“Positivist” is a dirty word I hear around this site a lot, an insult of the highest order. Yet when I read around, it seems to me to be the idea that predictive theories should be supported by observations.
Do Austrians really not care whether their theories make accurate predictions? Or is there a deeper meaning to that word that I’m missing?
The deeper meaning is that one does not need to perform experiments for praxeological statements to be true, yet positivism would say that such statements are useless tautologies or tell us nothing about the real world, etc.
Well they tell us nothing about the empirical world. For praxeology to hold true in real life you need to prove that human beings are praxeologic agents.
Not a hard thing to do, but nonetheless this is what positivism requires.
What is wrong with positivism is that it is a performative contradiction. It is a predictive statement that statements cannot be predictive.
I don’t know what you mean. Positivism, in its traditional form, holds on to the principle of verification, namely that you can translate all ‘meaningful’ statements into statements about sense data, or immediate observable data. Popper says that statements which cannot be proven false are meaningless, rejecting all axioms. I don’t see how this is compatible with Austrian economics whatsoever.
I entirely reject positivism, but most Austrians say that positivism works for natural sciences, but not social sciences.
Positivism is a philosophy that is against reason in every sense of the word. It asserts that you can only learn things through experience… that is faulty for many things. You don’t need to experience something to know it… you just need to know about it. You can learn from a priori too.
Popper wasn’t a Positivist. Most Austrians I know are Bayesian fallibilists when it comes to empirical science.
More importantly, Popper doesn’t say that statements that cannot be proven false are meaningless, but that fallibility is the demarcation between science and non-science. In his mind, economics would fall more readily under the header ‘philosophy’ than ‘science’.
I go for a weaker statement of the verification principle: That one has to know how to verify the statement for it to have any truth content.
This can be done either thru evidence (empirical “truths”) or analytical (tautological truths)
Screw popper → AJ Ayer in Language Truth and Logic is where its at. Though I don’t know why they like to hang onto “truth” so much, especially when AJA says that all empirical truths are weak truths…
Yes, but, didn’t W.V Quine do away with analytical truths? I don’t know any positivists who hold onto the synthetic/analytic distinction.
Interesting, I didn’t know that.
In this thread about Critical Rationalism, I try to point out a few problems with Logical Positivism as well.
More precisely he called parts of evolutionary biology and microeconomics “metaphysical research traditions”. To the Logical Positivists, metaphysics was something to avoid at all costs, but Popper had no such problem. He only liked to keep the metaphysics distinct from science.
Yes, this is the position that many mainstream philosophers take, but if you take a class in logic they will still teach this analytic/synthetic distinction. Also, mathameticians don’t seem like they are going to give it up anytime soon. BTW, you know a positivist?
Quine is not the emperor of positivism.
There are dumb positivists and smarter ones. Of course I disagree with some positivist theories.
How do you answer the charge that Logical Positivism is self-refuting? Are the tenets of Logical Positivism subject to the verification criteria? If they are, how in principle could they be verified? If they can’t, doesn’t that mean that Logical Positivism is cognitively meaningless or else is metaphysics (equally bad to people like Ayer).
Positivism of the Vienna brand largely suffered a defeat in Physics at least from the Philosophical interpretation/point of view. The Copenhagen interpretation(it is often referred to by physicists as “realist”, don’t know if they mean the same thing as the Austrians by the use of the term though) of Quantum Mechanics largely concedes as in Niels Bohr’s words: “Physics is not about the Universe, but what we can say about it.” This is an important revelation about what can be experienced and cognised from a human perspective. I wish to write an article some time relating many of these strange similiarities between Physics and Praxeology…
Interestingly Ernst Mach, who I recognise was a pretty influential positivist philosopher of science as well as a great physicist in his own right, could never accept atomic theory, thinking it too abstract far removed from experience. Einstein could never accept the Copenhagen interpretation, and this partly motivated his search for a “final theory” that was to dominate his later years.
What specific formulation of the verification principle do you mean?
I chose a more conservative definition: that in order for something to have truth content, you have to know what conditions might lead it to be true or false.
Since the verification principle is meant to apply to all prepositions, and is itself a preposition, it applies to itself. The verification principle is obviously not empirical. I believe it is tautological; Truth is a claim to knowledge, and how can you have knowledge without knowing how to find it? I suppose the verification principle kind of looks like plato’s learning paradox from this angle…
Personally I think that tautologies are metaphysical, and that metaphysics that isn’t tautological is bull. I think Ayer would disagree with me lumping tautologies into metaphysics, but then again logical positivists are very coy with their “truth” terms.
Didn’t Ayer recant logical positivism by the end of his career? e.g.
“Positivism” is more than an approval of science and the scientific method. The positivists of the early twentieth century claimed that only science and empirical observation can give us knowledge. So when someone criticizes Austrian economics because it doesn’t use the scientific method (like other schools of economics supposedly do), they are giving a positivist critique of austrian economics.
Positivism is bunk because you can’t prove positivism with science
I think the best way to put it: science is a taste, not a truth. What constitutes “proof” is ultimately subjective. People with attitude problems set impossible to fulfill criteria for what constitutes proof of ASE, then spin around 180 degrees and hold that their own brand of economics is correct until proven wrong, which is also impossible by the different criteria that they set for that. That kind of double-think is alarmingly common in general.
Positivism is not necessarily a horrible thing. There is some positivism in the Austrian method with the belief that there are universal laws that span human history and are not subject to change. So we take a bit from the positives, a bit from the historists and combine that with praxeology and you get what we practice. I think the problem with positivism is when people try to bleed it into the social sciences to a large degree. Then you get full blown ‘scientism’
I remember reading this elsewhere as well, that more or less, that Ayer’s process, not his conclusions, was important. If I could find the source currently, I could be a lot less vauge about it :\