Author: Curt Doolittle

(From elsewhere) (scientific method) (rule of law)

Peter,

Thanks again. (I am extremely appreciative of your attention. I wish I could reduce my work to pithy one liners but I can’t.)

Getting a couple of things out of the way: (a) Yes, My point was Hoppe was just a door for me because his arguments were analytic. Other have argued that it’s all in Kuehnelt-Leddihn – which is purely narrative. (b) I don’t believe Brouwer, Hibert, Goedel, Cantor, Russell, Mises, (or even Keynes – at least in his work on probability) understood that they were all dealing with the problem of justification. It’s clear that Poincaré couldn’t solve it. I am pretty sure that only Popper understood it. And that only Bridgman understood why – but he could not generalize it. Hayek certainly sensed it and reached into every possible discipline but couldn’t solve it except perhaps in law. But all of them sensed that something was not quite right – that science had evolved into pseudoscience: or what we today are calling ‘mathiness’. And what physicists claim is an over reliance on models and an under-reliance on increasingly expensive experimentation.

(c) As to my reaction to Firestien, my reaction is the same as you suggested above: I go to the original authors: Hume on induction, and Popper on Critical Rationalism (even in its flawed cosmopolitan, rationalist and imprecise form), and Bridgman on his acknowledgement that we should have discovered relativity many generations earlier.

So, of course I agree with “Ignorance”. But then, lets look at the difference between the goals of the research scientist and a teacher of science and the goals of the author of a constitution and the judges who must interpret the a law under the rule of law, such that he preserves logical decidability and therefore need not add his own subjective content in order to preserve rule of law. In other words: rather than the investigator lets look at the rules of constructing an institution that preserves liberty.

So we start with: ‘meaning’ which assists in free association (theorizing), and ‘constructions’ which constitute proofs (the act of deciding), are very different things.

Law must be strictly constructed if it is to be free of subjective content. This is the virtue of property rights as a positive expression of the single requirement for rational cooperation: the requirement that actions that affect others be productive, not parasitic.

The rule of law should consist in a series of negatives, strictly constructed in response to innovations in parasitism which violate the rational incentive to cooperate.

I am not concerned with free association – that’s a scientists concern. I do not think there is any magic to the now rather obvious fact that ‘what works’ (recipes) and ‘general rules’ (theories) are two different things – the former lets us act, the latter helps us with freely associating. But the only truths we know – meaning the only informationally complete statements – are negatives: what we know that fails. At this point it’s fairly obvious. (IN fact I have argued that there is only one rather expensive question that we need to answer in the practice of science: whether the least-cost means that we pursue confirms or falsifies Popper’s theory of Critical Preference. (I think there is a good argument to be made that we already perform the optimum means of investigation: cost based.)

HOW DOES LAW EFFECT THE STUDY OF ECONOMICS?

If you have immoral laws, and perform economic research to justify them, you then perform immoral economics. This is the essence of the Misesian argument. Mises made the (erroneous) argument that this was a scientific or logical constraint – it is neither. It is merely immoral. Cooperation is either rational or not. If it is not, then it is not cooperation, it is predation. And man has no obligation to suffer predation.

Likewise praxeology allows us to construct proofs: tests of existential possibility, but not truths. We can theorize either empirically or through construction, or through free association: the means by which we come up with theories is irrelevant. What is relevant is the means by which we perform due diligence. And one of the tests of due diligence is morality: whether the transfers involved are voluntary (rational.)

So the debate about how we do economics: empirically or deductively or by imagining fairy tail worlds, is totally irrelevant. it’s whether we test out theories. And without operational testing, (a praxeological test) we do not know whether our work is moral or not – or possible or not.

So the missing logic in the sequence:

– Identity (category)

– Name (what we mistakenly call numbering)

– Addition / Subtraction (arithmetic)

– Relation (mathematics)

– Causation (physics)

was:

– Cooperation. (economics) Meaning: Property rights as positive expressions of the negative prohibition on parasitism, without which cooperation is irrational; and where fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of externality are a sufficient test of rational and moral action.

followed by:

– Decidability (Law). Strict construction.

So operational criticism is not means of investigation – the means of investigation is irrelevant (that would be the fallacy of justification). Operations are a test of existential possibility. And laws are means of recording truth propositions in the negative form. Liberty is not a positive argument. It is a prohibitionary one: non-parasitism by violence, theft, fraud, indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, conspiracy, conversion, invasion, conquest, and murder.

So that is the difference in value judgements: do you wish assistance in free association? Or do you wish assistance in preventing the parasitism that allows for free association?

That the warranty of due diligence is normatively enforced rather than legally enforced is less important in science than it is in propaganda. Because it is by propaganda and pseudoscience that the postmodern and progressive agenda is advanced.

The norms of science need be practiced as requirement for warranties of due diligence before information is added to the informational commons – and those violate those warranties should pay restitution for their damages.

Truth telling can be institutionalized. Because one need not be correct. one need only perform due diligence that he is not engaged in errors of omission, insufficient elimination of imaginary content, bias, and deceit.

Scientists (even critical rationalists) defend their ability to err. AS if error was anywhere near as important as deceit.

But as the 19th and 20th centuries have shown, (if not Kant himself), our civilization was attacked by pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, outright lies and propaganda.

So my goals are not to eliminate error in the process of invention. My goals are the construction of institutions that prohibit deception.

And this should be the goal of any moral economists – not just of philosophers.

Anyway. Thanks for your valuable time. I hope I was able to communicate this rather interesting intersection of epistemology, science, morality and law.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

( Eli Harman , Ayelam Valentine Agaliba, Frank Lovell, Bruce Caithness #criticalrationalism #libertarian )