2nd July 2003
Abstract:
These are critical notes made while reading Deborah A Redmans's "Economics and the Philosophy of Science". The philosophy is largely that of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos. Redman begins in the style of a neutral reporter, but later shows her impatience with the confusions sown by those eminent people. Hutchison supplies the main sceptical comments. My main comment is that neither Redman, nor the philosophers she quotes, appear to recognise that it is simply impossible to discuss "science" if the unstated assumption is that science is whatever anyone chooses to call science. One has to start with the strikingly observed worldwide unanimity of physicists and chemists within their respective disciplines, and take account of the fall-off of unanimity (that is, the widening scope for disagreement) as one moves through biology, medicine, etc. (that is, as the matters studied become more and more complex). Economists are in the absurd situation of claiming to be scientists, or at least, wanting to appear to be scientific, when the matters they study are simply too complex ever to lead to consensus. The absurdity is demonstrated when, for example, Friedman is cited in this book as claiming that there is no fundamental distinction between economics and the physical sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, historians and philosophers do well to ply their trade without making inappropriate claims of objectivity.
Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyarabend, Bartley
Polanyi , Fleck, T W Hutchison, Schumpeter
Bacon, Adam Smith,. Howson & Urbach, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Keynes, Robespierre, Hitler, Auguste Comte, Hegel, Hicks, Higgs, Suppe, Darwin, Einstein, Huxley, Mozart, Hayek, Medawar, Carnap, Gödel, Frank, Born, Neurath, Wittgenstein, Hahn, von Mises, Bertrand Russell, Duhem, Noretta Koertge, Agassi, Marshall, Barro, Friedman, Von Neumann, Nash, Stephen Toulmin, Norwood Russell Hanson, Newton, John Neville Keynes, Cairnes, Samuelson, Planck, Marx, Plato, Mannheim, Mill, Toynbee, Mrs Thatcher, C P Snow, Ramachandran, Archbishop of Canterbury, Niehans, Adorno, Latsis, Heisenberg, Rudolf Mössbauer, Fermi, Dirac, Ricardo, Edgeworth, Thomas Carlyle, Galbraith, McCarthy, Morgenstern, Leontief, Aristotle, Joan Robinson, Phyllis Deane.
---------------------------------------------------------------
9.10.2001
This arises from seeing in passing a book at someone else’s place with the title: Economics and the Philosophy of Science by Deborah A. Redman
It seemed interesting, serious, slightly outsiderish. On checking further, I located another book by the same author: The Rise of Political Economy as a Science by Deborah A. Redman
The first seems to be a critical romp through modern stuff based apparently on the Vienna Circle and its opponents. The second begins with Bacon and ends with Adam Smith.
So here goes.
I doubt if Redman is going to get down to the basic problem of the lack of seriousness of economists, their satisfaction at grandstanding and pointscoring rather than with the attainment of truth. However, let’s see.
She starts with the thought that the acquisition of knowledge and the application of reason do not really go together. This is novel to me as a flat statement, but in line with my various maunderings around the subject. How often have I groaned that real scientists do not “infer” their results from the observed data in some programmed or analysable way. There is boondoggling, try this and that, sleeping and dreaming on it, blethering to colleagues, publication and counter-publication, with a party line eventually emerging. Apparently Kuhn has a lot to do with this recognition (it is no good just debunking something - it has to be clever). Reference to Howson & Urbach shows that Kuhn (linked with a said-to-be-superior Lakatos) gets only a 2-page dismissive section (pp134-6). I see that Redman has a chapter 9 “Lakatos and Kuhn: Science as Consensus”, which says it all. I find that my notes on Howson & Urbach do cover Lakatos & Kuhn at about the same relative length as Howson & Urbach do.
I note in passing that Eastern Europe (Austria, Poland, Hungary) seems to be prominent in this story (I wonder if Kuhn, who was an American, has his roots there too).
10.10.2001
“Rationalism”, according to Redman, is “the theory that reason rather than experience is the source of knowledge”. The mind boggles, but there is something to be said for it. The accumulation of knowledge began with agriculture 10000 years ago, which gave time for “leisure” and thinking. In other words, a million years of experience added up to very little. But thinking is not reasoning. Time for thinking produced writing, time to file it away, time to read and study it. Writing, reading, studying, give scope for the accumulation and analysis of experience. Knowledge flows from experience and from the “leisure” (i.e., freedom from the need to hunt and berry-pick) to reflect on, codify, and accumulate that experience. “Reason” is a tool of reflection. “Reflection” sounds vague, and “reason” sounds precise, but what exactly is it?
Two words further on, I find that “empiricism” is “the theory that experience is the source of knowledge”! God preserve us from one-track minds. I’ve cracked this nut! Experience quite evidently is the sole source of knowledge, but you need time - freedom from labour - to reflect on, codify, and accumulate that experience. Reason comes into that, but what exactly is its definition?
According to Redman, the one-track minds are Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, lined up on the side of rationalism, Locke, Berkeley and Hume lined up for empiricism. Clearly Johnny Foreigner against the Scotto-English.
(Still on p3 - page 1 of the text!). Science apparently fused these ideas. Here, Redman becomes incoherent, and no wonder. It is not that she is incompetent. She just lacks the literary skill of a Keynes, say, to make apparent sense of nonsense. The story is that a scientist “infers” a theory from the data. He then “deduces” consequences from that theory. Then he does experiments to see whether those consequences are in fact observed. I have no quarrel with this, except that it splits into two neat phases something which is a constant mixture of conversation, reflection and boondoggling. But she goes on, apparently to sum up, by saying that “the justification of a statement is either inferred from principles (rationalism) or inferred from evidence (empiricism). New theories are adopted because of their greater explanatory power, and thus science progresses ever closer to the truth”. This is hopelessly incoherent. How can a “justification” be inferred? Does she mean “deduced” by the first “inferred”? Is she implying that scientific “statements” can be neatly classified into those two categories?
This might not matter much in an introductory romp, but she gives this thumbnail sketch great importance by going on immediately to say, “this view of scientific method is outdated and mistaken”. The whole matter is then thrown into confusion by quoting a guy as saying that “the question of whether history is a science cannot be arbitrarily decided by pointing out that it is neither experimental nor predictive”. No, says I, but it can be decided by arbitrarily defining what we agree to mean by “science”, and no one that I have come across had ever included history in that category.
She quotes Popper as saying that science alone systematically corrects its errors. Why did Popper not realise that this is just another way of saying that science may be defined as dealing with situations where truth can be unambiguously defined, i.e., situations where there is room ultimately for only one (correct or true) opinion? In the overwhelming majority of human activities, there may be room for any number of opinions, room for a head-count, room for individualism, room for democracy. In science, there is ultimately no room for opinion. It is in its essence a dictatorship. To put this another way, Popper is guilty of tautology. Science is the only activity where the word “error” has a defined and unambiguous meaning. Of course, a subject like history deals with some “facts”, like the date on which Robespierre was guillotined, and those facts can be in “error”, so to that extent, history may be said to have scientific content. But this is not a useful categorisation. Even a list of facts, in a subject like history, is inevitably tendentious, since a reader of the list is entitled to ask, “why this list, why the omissions, what does this guy think is so special about Robespierre?” The essence of history is indeed what the guy thinks of the facts, what story he makes of them, what slant he gives to the story (after all history and story are the same word!).
There follows a paragraph which I won’t dissect in detail. It is too gruesome. I quote only one sentence. “Construing science to mean a single category whose legitimacy and progress are measured by the extent to which the methods of physics are employed has been rejected as naïve by most philosophers.” Since “science” can be defined (or “construed”) in any way you like, naivety being an inappropriate distinction, does this not just mean that non-scientists are anxious to claim the title (extend the meaning) to their own subjects, to help in career-building and grandstanding? And might one ask where philosophers figure in defining science?
