ECONOMICS: ART OR SCIENCE? (FALSE DICHOTOMY) —“Is economics an art or a scienc

ECONOMICS: ART OR SCIENCE? (FALSE DICHOTOMY)

—“Is economics an art or a science?” Gary would ask after a particularly difficult problem set. “Both,” he would answer his own question, to the great relief of a lecture hall full of students terrified that they were about to be called on.—

The question is a fallacy of framing. Theorizing is an Art. Constructing a Proof is a Science. All correspondent proofs are constructed scientifically. Operationalism is the only proof possible in science. Economic statements are operationally reducible to human actions. Therefore economics is both an art and science – just like all other investigative forms of inquiry. That is what Mises failed to comprehend, and why he unfortunately cast his work forever as a pseudoscience, by claiming that a logic (a proof of internal consistency) was a science (a demonstration of correspondence by a proof of operational construction).

Can’t really blame him. Brouwer and Bridgman were smarter than Mises but didn’t figure it out either. Popper got halfway but couldn’t escape cosmopolitanism’s debilitating empty verbalisms, any more than could Mises.

Anything extant, the theory of which requires a truth claim, must be describable by operations otherwise it is at best analogy, more often lucky presumption, and generally accidental error.

Just took me a four years of my adult life to figure all of that out unfortunately. Fortunately I understood computability as operational beforehand or I also might have been confused by the existing literature as well.

If all logical problems were not tautological then we would not be able to construct tests of internal consistency by the use of axiomatic systems. Operations solve the problem of necessary verbal incoherence by replacing meaning with names of operations that must be extant and demonstrable. This avoids the endemic fallacies in rationalism.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine