Author: Curt Doolittle

GOOD ECONOMICS AND BAD ECONOMICS / GOOD PHILOSOPHY AND BAD PHILOSOPHY

I love Hoppe’s speech on good and bad economics. And regardless of my criticism of deductivism (a priorism) when economics is in fact, entirely empirical (not positivist, but empirical), I agree with him that economics doesn’t have ‘flavors’ but instead either makes true, internally consistent, and externally correspondent statements, or it does not. Worse, bad economics create bad behavior and bad economic conditions.

Now, philosophy is the same. While the discipline of philosophy attracts people who prefer many different FLAVORS of philosophy, the fact is that philosophy is either GOOD or it is BAD. In the sense that it is either TRUE and correspondent with reality, and encourages us to act in correspondence with reality, or it is FALSE and does not encourage us to act in correspondence with reality.

Now since philosophy consists of suites of statements, it’s possible for some philosophies to, as sets produce mixed goods and bads. But it is also possible for philosophies to produce net bads, and net goods.

In the end analysis, we will settle on one optimum philosophy. And that philosophy will be ‘the way’ (constructivism, intuitionism) which we now refer to as ‘the scientific method’.

Not that it has much to do with science. It just arose from the discipline of science.

There is good philosophy (Philosophical Constructivist Realism, and Moral Propertarian Realism) and there is bad philosophy: everything else.