Well that just begins the debate as to whether we are tabula rosa or not. A different debate.
I’ve never misrepresented what I have said and what you have said can be seen by all. I merely elaborated further upon my main points in an effort to show you my correctness. Explain to me this, how can you look at facts and derive theory from the natural sciences but not have the social sciences? Perhaps in explaining this, you will see where you are erring.
Tabula rasa.
I have explained exactly how that is not the case, and you have not met my explanation with any direct counter-explanation.
Explain to me this, how can you look at facts and derive theory from the natural sciences but not have the social sciences?
“Have the social sciences”? The grammatical structure of this sentence makes its meaning unclear.
And you missed addressing this a second time…
what exactly in the following to you deny?
"Simple fact #1: Rothbard wrote that Bacon advocated just looking at simply-hoarded facts long enough, and that’s it.
Simple fact #2: Bacon wrote against simple fact-hoarding, and advocated a multi-part methodical approach which, whatever its certainly-existent faults are, did NOT consist of simply staring at unsifted facts."
Opps forgot its an A.
‘I have explained exactly how that is not the case, and you have not met my explanation with any direct counter-explanation.’
I have see no explanation. Please restate it.
‘“Have the social sciences”? The grammatical structure of this sentence makes its meaning unclear.’
How can you have facts to theory in the natural science but not the social sciences?
‘what exactly in the following to you deny?’
I have already addressed those two points.
‘You do Rothbard an injustice if you do not include the portion of his comments in which he specifically states that Bacon himself never followed his own philosophy of facts bringing about theory. It is less then several paragraphs below the quote you have given.’
'The simple premise that you cannot conclude theory from the searching of facts. Theory is necessary beforehand in order to prioritize information and construct / retain the limits of relevant information. If Bacon were true to his philosophy then he would be buried under all the data with no way to eliminate what is and isn’t relevant because that would implied a theoretical framework before the acquisition of data. So far you are only confirming what I am saying in a misguided fashion. You state that Bacon had a methodical approach to data collection. That presupposes some theoretical framework to the gathering and dissemination of facts therefore putting theory before fact. ’
Be aware that “Profit and Loss” is in the collection “Planning for Freedom”.
How can you have facts to theory in the natural science but not the social sciences?
Because nature, as Mises said, is characterized by “ascertainable and inevitable regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena”, while the realm of human action is not.
I have already addressed those two points.
I’m not asking you for a general “address”. I’m asking you which specific proposition(s) you deny in the following:
"Simple fact #1: Rothbard wrote that Bacon advocated just looking at simply-hoarded facts long enough, and that’s it.
Simple fact #2: Bacon wrote against simple fact-hoarding, and advocated a multi-part methodical approach which, whatever its certainly-existent faults are, did NOT consist of simply staring at unsifted facts."
I wasn’t trying to start a debate about that. I misunderstood you, thinking that you meant to use the word “theory” to mean just things which we consciously come up with. It would have been a lot easier to have just told me that you we could break that infinite regression by saying that we might start out with an “innate” theory, which would have alerted me to the fact that I was misunderstanding how you meant to use the word “theory”.
Either way, it was you who steered the debate in that direction, simply because your substantiation of why we need to start out with a theory presupposed that we don’t start out as a “tabula rasa”, that we instead start out with a theory before we even start looking for anything. It was your argument that we always need “pre-existing theorization” to have “pre-existing facts”; and I just traced that back to its foundation, showing that it created an infinite regression, assuming that you were using the word “theory” to mean just consciously coming up with theories. And I can now trace your argument back to its foundation more accurately, finding that your argument presupposes that we start out as a “tabula rasa”, simply because that is the only way to stop the infinite regression, now that I know that you meant to use the word “theory” also to mean something which you could just start out with, never having consciously come up with it.
But I don’t even want you to try to substantiate that claim, because you are using the word “theory” to mean something so broad as to render this whole argument trivial. We of course start out with a theory in that sense, because we have a method of looking for things. It would be ridiculous to say that we just start out with nothing. How could we even account for evolution, if we thought that we started out with nothing? How did this debate get to this point?
