ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIR

ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIRICAL SCIENCES – AND THOSE THAT ONE ARGUES OTHERWISE DEMONSTRATE EMPTY VERBALISM ON THE PART OF THE ADVOCATE.

(from elsewhere)

a) to be classified as a science a discipline must practice the scientific method: observation (measurement to overcome limits to perception and memory), tests of external correspondence (experiments), tests of internal consistency (logic).

b) empiricism (observation) is not equal to experimentation (positivism).

c) economic properties are not deducible from first principles, and we have dozens of examples, the most common of which is sticky prices.

d) humans are able to cooperate because of sympathetic intention, and could not do so without it. That is, we can (as can dogs, but not apes) understand intentions. We are also marginally indifferent in our incentives. As such we can test the rationality of incentives. Therefore all economic statements are empirically testable by sympathetic experience (the reduction of stimuli to that which we can perceive by our senses.) Or what is called ‘instrumentalism’.

e) as such economics does not differ from any other scientific discipline in that we require instrumentation (both mechanical and logical) to reduce that which we cannot experience to that which we can experience, and upon experiencing, make a comparison. We simply need less instrumentation to perceive the data than we do in most other fields.

f) the purpose of which is to develop general rules of arbitrary precision that we can use to model that which we cannot experience directly, from fragmentary information that we can experience directly.

g) All statements of external correspondence are and always must be theoretical (in the spectrum intuition->hypothesis->theory->law.

h) Since all hypothetical statements must include arbitrary precision, all general rules are limited by some scale or another(greater or lesser), beyond which the theory fails. In other words, all phenomenon demonstrate a distribution. That which does not is merely tautological.

i) All axiomatic statements consist of constructions, with deterministic consequences, not observations – because all information that can exist, exists in the axioms.

Ergo, economics is an empirical science as are all disciplines. All thought is empirical, hypothetical, theoretical, and bound by one or more axis of arbitrary precision. Logical MODELS consist of general rules. Axiomatic systems are TAUTOLOGICAL. Their value is in their tautology: which allows us to test the internal consistency of our statements.

Mises failed to grasp operationalism which is why he had to create a lot of verbalist nonsense by equating verbal definitions with the properties of reality, so that he could justify his failure.

(Honestly in retrospect, it’s amazing that like marx he could create that much nonsense – enough nonsense to overload the gullible.).