reading a book like this, I was shocked by how lax the standards for this sort of work are.

Obama Has the Right Idea

by Gene Callahan

There has been a lot of commentary about Obama’s “beer summit” with Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley at the White House to discuss Crowley’s arrest of Gates. I must say that I admire Obama’s approach here, as I find it refreshingly Aristotelian: the right way to sort out conflicts like that between Gates and Crowley is to have a symposium and engage in reasonable discussion about the problem.

Tacit Knowledge

by Gene Callahan

Although I haven’t been programming professionally for several years now, I began re-reading Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls for fun the other day, and ran across this:

“Good programmers are a little bit lazy: they sit back and wait for an insight rather than rushing forward with their first idea. That must, of course, be balanced with the initiative to code at the proper time. The real skill, though, is knowing the proper time. That judgment comes only with the experience of solving problems and reflecting on their solutions.”

Even in this most algorithmic of disciplines, there is no algorithm for acting like a skilled practitioner.

Propaganda Part II: Opaque Symbols

by Gene Callahan

The political theorist and philosopher Eric Voegelin, who was an attendee at the Mises Kreis in Vienna and a lifelong friend of Hayek and Schutz, coined (as far as I know) the term “opaque symbols.” What this means is that the symbol user’s connection to the experiential source of the opaque symbol is missing, so the symbol is no longer “seen through” to what it symbolizes, but instead has become a substitute for the experience itself.

Opaque symbols are a major component of ideological propaganda. For instance, “freedom” and “liberty” are now tossed around in American political discourse with little more meaning than “Good stuff you should like!” I saw another interesting example recently on TV.