But that isn’t even how Ludwig von Mises meant to use the word “theory”, if he ever said that we need to start out with a theory in studying markets. He was interested in explaining people acting in the real world, especially in market situations. But he thought that we first need to understand the basic parts of their minds, in order to be able to do that, which we could do only if we first look into our own minds, creating a theory before even going out and looking at anything. That is the theory which we need. Our map of the nature of our own volition is the theory which we need to have before we can make sense of the regularity in the movements of other people. We care about the regularities in that movement in economics; but we couldn’t make sense of them without first creating a map of the basis of our own volition. He was saynig that, if we want to understand the regularities in the movements of other people, we first have to do something pretty indirect, understanding the regularities in our own minds. He wasn’t saying anything about whether we need a theory before we could understand the regularity of our own minds, and definitely wasn’t saying that we need a theory before we could understand the regularity of rocks, rivers, and so on.
“Can you substantiate that in the context of the pure natural sciences?”
I’ll take this for anarchistcain.
Its rather simple that a theory simply cannot simply be generalized from set of facts in a sound manner, and this has been shown both by Karl Popper throughout his corpus and by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions both in through different means.
Popper, in his Logic of Scientific Discovery, showed that the scientific program of simply collecting facts, and then generalizing theories from those facts cannot be a sound means of acquiring empirical knowledge about the world due to the problem of induction. No matter how many white swans one sees, one cannot jusfiably extrapolate from such experience that all swans are white. Rather than basing the soundness of theories on verification, as the positivists desire to do, Popper instead argued for what he called “Critical Rationalism,” the view that the enlargement of our knowledge about the world should proceed by making unjustified (unjustified because of the problem of induction), universal conjectures about the world (i.e. theories), and then trying to falsify them. Ergo, it follows that the Critical Rationalist first creates a theory about the world, and then does the empirical observations necessary to falsify it.
Kuhn attacked such science from a different, more psychological approach. He argued that there were no such things as simple facts about the world that could be gathered together and then generalize into theories. Instead, Kuhn wrote that all “facts” about the world are already impregnated with the observor’s views about the world, and that therefore there are simply no such things as unbiased facts. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he provides the example of a pendulum: for an individual operating in the post-Galileo paradigm, a pendulum’s oscilation would be understood as occuring because the object is subject to the force of gravity while returning to its equilibrium position while for someone operating within the Aristotelean paradigm it would be seen as being as an object repeating its motion again and again until it reaches its natural position in the world. While I may have accidently erred in presenting both views above, it nevertheless cannot be denied that the natural philosopher in the post-Galilean paradigm and the one operating in the Aristotelean paradigm, though they are looking at the same “fact”, are percieving it differently due to their views of the world.
Another critique can be made to the view that science is primarilly the gathering of data and then the extrapolation of theories from that data: the historical fact that science has for a couple centuries now proceeded in such a fashion that they have been guided by theories in some form or another. For instance, before the advent of General Relativity, much of the effort in astronomy was to making the solar system make sense in respect to Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation whether it is Urbain Le Verrier’s dicovery of Neptune, or the failed attempt to make sense of Mercury’s perihelion through the search for the planet Vulcan. The same is true for much of contemporary subatomic physics, experiments are not being done in order to simply catch facts and then make a theory of them; no, instead much of what is being done is that physicists are doing is that they are trying to find the Higg’s Boson because it is predicted by the Standard Model. Indeed, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper emphasized that a good, falsifiable theory made novel predictions that differentiated it from other theories and that could be used in order to direct scientific research.
For all the reasons above, I consider it to be a hard, if not ridiculous, position to hold that science generally proceeds from facts to theories rather the other way around.
It would indeed be a ridiculous position to hold that science generally proceeds from facts to theories rather than the other way around. But that wasn’t what he was arguing. He was arguing that “to look at facts to derive a theory is preposterous”. I don’t see a “generally” thrown in there anywhere. I don’t see him saying that we generally use theories to derive facts, but him saying that we always use theories to derive facts no matter what, because not using a theory would be “preposterous”.
