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.  

Mankiw And Meltzer Are Right! More Or Less

by Mario Rizzo  

As we have been saying here, the claims that the fiscal stimulus has saved or created X number of jobs is not a simple empirical question. It must be an inference from a model that tells us what would have happened in the absence of that stimulus. Collecting reports from various firms or local governments about their job situations will not do. At best these individual reports are based on pop-theories on the part of the reporters about what would have happened.

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.  

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.

The Failure of Macroeconomics

by Mario Rizzo  

The current issue of The Economist has a very interesting article on the turmoil among macroeconomists (“The Other-Wordly Philosophers”). Essentially, the article argues that although the dominant macro model, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory [DSGE], appears to be in a state of near-total breakdown, there is no agreement among economists as to what should replace it.

“Would economists be better off starting from somewhere else? Some think so. They draw inspiration from neglected prophets, like Minsky, who recognised that the “real” economy was inseparable from the financial. Such prophets were neglected not for what they said, but for the way they said it. Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories. They will believe something when they can model it.”  

Flattening that Earth

by Gene Callahan

This is a pet peeve of mine, and it just won’t go away. Today, in a nice mathematics book called Journey through Genius, I found this:

“Skepticism aside, Eratosthenes’s reasoning is noteworthy not only for its cleverness but also for the striking fact that he entertained no doubts whatever that our planet was a sphere. In striking contrast, European sailors some 15 centuries later would fear plunging off the edge of a flat earth. We sometimes forget that the ancient Greeks were fully aware of the earth’s spherical shape, and if later sailors kept a keen eye peeled for the horizon’s edge, it was a symptom not of knowledge yet to be acquired but of knowledge lost.”

Well, folks, this passage is a symptom of knowledge ignored.

Can Biology Dispense with Purpose?

by Gene Callahan

Mario called into doubt the usefulness of purposive explanations in biology in this thread. I started to write up the following as a comment, but it grew long enough, and, I hope, of enough general interest, that I found it appropriate to elevate it to “post level.”

I think the evidence is very strong that biologists just have not been able to do without thinking of the “purposes” of biological features, despite the scientistic prejudice against regarding any such consideration as scientific.

It’s Just a Trick of Evolution!

by Gene Callahan

In a blog discussion, I recently ran across, yet again, an extremely odd and quite empty argument against morality being objective. “Ha,” the poster proclaimed, “morality is just a product of evolutionary selection!” At this point, it’s supposed to be obvious that moral principles aren’t “real” but are merely some sort of illusion fostered on us by natural selection to promote survival of the species.

Well, no doubt evolution had something to do with our ability to formulate and comprehend moral principles. But so what? Evolution also selected for our ability to both build and perceive chairs! Does it somehow follow from this that chairs are “just an illusion” foisted on us by evolution?

Who will capture forensic science?

by Roger Koppl

Friday I spoke at a conference on  Forensic Science in the 21st Century: The National Academy of Sciences Report and Beyond.   The report was a humdinger.  It says,  “The bottom line is simple: In a number of forensic science disciplines, forensic science professionals have yet to establish either the validity of their approachor the accuracy of their conclusions, and the courts have been utterly ineffective in addressing this problem.”  That’s strong stuff.  The report did a good job at identifying the unscientific nature of much of forensic science.  The report neglected problems that can arise in nuclear DNA analysis, but it is still impressively hard hitting.  

Lord Keynes: A Hayekian Appreciation

by Mario Rizzo

 

No, I haven’t gone crazy. John Maynard Keynes’s economics is not Austrian economics. He and Friedrich Hayek had serious disagreements over economic theory and policy.  I believe that Hayek was largely right in these disagreements. Nevertheless, Keynes was personally kind to Hayek. He found him a place to stay in Cambridge during the Nazi bombing of London. He also had some good things to say about Hayek’s controversial and, at the time, underappreciated book, The Road to Serfdom.

 

But, of course, this is not all. They shared a deep appreciation of the humanistic (for lack of a better word) aspect of economics. In effect, they looked at it as a “philosophical science” – a term that today might be considered a contradiction in terms.