However, Redman’s project is still of interest to me, because her declared aim is to debunk, or throw light on, the claims of people like economists (remember her title is Economics and the Philosophy of Science) to scientific method, scientific jargon, scientific principles. As far as I can see at this moment, her quarrel with such people is not that their claims are necessarily wrong, but that, while evoking names like Kuhn, Popper and Lakatos, they reveal their ignorance of what these guys were actually about. That is, she is filling a need for “a concise, neutral, accurate introduction to the vast philosophy of science literature so that economists and other social scientists can become well informed with the least possible expenditure of energy and time”. Seems OK to me!
Logical Positivism emerged in the early 20th Cent. and is the source of the modern philosophy of science. I interpolate that science got on very well without it, and has largely proceeded in complete ignorance of it. I take Redman’s word for it that social scientists make uneducated references to Kuhn, Popper and Lakatos, but I never heard any physicist referring to them. Indeed I have heard of them, and then largely as mere names, only recently.
Logical Positivism is associated with the Wiener Kreis, which was dissolved by Hitler in 1938. Apparently it survives in improved form as “logical empiricism” (never heard of it). It is not to be confused with the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), apparently.
Logical Positivism was a response to the metaphysical excesses of Hegel. I.e., it was down to earth - only the data mattered. The idea hinged on verifiability. However, it proved that nothing was really verifiable.
When the Wiener Kreis dispersed, mainly to the US and Britain, it got progressively less strident (i.e., less insistent that only science mattered) and sank into Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.
That finishes Redman’s survey of Logical Positivism!
The pendulum is represented by Polanyi (Hungarian), Fleck (Polish) and Kuhn (US). Redman’s incoherence is decisively illustrated by the following opening remark. “They have in common a view that science cannot be rationally justified and hence belongs to the sociology of science.” Stripped of decoration, this reads, “science belongs to the sociology of science”, which is obviously unconstruable.
What it means, apparently, is that science cannot be defined by external conditions. It is just whatever scientists do, God bless them.
A page on Polanyi (1891-1976) succeeds only in conveying to me that in Polanyi’s view science is neither objective nor subjective but a mixture of the two!! I quote: it is a “fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge”. Wow!
I don’t have any difficulty in following Polanyi in dismissing the idea that science is an objective list of facts. The human mind is there too. But I regard as meaningless twaddle the following, quoted from Polanyi:
The myth of objectivity is a “passion for achieving absolutely impersonal knowledge which, being unable to recognise any persons, presents us with a picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent. In such a universe there is no one capable of creating and upholding scientific values; hence there is no science”.
Drivel! We ourselves are not absent from our own “picture of the universe”. We are there, but only as one of a million species dwelling in an infinitely various material world. Of course, we are we, standing outside the picture we have made, looking at it, and seeing ourselves in it the way we have painted it. “We” are absent from the picture admittedly, only our own scientific description of ourselves is there. In the picture, there is indeed “no one capable of creating scientific values”. That is (groan) quite obviously because it is only a picture, for God’s sake. It is rather as if we were to say that there is no one in a self portrait of Rembrandt who is capable of creating a painting, hence there is no painting. Polanyi, you idiot, it is only a picture.
In spite of that, I agree completely with what Polanyi goes on to say, namely that science does not proceed by a definite rule, but by what he prefers to call “the tradition of science”. Our picture is not the picture, it is our picture, but objective in the sense that every one who is anyone agrees with it. There are no dissenting opinions. If anyone dissents, then he is by definition not a scientist, someone impervious to objective scientific demonstration!
11.10.2001
I suppose what I meant above by, “Our picture is not the picture, it is our picture, but objective in the sense that every one who is anyone agrees with it”, is that although we have no means of penetrating “reality” apart from our sense impressions, we have plenty of evidence that our fellow human beings are built on a fairly uniform pattern. We see “the same” picture of reality in the sense that we often agree with each other about what we see, and in the case of science, the agreement is virtually 100%.
The difference between rhetoric and science is that the “goodness” of rhetoric is judged by its effect on the audience, whereas the “goodness” of science is valued according to its correspondence with the truth. It would not be a far step to say that the “goodness” of science is also judged by its effect on the audience, with the rider that the audience must be the entire educated world of all races, cultures, languages and religions, and that the effect must be near 100% agreement throughout this audience. This definition covers all the usual ideas of verifiability, falsifiability, objectivity, and so on. Philosophically, objectivity is impossible, but 100% universal agreement comes as near to it as is conceivable.
Redman’s woolliness is shown by her next paragraph which says that the link between Polanyi and the positivists is threefold (what follows recalls the joke told to me by J Little: “economists are of three kinds, those who are numerate and those who are not”). She seems to forget this introduction totally and immediately, because the following text has not the slightest trace of anything resembling a list. However, the message seems to be that even the positivists conceded that “discovery belonged to the psychological realm”, so Polanyi’s “emphasis on the sociological and psychological aspects of discovery was (Redman dreamily says ‘were’) not new”.
In spite of this, Redman sails on to say that Polanyi was “in direct opposition” to the positivists.
Interestingly if true, Redman attributes to Polanyi the idea that the positivist doctrine, which apparently meant that the methods of physics were to be applied to the social sciences (whatever that means), was harmful to the latter. The interest would be that for the first time, something is being claimed, which, if correct, would have observable consequences, other that a published paper or an entry on the CV. I’m not sure that I can even imagine what Polanyi has in mind. Certainly, in my experience, a whole lot of time is wasted by sociologists (economists are what I have knowledge of) who try to sound scientific while lacking the background to be so. Thousands of man-years, thousands of books, innumerable chairs and lectureships, must have been “wasted” on econometrics to no visible or enduring effect. But the same could be said of wide areas of sociology, or of the humanities in general, which have no pretension to or connection with science or the scientific method whatsoever.
The next one up is Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), “an almost unknown philosopher of science”. Apparently he was re-discovered by Kuhn. The life of poor old Fleck is a catalogue of woe. Jewish, Auschwitz, Buchenwald ….. To him is attributed, in relation to science students, what I normally say of economics students, namely that what happens to them is indoctrination. However, I think he turns my view on its head. ALL pupils and students are indoctrinated. Science students are the exception, but only in the sense that they are the only ones who are indoctrinated with material which is almost 100% truth. No subject, I imagine has 0% truth. Take history as an example. There will be a certain amount of material taught which is factual or true, i.e., on which there would be 100% agreement, but indoctrination takes place both on what the teacher chooses to present, and on how he chooses (or feels obliged) to present it. When the student re-presents the material in examinations, he will be allowed some leeway to diverge from the teacher’s line, but woe betide him if he thinks he has total freedom. The day to day, term to term, experience of a history student under Stalin would not be very different, in that regard, from that of a student under Harry Truman. The same could be said of science students, but with the crucial difference (and this encapsulates the point I am making) that the US and Soviet teachers, curricula, and examination papers in a hard science discipline would be more or less interchangeable.
Personally, I find nothing to remark in Redman’s exposition of Fleck. When he talks of the Denkstil, the Denkcollectiv, I find myself saying yes, yes, yes. Our whole lives, not just our scientific perceptions, are subject to a Denkstil, and we are all part of a Denkcollectiv. All I add is that the Denkstil and Denkcollectiv, while evolving and changing everywhere, is in all areas except science, different for different races, cultures, languages and religions, but for science, they are more or less the same. I would add that the Denkstil in science, although it evolves, does so extremely slowly. I can testify that the Cambridge physics degree course of today is virtually identical with the Edinburgh course of fifty years ago, except for minor short courses in the extremely small (sub nuclear) and the extremely large (cosmology).