Do the natural sciences start out at the very beginning, with mindless fact-grubbing, and then use the theories from that mindless fact-grubbing to know where to look for the other facts? Or do the natural sciences start out with a theory straight from the beginning? It would probably be nothing other than your own definition of “theory” in this context which would determine the answer for you. If theories are what we consciously come up with, we don’t start out with a theory, but start out with mindless fact-grubbing; and, if theories are any understanding of anything, whether we consciously come up with it or not, we start out with a theory, never doing any mindless fact-grubbing. We are just playing with language here.
By the way, if you use the first definition, which encompasses only consciously coming up with them, it wouldn’t be long after we are born that we come up with enough “theories” where most of our searching in the world is conditioned by those theories. It wouldn’t be preposterous to say in that sense that we generally use theories to come up with facts, and wouldn’t have arrived at them at least at that time without having had that theory in the first place, but would be preposterous to say that we always need a theory to come up with facts no matter what, simply because that would create an infinite regression, meaning that we couldn’t ever come up with anything, because we would have been stuck from the beginning.
See my previous post to see what the Misesian position is on the only meaningful, non-trivial sense in which we could say that economics presupposes that we start out with a theory. And notice that it doesn’t take a stance on whether we need to start out with a theory with anything else. It is something peculiar to studying history. It doesn’t apply to anything else.
Lam, with the hypothetico-deductive method, the hypothesis does indeed precede the gathering of potentially falsifying facts. But whether the hypothesis becomes to any degree an even provisionally accepted theory follows and depends on either the corroboration or falsification provided by the facts.
Andrew and Lilburne, I have no idea what you guys are arguing about. Do any of you all care to suggest some literature?
Daniel, I do not care to suggest any literature in case you were wondering.
“Lam, with the hypothetico-deductive method, the hypothesis does indeed precede the gathering of potentially falsifying facts. But whether the hypothesis becomes to any degree an even provisionally accepted theory follows and depends on either the corroboration or falsification provided by the facts.”
What you have just said further corroborates what I said above: you need a theory in order to meaningfully gather facts. Nevertheless, to the Critical
Rationalist even if the facts prove the theory’s mettle, they still do not justify its assertions about the world.
Critical Rationalism > Hypothetico-Deductive Model.
“Do the natural sciences start out at the very beginning, with mindless fact-grubbing, and then use the theories from that mindless fact-grubbing to know where to look for the other facts? Or do the natural sciences start out with a theory straight from the beginning? It would probably be nothing other than your own definition of “theory” in this context which would determine the answer for you. If theories are what we consciously come up with, we don’t start out with a theory, but start out with mindless fact-grubbing; and, if theories are any understanding of anything, whether we consciously come up with it or not, we start out with a theory, never doing any mindless fact-grubbing. We are just playing with language here.”
If we are really talking about the beginning of science then it begins with the criticism of mythologies, and therefore the criticism of theories about the world. Where theories have not paved the way for the physical sciences, then man’s metaphysical views about the world have.
“See my previous post to see what the Misesian position is on the only meaningful, non-trivial sense in which we could say that economics presupposes that we start out with a theory. And notice that it doesn’t take a stance on whether we need to start out with a theory with anything else. It is something peculiar to studying history. It doesn’t apply to anything else.”
I was never speaking about economics in the above post, it was specifically tailored to the physical sciences as asked above. Furthermore, Mises is generally dead-wrong whenever he speaks about the methods of the physical sciences, probably due to the influence of Carnap in this field, for he never seems to realize that verification is an unsound method even there.
Thanks, LS!
Theory and History by Mises
Novum Organon by Bacon
Anyone else have a confused face on and a headache from reading Andrew and Lilburne’s posts? It’s like I’m an english major in an advanced quantum physics class…
Lam, as Ryan said, nobody here has said that “science generally proceeds from facts to theories”. I’m saying that the natural sciences sometimes and at some points in the chain of inference do proceed from facts to theory, therefore Andrew’s contention that “to look at facts to derive a theory is preposterous” is false.
“At the beginning, you didn’t say “one must always start with a theory” (which is the number 2 item above). You said, precisely this (which, you’ll notice includes nothing about starting the chain of derivation with either facts or theory): “To look at facts to derive a theory is preposterous” (the number 1 item above). THAT is what I said only applies the social sciences, and not to the natural sciences. What I was objecting to is your erroneous statement that at no point in the chain of derivation can natural science proceed from facts (data) to theory.”