Theme: Science

(to boettke)

An unwanted voice of dissention from the analytic philosophy of science.

Not that the philosophy of science (testimony) is other than a bit of hand waving in economics, and not that a rare few might understand this but here is the correct restatement of ‘validity and justification et al’:

(a) Economics(cooperation in production of good services and information for markets both private and common) is no different from any other science (science meaning application of the scientific method – and yes, there exists a method though poorly understood.)

(b) “Science” refers to the use of logical and physical instruments to eliminate the full range of falsehoods: ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, partial accounting, suggestion and obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit – from our free associations. In other words, science is a moral and legal discipline just as are weights and measures, in the market for goods, services, information, and theories (ideas).

(c) The means by which we arrive at or justify a theory (premises) conveys no truth content (warranty of truthfulness) to scientific propositions (See Critical Rationalism and Critical Preference).

(d) The only truth content (warranty of truthfulness) is provided by the incremental increases in the survival of the theory within the limits proposed by as premises (pre) and scope(post). (Extensive Falsification).

(e) The function of whichever synonym you choose: praxeology, intuitionism, operationalism, or strict construction – which in economics is performed by the subjective testing of a sequence of rational(voluntary) and reciprocal(moral) choices – is to falsify that an economic proposition is operationally possible, voluntary, and reciprocal (ie: possible and moral).

(f) To deny this warranty of due diligence (as does the mainstream) is to abandon rule of law in economics, and to abandon the notion of voluntary cooperation, and to abandon moral limits in economics – thereby converting economics from a moral(truthful) to an immoral(deceptive) discipline – ergo, converting from the (austrian) attempt to improve institutions by the compensation for informational asymmetry(truthfulness and trust), to the mainstream attempt to maximize the disinformation necessary to cause the overextension of both consumption and sustainable patterns of specialization and trade, such that booms and busts continue to accumulate in duration and scope.

(f) To test the truthfulness of a proposition (provide a warranty of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, selective accounting, suggestion and obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit) whether in economics or any other discipline requires that we test each dimension of actionable reality available to man – which we reduce to the common terms of consistency, correspondence, possibility, morality, full accounting including limits, and coherence (comprehensibility of the narrative),

(g) But which more precisely refers to tests of each dimension: 1) categorical: consistency of identity, 2) logical: internal consistency, 3) empirical: externally correspondent, 4) existentially possible: operationally stated, 5) rational consistency: voluntary, 5) moral consistency: reciprocal 6) scope consistency: fully accounted including limits , and 7) coherent: narrated in coherence with all such dimensions.

(h) if all these steps are performed we can claim we have performed due diligence against the full range of falsehoods in the full range of actionable dimensions regardless of the subject we speak of.

The problem is, that since economics is reducible to the measurement of cooperation, even if biased toward to the production of goods and services, it is either an extension of rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity, (which is what the Austrian school attempts to confine it to, and the chicago school extends to insurance against shocks), or it is, as is the mainstream, an exercise in deception for the purpose of burning down civilizational capital by means of monetary disinformation (deception) for the purpose of purchasing virtue signals and premiums by the political, financial, and academic classes.

My opinion, as someone who specializes in this question, is that it is the latter, and the austrians are a lone voice of morality in the cacophony of an immoral and pseudoscientific polity.