And so we reach Thomas Kuhn (1922-), for whom “the key features are the emphasis on revolutions and the incorporation of the role of the sociology of knowledge into the philosophy of science”.
The first few paragraphs on Kuhn leave me with the same impression as I had with Fleck, namely “is this all?” His famous “paradigm” was so woolly, the meaning stretched to mean everything, that he abandoned it in favour of the “disciplinary matrix”. Redman contributes her own woolliness by citing the disciplinary matrix and the exemplar, while going on within 7 lines to specify that a disciplinary matrix has three constituents, one of which is the exemplar. The latter turns out to be a “concrete problem solution”, i.e., a worked example, close to what Kuhn originally meant by a paradigm. The picture I’m getting is that the apprentice scientist is like the apprentice plumber. The master shows him how to do it.
Not very revolutionary! But hold on. Redman says portentously that “this represents his attack on positivism”. Eh? How? Well, the “received view” apparently depends on learning by “correspondence rules”. Does it? How come I have never, ever, heard of this received view? Nor do I have the remotest idea of what a correspondence rule might be. Kuhn’s exemplar, learning by showing, is at once acceptable. How would you learn to swim, or even think of swimming, if somebody did not show you? But what on earth is the competing received view of learning to swim by correspondence rules?
Kuhn illustrates his “learn by showing” by the story of a dad taking his child round a zoo, pointing to a stork and saying “that is a stork”. He goes on: “this knowledge can therefore be embedded, not in generalisations or rules, but in the similarity relationship itself”, i.e., the boy can thereafter name as a “stork” anything that looks like what he was shown. To me this is banal - so true as to be not worth remarking. Unfortunately for me, he does not tell me what a dad acting on the received view would do. Is he envisaging that dad would present his child with a treatise on taxonomy, so that a bird (what’s that, dad?) would be a stork if it satisfied certain rules?
[Paragraph added later. On the other hand, if I merely pause to consider what the competing view might have been, and refrain form dismissing its adherents out of hand, I can imagine that it could be suggested that the child unconsciously encodes the information he receives on being “shown”, and that this coding might be described as rules of correspondence, i.e., if the object you see has this and this and this and…… this, then it is in all likelihood a stork.]
What I imagine is happening is that Kuhn is not talking to or writing for the likes of me. People like me say, “yes, OK, that sounds all right - the positivists sounded more or less OK too, but maybe they went too far in excluding the subjective and irrational - so what then?”. Kuhn was an academic. He was building a career. And his career path involved challenging the academic opponents who adhered to the “received view” of the Wiener Kreis. What seems to matter little to me or any other practising scientist, because it affects nothing we actually do, especially our careers, was to him of transcendent importance - for him a career was at stake.
12.10.2001
Now, Polanyi claimed, at least, to be saying something which did or should affect what scientists, social scientists, actually did. But as said above, I cannot imagine what this effect might be, short of the social scientists either ceasing to pretend to be using scientific method, or alternatively, making 20 years as a real practising hard scientist an entry condition for the profession of social science.
Redman recalls (p20) that Kuhn in 1977, like Popper in 1974 (see p61), complained that everyone had misunderstood him. That to me is not a surprise. They are all, Kuhn and Polanyi and the members of their audiences, rhetoricians. They are not in the business of truth. Keynes, I recall, from the moment his General Theory was published, listened, more or less uncomplainingly, as his young disciples charged against the enemy with simplistic and distorting slogans. He never complained in public about the grotesque parody of his “theory” (whatever that was) when Hicks condensed it into one incomprehensible diagram - the IS/LM diagram. I guess that to him, what mattered was not truth (I suspect that the ultra-clever Keynes knew perfectly well that his theory was no more than clever journalism) but renown, and his disciples certainly furthered that.
Kuhn objected to being seen as irrational and relativistic. On the first point, he defended himself (1977) by conceding that there were objectively (my word, not his) good scientific theories, ones which were at once accurate, consistent, of wide scope, simple, and fruitful - his five conditions. But his defence, says I, could have been cobbled together by any fairly bright physics undergraduate. Surely it did not need one of the brightest lights of philosophy to do that. (I wonder, though, where general relativity fits into this, satisfying almost none of these conditions. Other theories can be thought of which satisfy all criteria except simplicity - there is nothing really simple when you get modern theoretical physics. Of course, you could insist on a jury of professors of theoretical physics - how simple is simple?). On the second point, he asserted that he did believe that some theories were better than others, not, apparently, as a matter of truth, but “for doing what scientists normally do”. This is the abysmal level that the argument descends to.
I know what company I am in when Redman quotes at length (p21) and approvingly, a silly paragraph by Popper in which he dismisses “normal science”, which he downgrades to “applied science”. This is just playground name-calling. When I was doing my PhD, I and my colleagues referred to our activity as “stamp collecting”, i.e., a more or less brainless plod along the path provided for us by our supervisors, noting down data and working it up into a thesis. One of the stamp collectors, a particularly unassuming one, was Peter Higgs. Now retired, he predicted 40 years ago an entity called the “Higgs boson”, which physicists are still trying to find. Who can tell when a brainless plod may turn up something which “changes the paradigm”? Of course, people regularly put down others by name-calling - we seem to be built that way. So physicists may dismiss chemists or engineers as mere appliers of rules made by their superiors - applied scientists, or even technicians. I regularly refer to myself as a technician when I’m in “humane” company, just to make plain that I am not getting above myself. And we all, physicists, chemists and engineers, look down the scale and our noses at medical people, vets, economists, sociologists, and such like people who regularly reveal that they have no feel for what a number actually is. But, come on - surely we don’t expect playground name-calling from your actual Karl Popper, a near-member of the Wiener Kreis!
Kuhn, apparently, has retreated from his “paradigmatic revolution” position so far as to be null. But he “has been quite influential in his own field in the sense that he has been widely read by professionals and has generated considerable controversy, as well as at least two colloquia”, says the innocent Redman, thus, at least in part, justifying my emphasis on career aims. He still insists, apparently, (in the words of one Suppe, 1977) on “reducing scientific knowledge to the collective beliefs of members of scientific disciplines”. Well, says I, as long as he does not insert a “merely” between “knowledge” and “to”, and does not object to inserting the word “unanimous” between “the” and “collective”, I do not mind. But the absence of the word "unanimous" is absolutely crucial. The whole point about science (is it possible that these great minds have missed this?) is that unlike all non-science (yes, I know this is self-defining), there is unanimity on matters of science between Japanese and Ceylonese, between Confucians and Moslems, between democrats and authoritarians.
18.10.2001
p22 (notes) Redman seems to like the idea that physics is no longer accepted as the measure of all science. She quotes approvingly some “elementary textbook” (1982) which opines that it is wrong to say that “various areas of knowledge, physics, biology, history, sociology and so on either come under that category [science] or do not”. The author goes on: “Philosophers do not have resources that enable them to legislate on the criteria that must be satisfied if an area of knowledge is to be acceptable or ‘scientific’. Each area of knowledge can be analysed for what it is”. The mind reels at the smugness of this. Do philosophers have resources to legislate on anything at all? Do they, for example try to set up criteria for a subject to be called “politics”? And when each area is “analysed for what it is”, is one to be forbidden to ask or assess what its scientific content is? Or is the word “scientific” to be banned as meaningless? What is wrong with my pragmatic test, that a subject is scientific if, as a matter of observed fact, its practitioners, while having total freedom of opinion, are more or less unanimous on a global scale.
My eye was drawn to a remark that Popper “deals with … the significance of Darwin” and that Kuhn followed him in this. Really? In what way, thinks I? I look up the index (there is a chapter still to come on Popper) for Darwin. Darwin turns out to be barely mentioned, but it is clear that his “significance” is simply that scientific and philosophical ideas (or, I suppose, any ideas) develop by mutations and survive by being the fittest. To me, this smacks of latching on to a big name to inflate one’s own status, rather as Keynes latched on to Einstein in his “general theory”. Darwin’s big idea was not the process of “survival of the fittest” (this was tagged on, I believe, by Huxley), but the mechanism of random genetic mutations. The idea that better ideas survive is hardly any sort of philosophy. The point is not the mechanism of survival, but what determines survival. Non-science survives if the audience like it - to put it crudely, if they buy it. And since there are many audiences, scores of competing ideas can survive together - like Christianity and Mohammedanism. Scientific ideas, par contre, survive only if they are right, and of competing ideas only one can be right - hence the monolithic nature of science. (Since I touch on this over and over again, I make clear that I do not mean that scientists always agree. But they disagree only at the growing tips of the subject, at the points where the process of competition for survival is going on.)
I note with some bemusement (p24) that “Kuhn considers physics to be the prototype of science (as do most philosophers of science)”. So, we’re agreed then! So why, one page before, did Redman, as mentioned above, say: “[the] view that the method of physics is the measure of all science is not accepted by most philosophers today”? Well, the only reason that occurs to me is that “today” is for her 1991, and the elementary textbook authority which she quotes is dated 1982, while Kuhn’s citation for the above opinion is 1970 (he seems to peter out around 1977). Nevertheless, Redman’s verb above is “do”, not did. Maybe there is a distinction between “philosophers” and “philosophers of science”.
My eye was taken also with a reference to trick pictures which can be seen as representing this or alternatively that. Kuhn thought a “paradigm shift” was like this “conversion” from one view to another. This strikes me intuitively as right.
19.10.2001
By “intuitively right”, I meant that it corresponded with my own experience of seeing something in a different way due to some sudden “conversion”, some nudge which pushes you from one perception to another, in greater or less degree different, one.
However, isn’t this just one way of describing any learning process? The transition from regarding Mozart as monotonous and boring to seeing him as wonderfully enjoyable may be sudden or gradual. In the same way, one’s mental picture of a new environment, say a city or valley or whatever, explored from fresh while on holiday, develops, quickly or otherwise, from the moment of entry. I have often remarked that my picture of a place where I lived for 11 years, is very much vaguer than my picture of cities I have explored only for a few days, first because I have studied the latter in order to get about, and second because cities like London, Paris, Denver, Warsaw, etc., etc., seem invariably to have a detectable structure which aids visualisation. This is like a scientific theory which falls easily into place. The trouble with the place with which, on the face of it, I should be most familiar, is that there is no structure. There is no market place or centre through which a grand main street sweeps, and from which obvious routes go out to the suburbs and surrounding towns (what directionality there was has been destroyed by the new by-passes). The “central” streets pick their way narrowly between old buildings. The river, which might aid visualisation of structure, is hidden from the streets. Growth of the town is such that the existing market place is left at the edge. The suburbs sprawl around in shapeless patches. Here the learning process is slow. I pondered over a map for half an hour, trying to visualise how a mooted “new town” or suburb would fit into the landmarks I already know. This, then is like a scientific theory which is messy and lacks clarity. Kuhn placed emphasis, I believe, on the “paradigm shift”, the sudden illumination on the road to Damascus, but why do this? Illumination happens with application and hard work. It can be gradual, like climbing an even slope, or it can be fast, like toiling up a slope and suddenly finding an easy descent.
To change the metaphor a little, exploration of a totally new country will consist largely of boring surveys of repetitive landscapes, but partly also of grand headline-grabbing discoveries, like the Grand Canyon or the source of the Nile. I doubt if real scientists have ever thought of their work as being other than that. Most plod, some get Nobel prizes, all but a few not unarguably merited.
So back to Redman, p25. She notes that the idea of the paradigm-shift, true to its rhetorical but not substantive success, is most often invoked not by scientists, or even historians of science, but by every Tom, Dick and Harry under the sun, even being applied to the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Another pointer that we are here in the field of rhetoric and career-building is Redman’s seemingly straight-faced remark, that “one truly revolutionary aspect of Kuhn’s work [one waits with interest] is that [his book] was published as one of the final monographs in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science series, the mouthpiece of logical positivism”!!
This sounds business-like. The chapter starts with a litany of names. Lakatos, Feyarabend and Bartley were all students of Popper’s. And a host of others were connected in some way. Fifteen more names are given, among whom I recognise only Hayek and Medawar. Popper attended the Wiener Kreis a bit, but “had differences” with them. Maybe I should recall that the Wiener Kreis also is furnished (p7) with a list of nine names, among whom I just about recognise Carnap, Gödel, Frank (physicist, presumably Born’s friend), and Neurath, and four hangers-on, among whom Popper and Wittgenstein. Later, I come across names like Hahn and von Mises, and I find Polanyi naming Bertrand Russell as the Wiener Kreis’s “spiritual father”!
Popper, apparently, is best known for his Logik der Forschung (1934 - Popper was 32 then) or The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959 - maybe when the first was published, it went without saying that “research” was scientific research, and by the post-war years, all sorts of stuff, including economics, were on the bandwagon). Redman characterises it as “anti-positivist”, although it “came out as No 9 of the Vienna Circle’s Schriften zur Wissenschaflichen Weltauffassung” . Redman for some reason forbears to describe this circumstance as “one truly revolutionary aspect” of Popper’s work. Notes on p56 say that this work did not cause much of a stir in Vienna, and also that a lot of Popper’s ideas, including those on testability, were more or less current in Vienna among critics of the Wiener Kreis.
There is controversy as to whether or how far Popper was a positivist or a hanger-on of the Wiener Kreis. On p58, Redman gives a list of 5 points of difference. At this distance, maybe it does not matter.
I warm to Popper when I find him credited with a root-and-branch, no holds barred, rejection of induction. It is not so much his position as such that appeals to me as the sudden and very rare absence of caveats, ifs and buts. Apparently Hume had the same philosophical position but felt that induction, although indefensible, was nevertheless useful and in everyday use. Popper rejects even this caveat. “I assert there is no such thing”, says he.
Although I warm, I cannot follow, thus apparently falling into line with “almost all philosophers”, and with Hume himself. Indeed, I find Popper’s statement simply arrogant and preposterous: “I hold that neither animals nor men use any procedure like induction, or any argument based on the repetition of instances. The belief that we use induction is simply a mistake. It is a kind of optical illusion.” On the other hand, I agree unreservedly with Popper that “the probability of ‘All swans are white’ being true must be zero”.
I simply do not see any opposition between this, and the observable fact that “All swans are white” is a useful and used induction, an “argument based on the repetition of instances.” It may be false, in the sense that it is not true, but it is not false in the sense that it is untrue. [Added later - I rubbed my eyes on re-reading this, but I add more substance later, so I leave it.] (Once again, I ask, is it possible that these great minds have missed this distinction?) An alleged fact (like “this ruler is between 11.5 and 12.5 inches long”) is either true or false. If it is not true, it must be false. “All swans are white” is not in this category. In other words, Prof. Popper, it is not an alleged fact. If, as is specifically mentioned in the development of Redman’s discussion, it refers to all swans, past present and future, then clearly (groan, groan) nothing in the future can possibly be regarded as a fact. I would go further, although the ground is less sure, to say that anything in the past cannot be a fact. Surely, in Popper’s own terminology, a statement is falsifiable only if there exists some person capable of going up to the stuff referred to in the statement to test it. A falsifiable statement must surely at the very least be able (in the real world, not in some imaginary thought experiment) to be falsified. “All swans are white”, as an all-time generalisation, is simply not a fact, and hence neither verifiable or falsifiable. But it is a working hypothesis, obtained by what we are agreed to call induction. Who is Popper to pontificate that we may not call it induction?
As I read on, I find, of course, that Popper is in fact singing the same song as I am, more or less. Only in his arrogance, he insists I sing in precisely his words. Thus he insists, foolishly and dogmatically, that “there is no induction, we never argue from facts to theories”. How can he say this, knowing that not everyone agrees with him, indeed, saying it because he knows that it is an extreme view. If it was the case that “we”, i.e., not Popper and his friends, but “we, the people”, never argue from facts to theories, one would expect that we, the people, would read that and nod. Surely we should be credited with having some idea how we are arguing! And we, the people, have, I think, always had the simple-minded picture that “we” looked at the moving stars for millennia wondering why they moved, and “arguing” from that fact, or the totality of observed facts, to stories or “theories” to explain or make sense of those facts. Who is Popper to say that “we” (presumably including idiots like me) do not do this?
Popper tries to get out of this by insisting that what we start with is not factual data, but a “problem” (this is the first of the 5 points of difference listed on p58). But, mon dieu, what is a problem but a list of puzzling data?
At this point, as so often (see above ad infinitum), I feel “am I wasting my time on these idiotic ‘giants’ of human thought?” Is this yet another case of a guy who is allowed to talk nonsense in front of his blackboard because the students depend on him for a pass, or because his colleagues fear that their career prospects will be diminished if they are demolished by his cleverness in debating?
I concede, of course, that the idea of falsification, with which Popper is credited, is better than that of verification. It is also contained in my homely phrase, “working hypothesis”, i.e., something to be treated as truth only until something or somebody comes along to contradict (falsify) it. Indeed the whole idea of progress, in which the better supplants the good, is in line with “falsification” rather than “verification”. The good idea does not fail any test such as verification. It remains a good idea, but along has come a better one. I am in fact working myself into realising that “falsification” is not so clever either. The good idea is not necessarily falsified. We are not in general talking about an idea about the height of Mount Everest. Scientific theories are, no doubt, sometimes falsified, i.e., thrown holus-bolus out of the window, but much more often, they are superseded by somewhat better ideas. And what does “better” mean? It means that the scientific community swings round to 100% acceptance that the new idea is better, c’est tout.
Popper believed that science should proliferate theories as much as possible. Well, maybe it should, but the plain fact is that it does not. From all the thousands of scientists working in any one field, emerge only a few theories, I would guess rarely more than two or three, and those differing only in details. We are not talking here of Buddhism and Christianity - we are talking of whether you make the sign of the cross on your bosom or your shoulder.
.
23.10.2001
Re-reading the above, I notice that I have agreed with Popper that “all swans are white” has zero probability of being true. I then elucidate that for me, this means that it is not true, but it may be not-untrue. It may be a good working hypothesis. But this is unnecessarily obscure! What I should have realised is that the whole notion of true/false applied to hypotheses in general is wrong-headed. Not only can the notion of true/false be applied only to factual statements, it can also only be applied to statements whose meaning is unanimously agreed. A reasonable person would be quite within his rights if he defined a swan as being, among other things, white. How can one talk of the truth or falsity of “all swans are white” if the question “what is a swan?”, or for that matter, the question “what is white?”, have no very obvious answers? You might hypothesise that the progeny of one given pair of swans, bred incestuously for ever, would never have a non-white member, but clearly the outcome can never be established. At this point, the word “bet” comes to mind, with all the philosophical baggage that that carries(a bet is not a wager on truth, but on an unknown outcome). Rather as in the passage above, I begin to wonder whether one essential qualification for attaining the eminence of a Popper may not be a certain blinkered persistence, an inability to entertain doubt and see difficulties at every step?
To put it in another way, maybe the key is always to be addressing an audience which hasn’t the foggiest idea what you are talking about. After all, Popper’s students, and the audience at his seminars, either included no scientists, or if there were any, they were there only from curiosity. No practising scientist would waste time getting “philosophy of science” on his CV.
p32 Have I been flogging the horse unnecessarily? For I now see that Redman has a section headed “why falsification fails”. She even has “five very convincing reasons”. As follows:
Reason 1. No I have not been flogging unnecessarily. For Redman’s first objection is that Popper was OK for a “single” statement “all swans are white”, but falls down for “complex webs of assumptions, laws, and various conditions”. In the latter case, she says, “theory cannot be conclusively falsified”. OK, let’s go along with that for the moment.
Reason 2. Popper has dismissed induction, but “fails to develop a fully non-inductive schema”. Note that word “schema” - just a more or less meaningless filler. There follows some very clever but inconsequential debating, including a longish farrago or, alternatively, tour de force, quoted from Popper himself. The standard of the debate may be judged from the fact that when Popper concedes that “there may be a whiff of inductivism here”, a critic is wheeled on to say “it is just false to say that there is a whiff of induction here - there is a full-blown storm”. Redman confirms this: “Popper’s method rests on being able to establish that progress can be made - something that he cannot do without induction”. So there.
Reason 3. Science does not, says Redman, reject a hypothesis just because it is falsified. Of course not, says I, because the process of changing opinions towards 100% unanimity has to take time, time for more experiments, for more argumentation. Again Popper is allowed a long defence, in which he more or less admits this.
Reason 4. Popper overestimates the objectivity of science. Scientists are never trying enthusiastically to falsify their own theories. Lakatos is credited with supporting this criticism. More or less irrelevant, says I, since science is of course also a career-competition. There are always people either confirming or refuting the current candidate theories. But unanimity emerges sooner or later.
Reason 5. The idea of falsification rests on the reliability of the falsifying evidence. But this can never be “absolute”. Redman presents Popper as backsliding: “Popper argues in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1972, that acceptance and rejection of basic statements ultimately rest on a decision reached through a process much like a trial by jury”. This is exactly what I referred to above, as “the process of changing opinions towards 100% unanimity (which) has to take time, time for more experiments, for more argumentation”. This, according to Popper’s critics, means that “we have returned to Kuhn’s irrationalism”, and that Popper can be “dubbed the irrational rationalist”. If this is so, then in those terms, I am certainly one of those, i.e., a Popperian Kuhn!
In reinforcing Popper’s dalliance with the non-absolute, Redman quotes from Popper a passage which I remember picking out a long time ago. It applies to hard science. When it comes to the social sciences - well, in my view you can hardly even begin to talk about a “structure” and “foundations”:
“Existence is basically incomprehensible. Thus, the most impressive systems of human thought rest on dubious foundations. You dig back, but inevitably there is a point where you must stop. The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it. Science does not rest on rock bottom. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we cease our attempt to drive the piles into a deeper layer, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.”
24.10.2001
So we have 5 reasons for not believing in the Popperian falsification idea -
theories are generally not simple,
induction is abjured but it is still there,
real scientific theories are not as a matter of fact rejected on falsification,
real scientists are not automatons programmed to falsify their own theories,
nothing is absolute
To my mind, this rag bag of reasons (which in Redman takes up 3 whole pages) is just an obscure and academic-sounding way of saying something like what I have written in commonsense terms above. There is no big demand for common sense. You cannot sell it, or make courses and exam questions out of it. But in the infinitely complex real world, which we all deal with in common sense ways every day of our lives, an effort to simplify or codify, while at the same time complexifying the vocabulary and language, just provides fodder for endless confused debates.
Fortunately, Redman rescues us by pronouncing that “critical rationalism need not be renounced because falsification fails”.
(p35) And that leads us, apparently, to Imre Lakatos, (1922-), “often deemed second to Popper”. Hungarian, ejected or escaped in 1956, a “mature” students at Cambridge, taking a PhDs at age 40+. He died suddenly at 51 “at the zenith of his career” at LSE.
He is even more of a mystifier. A quoted paragraph of only 5 lines uses the phrase “modus tollens” twice, and also the phrase “the negative heuristic”. A previous quotation has expanded “a heuristic” to mean “a powerful problem-solving machinery”, but what a negative heuristic might mean I do not (yet) know. To be fair, I suppose Lakatos had previously explained what “modus tollens” means. If not the reader would never guess, no matter how good his Latin was. The OED tells me that it is a “rule of logic”, which says:
If
“if p then q” is true
and
“not q” is true
then
“not p” is true !!!!!!!!
Let’s try to set up a simple illustration. Let’s try p=we are in Africa, and q=we are hot, and suppose that “if p then q” is factually true. So, if we are in Africa, we are inevitably hot. Now suppose it is a fact that not q is true, i.e., that we are in fact not hot. The we cannot possibly be in Africa. So I agree with modus tollens!!
Now for the mystery-mongering paragraph:
“All scientific research programmes may be characterised by their “hard core”. The negative heuristic of the program forbids us to direct the modus tollens at this “hard core”. Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent “auxiliary hypotheses” which form a protective belt around this core, and we must direct the modus tollens to these.”
I can now see that modus tollens is another way of referring to the falsification idea. You think of a theory p, which fits known facts up to now. You deduce from this theory that q must follow as a consequence. You then look for this consequence but do not find it. So you conclude that your theory must be wrong, i.e., that you have “falsified” it. It would be difficult to think of a more telling example of academic obscurantism than the introduction of this new term into the matter.
Mystification is deepened by introducing a so-called “MSRP”. This turns out to mean “methodology of scientific research programmes”, for which Lakatos “became famous”. Well not famous enough for me to have heard of either him or his MSRP.
So the above paragraph can be rewritten as:
“SRPs have an uncriticisable hard core. The guys in the lab use MSRP only in areas derivative from the hard core to propose theories and try to falsify them.”
Redman points out that Lakatos, who set out to oppose Kuhn, is in fact sounding like him. Kuhn himself is quoted as saying, “hard core, work in the protective belt, and degenerative phase [Lakatos had decided that theories were either going somewhere or not, were “progressive” or “degenerative”] are close parallels for my paradigms, normal science, and crisis”.
What is happening, I think, is that as these clever guys trim and trim to make their clever but essentially ramshackle theories fit the infinitely complex facts, they are driven more and more to high-sounding expressions of common sense accounts, i.e., no matter where they start from (for career purposes) they are driven to convergence to the point at which they might have started, and which “ordinary people” have never left.
25.10.2001
While shaving this morning, I thought of Redman’s mention of a jury. I quote what I wrote a page or two above, as follows:
“Redman presents Popper as backsliding: ‘Popper argues in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1972, that acceptance and rejection of basic statements ultimately rest on a decision reached through a process much like a trial by jury’. This is exactly what I referred to above, as ‘the process of changing opinions towards 100% unanimity (which) has to take time, time for more experiments, for more argumentation’”.
What I failed to stress here is the nature of this “100% unanimity”, because it is this which, I have argued above in various ways, defines (demarcates in Popperian language) science from non-science. Science is the only field in which professionals reach 100% unanimity uncoerced in any way. Even juries are coerced, first because as (generally) simple people they are harangued in court de haut en bas by practised rhetoricians, and second because they are imprisoned in the jury room, more or less, until unanimity is reached. In other words, a random collection of 12 normally argumentative people are told from the outset, “discuss until you reach agreement” The setup is such that the more energetic, loquacious or persuasive are expected to wear down those of opposing opinions who are less so. In normal human society, unanimity is unknown, except in the presence of greater or less coercion - the thought police, censorship, social disapproval, religious threats, and so on. In science, there is no disciplinary apparatus. No scientist has ever been burned at the stake, shot, or imprisoned by another scientist. It is true that science students, like all students, are coerced by the need “to satisfy the examiners”, but once he has his letters and his post, he can, if chance takes him that way, immediately publish a paper with results which contradict a theory of his professor, no matter how eminent. Why? Well the answer is necessarily circular, but nevertheless clear. It is that although he is addressing a “jury” of his peers, that jury by the nature of the profession passes the question, as it were, to another jury, the real world. Does the new result align with the real world or does it not? Non-scientists are dependent on a poll of their audience, a weighted poll, weighted by standing and power, and in general the result will not be described in yes/no terms, still less in yes or no terms. The scientist is dependent (ultimately, not immediately) on a yes or no test of factual truth. It is inevitable that the test is applied by people, and not by machines, but it is a matter of observable and checkable fact that those people ultimately put aside all prejudice and subjectivity. It may be asked, “but what do all these words mean?” Well, dictionary definitions do not help. All one can say is this: take any subject other than hard science (physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.) and apply the same words. Any reasonable jury will agree that they do not fit!! This applies (in varying degrees) not only to openly opinionated subjects like divinity, philosophy and literature, but to pseudo-sciences like economics, and to half-way houses such as biology and medicine.
The latter subjects raise questions of complexity. Physics is pre-eminently objective because it is pre-eminently simple. My own opinion is that the top and bottom ends of modern physics (by this I mean cosmology and sub-nuclear physics) are entering the non-simple, and are thus in danger of becoming prey to charlatanry and grandstanding, of the “Brief History of Time” variety. Biology, medicine and economics (in that order) are simply too complex ever to be reduced to factual yes or no tests. The last named is almost 100% charlatanry at a very clever and entertaining level.
Subjects like philosophy and literature are in my view relatively free of charlatanry because, in those cases, it is universally accepted that the objective content is near zero. The most eminent, acclaimed, interesting, and coherent, practitioners in those fields make no serious claim to being right, merely to being the most eminent, acclaimed, interesting, coherent, and so on.
With difficulty, I remind myself that I am at Redman p38, and about to embark on the “Duhem (1861-1916) thesis”.
As far as I can see, the Duhem thesis is that “a crucial experiment is impossible in physics”. That is, in 1906, when Popper was 4 years old, he was saying that falsification is impossible.
The sort of verbal morass we are in is indicated by the following passage:
“Lakatos insists he is a falsificationist, a view seemingly inconsistent with the Duhem thesis, which he incorporates into his philosophy. He accomplishes this by altering the meaning of falsification [Redman’s italics], and by arguing that there are two versions of the Duhem thesis.”
Later, she says, “not all philosophers of science agree that the Duhem problem is capable of being solved”. She does not specify what the “problem” is, what “solving” it would mean, nor exactly what benefit would flow from doing it.
I’ve read the stuff in between, but refuse to comment further. I doubt if it will play any further part.
26.10.2001
I like very much the first sentence of the next section (p39). “In this section I would like (!) to show that Lakatos’s MSRP fails”.
I like even better how it continues (I re-edit a continuous sentence in numbered lines):
“I will treat the following issues:
1. rationality as Lakatos defines it fails
2. the demarcation criterion fails
3. his relationship to the Popper school of thought is dubious, and
4. Lakatos’s “rational reconstructions” of the history of science - his theory of history - grossly pervert history.”
Yarooh. Love it. Clearly these guys make a living by building up and knocking down. The only criterion for attention in this process is that the stuff has to be clever. It reminds one of the rules of chivalry. A knight would fight a knight, but not a commoner - he would send out his servants to beat him up. So, here, stuff may be monumental and immediately demonstrable nonsense, but if it is clever monumental nonsense, then it can be lovingly and cleverly exposited, merrily and cleverly demolished. On the other hand, if it is obviously true, but unclever and for some reason unwelcome (“unhelpful” used to be the civil service-speak), then it is politely ignored.
2.11.2001
So let us follow the Redman “treatment” of the 4 criticisms.
1. rationality as Lakatos defines it fails
This takes a little more than half a page. Redman writes fairly obvious stuff that I just nod to, to the effect that scientists do not mechanically abandon a line of research just because one step proves “false”. She quotes 8 lines from Lakatos admitting as much. So scientists are not “rational”, in the contorted sense required. “For this reason”, Redman goes on, “Lakatos has been accused of ‘epistemological anarchism’, a stance usually associated with Paul Feyerabend”, who is recorded as embracing Lakatos as a “fellow anarchist”. We are all agreed so far.
2. the demarcation criterion fails
This gets one shortish paragraph. If scientists are not logical-rule-following automatons, then, “Lakatos does not have a criterion for demarcation between science and non-science”. Maybe not, but a scientist does. After boondoggling round and about, head-scratching, blethering, discussion, publication, and more discussion, “science” reaches a unanimous conclusion - this just states an observed fact. Scientists do sooner or later (and in practice the time scale is not so long, a year or two, maybe in some instances a decade or two) reach a unanimous conclusion. In normal speech, this conclusion may be treated as a “truth”, but everyone knows that it will be modified if anyone finds a better or more comprehensive theory. The scientist thus has no problem of demarcation. The whole thing is of course illogical, untidy and circular. Science is what scientists agree it is, and the scientists themselves decide what is science, and what is not, who is a scientist and who is not. Is the “demarcation” important? I’ve never met anyone who thinks it is. No scientist would care tuppence if, say, somebody like Billy Graham, claims to be a scientist. He would just think “shome mishtake shurely”, and pass on. He would, I realise, “politely ignore” the claim, just as I ascribed this attitude to Redman above. It is clear that it is a matter of insiders and outsiders. In Redman’s area of academic disputation and career-building, I, the commonsensical scientist, am an outsider to be politely ignored. As a scientist, I am free to regard her, Popper, Lakatos, and the whole caboodle (or Wiener Kreis), as outsiders that I can get on very well without. Interestingly, she poses the question of why Lakatos and Popper regarded demarcation as important. Her answer, or rather the one she ascribes to Newton-Smith (1981), is that they were ideologically committed to opposing “pseudo-scientists” like Marx and Freud. And economists, say I. There we are agreed. They are just plausible story tellers. They might or might not score high in an opinion poll, but there could be no unanimity. That is the demarcation criterion, in my opinion.
6.11.2001
The hopelessness and unavoidable circularity of the whole business is exposed in Redman’s concluding paragraph on this sub-sub-section:
“It seems safe to say that most philosophers would consider Popper and Lakatos’s attempts to erect a demarcation criterion not only a failure but also an impossible goal. To classify it solely as a failure seems to indicate that demarcation is possible - a dubious proposition.”
The wooliness of this makes the head spin. First, and at the most trivial level, the lack of an apostrophe after Popper’s name is a bit slack, and she characterises “attempts” as “an impossible goal” - a dubious bit of syntax! But the fact that Redman can write down and then leave a couple of sentences, nearly every word of them fairly crying out for the response, “it depends what you mean by …. ”, shows that we are in academic fairyland. Of course, anyone embarking on a woolly enterprise like trying to “demarcate” the boundary between “science” and “pseudo-science”, or between “science” and “non-science”, or between the “meaningful” and the “non-meaningful”, must know at the outset that the task is “impossible”, and that he is bound to “fail”, and it is open to any fool to say so. But, it depends what you mean by “impossible” and “fail”. Popper is, after all, there, not because he succeeded (i.e., failed to fail) but because in tackling his impossible task, he was clever. And his critics are nowhere, unless in their equally “impossible” opposition, they are by chance equally clever.
3. his relationship to the Popper school of thought is dubious
The unintended self-ridicule continues here. Noretta Koertge (1978, ex-LSE) is cited as pointing out that, contrary apparently to what everybody thought, “Lakatos’ position is in fact an inversion of Popper’s basic views”. Although, apparently no one had noticed, least of all (presumably) Lakatos (who had died in 1974), the latter’s definitions had moved science over the demarcation fence alongside metaphysics! All that remained on the falsifiable side was “pre-scientific trial-and-error learning”!! The truth or plausibility of even that is not discussed further. This put-down was rubbed in by Bartley (1976), like Lakatos another LSE Popperian, who said that Lakatos had named his “acclaimed” notion of the “scientific research programme” by taking Popper’s “metaphysical research programme” and substituting the word “scientific”, in order to remove a “public relations obstacle”.
4. Lakatos’s “rational reconstructions” of the history of science - his theory of history - grossly pervert history.”
The gist of this is that Lakatos was far from punctilious on recounting historical fact. He is cited as writing that “Prout recognised certain anomalies … ”, while adding a footnote that Prout in historical fact denied that there were any anomalies, and later failing to continue the “practice of providing factual footnotes”. Next a Lakatos 4-line account of the origin of Bohr’s planetary atom, is asserted to be a “historical parody”. Lastly Lakatos is cited as admitting that “some statements are to be taken with tons of salt”. Obviously, he lived dangerously (as well as cleverly).
So what does this 4-point put-down amount to? Why, that he was a clever charlatan, capable of proposing confusion cleverly enough to appear clear. But we have to be careful in throwing abuse around. Charlatanry is a matter of degree. We are all, Popper, Kuhn, Redman, and also Einstein, Keynes and me, charlatans to some degree. Rivals for a professorship or a Nobel Prize cannot afford to be too punctilious. My judgement on Lakatos is brushed up by Bartley in a note given on p67. This records that Bartley regarded Lakatos “as the most immoral man I have ever met” (I think he means sexually immoral). “Lakatos talked openly and appreciatively - with a certain connoisseurship - of the sort of behaviour which is widespread and almost universally covert. … I often saw Lakatos lie.” Just to spread confusion even further, Bartley may be quoted (slightly out of context, but only 3 lines further on) as admitting that, nevertheless, Lakatos “was morally my superior”!!! A very clever charlatan, indeed! Of course, maybe he meant that Lakatos was a moral cess-pit, and he, Bartley was even worse!
Redman does not pretend to be (wholly) objective. She records that “it is a pleasure to conclude”, with Agassi (1978), that “Lakatos’ MSRP is a failure ….. the Lakatos era is over.”
And now we go on to “Paul Feyerabend, the ‘Dadasoph’” - God help us.
Viennese, he was presumably non-Jewish, since he served in the German army. Redman has some stuff to explain why he was called the dadasoph, but it passed me by.
Redman introduces him (at second hand) as “a brilliant but tiresome, self-centred, repetitious buffoon”. More than a match for Lakatos?
A list of his theses is given. One of them is that “science is not necessarily superior to other types of knowledge”. To which I can only reply, “What on earth is meant here by ‘superior’? And what is meant by the qualifier ‘necessarily’?” I am a scientist, and I believe that science, in my usage of the word, is the only discipline which deals in facts, i.e., in matters on which scientists unanimously agree. There is a question of degree here. Chemistry and engineering, and also physics if we exclude modern “advances” on the ultra-small and the ultra-large, fit the definition, biology less so, medicine less still, history hardly at all. In my view, the question of superiority simply does not come into it, except in the sense that I may sometimes put on airs of superiority, just as a historian may do the same. But how on earth can any half intelligent person insist that science is better than history. Surely even a half-wit would immediately ask, “better for whom, or from what point of view?”.
When that is said, however, it seems clear after reading a couple of pages that Feyerabend is someone I approve of, someone who (I think so far) is telling the Poppers and Kuhns that their theories are superfluous, and would even be harmful if any scientist actually applied them, which, fortunately they are in no danger at all of doing, since they are too busy and incurious even to have heard of them.
Of course, since he could not earn the description of “buffoon” otherwise, he waves his arms about too much. People should consider scientific methods, but also the myths of primitive societies. Well, yes, as long as they are confined to the later pages of the less serious newspapers. He mentions acupuncture, but of course, people like me have no objection to acupuncture and any other folk procedure you like, provided that their proponents do double blind randomised test on them. Merely blethering about them will no longer do. Maybe in that sense, science is superior, not superior-full-stop, but superior from the point of view that it yields predictable and unanimously agreed results.
8.11.2001
So, d’après moi, myths are all right providing they prove to be science. But note that Feyerabend is mixing things up. He takes a myth, acupuncture, and implies that now it is found to be, after all, science. So science is not so superior after all. A mix up. I prefer simply to say that I make no claim that science is superior to myth, philosophy, etc., only that it is superior if you want to build a bridge or split an atom. If myth does prove to be just as good at these things, then it is no longer myth.
Feyerabend is quoted (p47) as writing, “A mature citizen … will study science as a historical phenomenon and not as the one and only sensible way of approaching a problem”. To which, one can only reply as follows. It depends on the problem. There are whole classes of problem for which science is indeed the only way, sensible or not, of approach. These are in fact scientific (engineering, chemical, electrical, ballistic, etc.) problems. Life is full of problems far removed from science. If this were not so, scientists would rule the world, and it is an observable fact that this is not so, indeed virtually the opposite of the true situation.
9.11.2001
On p48, Redman quotes Feyerabend at length. He sounds furious, and more than a bit like me (or vice versa). I quote partially, and re-edited in minor ways: “Popper belonged to a generation still vaguely familiar with physics …. he invented the too-simple errors he spread … which he worked hard to make plausible .. a pioneer of simplemindedness …. the new breed received their philosophy ready made … they engage in a stern defence of the status quo … fear of unemployment (that sounds particularly like my references to careerism) … attention only to details .. . so philosophers of science are illiterates with a good conscience.”
I say amen to all of that. But he goes on to say that unanimity of opinion, which “may be fitting for a church”, is bad, implying that this is so, not only in the case of the careerist “philosophers of science”, but (perhaps) in every case. Here, of course, I part company. Unanimity is the defining characteristic of science, except maybe at the growing tips. Once again, a metaphor prompts a further clarification. Science uniquely is made up of a unanimously defined body of established knowledge plus a comparatively tiny area which is in process of being settled. All other subjects range over the entire spectrum of their proportions in each category. Even history has a store of “facts”, such as the date and final form of the American declaration of independence, “but the rest is history”. “Facts” is in inverted commas, because the “facts” are not really facts, but things which are near enough facts for there to be unanimity of opinion. I suppose even Feyerabend would not recommend giving rein to crackpots who might want to challenge everything under the sun, even “facts” and facts.
Curiously. Redman does not take this occasion to refer to Fleck (1935), whom she has rescued from oblivion on pp15-16, and whom she credits on p56 with a belief in “science as professional indoctrination”. Feyerabend comes near to this, and of course it is gruesome nonsense.
The verbal circus we are in is illustrated by the next section heading: “Why Feyerabend is a rationalist in disguise”, immediately followed by a sentence containing the title of a Feyerabend paper, “… Lakatos, fellow-anarchist”. That is, the words “rationalist” and “anarchist” are being flung about with such abandon that, with enough cleverness, they can be made to stick on anybody. What Redman means by this, I think, is that in her view, Lakatos was a rationalist, and that Feyerabend, in spite of his protestations, was really an rationalist too. (Remember that Lakatos was himself a backslider from Popper’s rationalism).
It turns out that the allusion of Feyerabend to Lakatos was an in-joke which they shared, presumably just before Lakatos’s death. Feyerabend had originally jokingly proposed to Lakatos to dedicate to him as a “fellow rationalist”, but Lakatos for some un-followable reason preferred “fellow-anarchist”. The point is that each accused the other jokingly of being the opposite of what they claimed. Redman resolves this by saying that Feyerabend was rationally criticising the self-proclaimed rationalists for not being rational enough to recognise that their own rational reasoning led rationally to the conclusion that science is irrational. Got that? Personally, I see the point very clearly. It is another version of the unavoidable circularity I have noted above several times. The only thing is that I deplore the obfuscation and name-calling.
Redman sums up by saying that Feyerabend only sounded radical (which for some reason she links with the “Left”), but he was really not, and hence was a “conservative”. Heigh ho.
And now we come to the Dada of Dadasoph. I am agog. Webster, apparently, defines Dada as “deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values”. Some definition. I’m perfectly sure, although I know nothing about it, that a given picture needs a lot more than that to be recognised as Dada. The “soph” part receives no attention, but is presumably someone who engages in sophistry, i.e., far-fetched pseudo logical argument or debate. Put together as Dadasoph, it is, I suppose, intellectual-sounding abuse.
I read on, but again and again, I find that I nod and nod and nod, right up to the point where Feyerabend or Redman imply that irrationality or relativism hold sway, not only in general, and in particular in the development of scientific theories, but also within science itself. There I draw the line. I demarcate. Thus, on p52, I read a Redman-approved list of Feyerabend’s “sensible themes”. I count eight of them, and seven are OK. The exception is, “the line between science and non-science does not exist”. As usual, it is possible to agree with almost anything, provided you mull the words around until they lose their conversational meaning. I am on record as approving Marshall’s “Principle of Continuity”, the one which he proclaimed to be of huge importance in his preface and then never mentioned again. This states (according to me - Marshall himself did not state anything) that the line between anything at all and anything else does not exist. A scientist, of all people, has no option but to agree.
But, come on, we have a whole host of words - look up any university syllabus - to denote academic or other activities. Of course, mon dieu, no line exists between any of them, but there is a march, a buffer region, which can be referred to in normal usage as a line. Would a physics student be confused for an instant if he wandered by mistake into a chemistry or medical class, let alone a history or art class? So, of course, there is a line between science and non-science, and my definition of it is that on the science side there is effective unanimity - not 60:40, not 90:10, but 99% or more. It is not that diversity of opinion is not allowed (c.f., Fleck on “professional indoctrination”), but that there is no room or occasion for it, and hence it is simply, as a matter of observed fact, not there.
Now (p53) we come to the youngsters, with Bartley, born 1934, also LSE.
Immediately, I bristle. Bartley is quoted as defining the philosophy of science as being concerned to “defend particular positions” (he gives in fact a list of 12 verbs but they all mean this). Well, OK, maybe he and his colleagues are doing just that, but I hope that further reading does not show him to be confusing this activity with any aspect of science itself. I wonder, because he bundles together “philosophies of science as much as philosophies of religion”. But, although knowing nothing of the philosophy of religion, I imagine it has some recognisable relationship with religion. One imagines that students of religion might well also study the philosophy of religion, whatever that is. This is most certainly not the case for the philosophy of science vis-à-vis science. However you demarcate, there can be not the slightest doubt that the philosophy of science lies on the non-science side of the line. It defies credibility that any science student would attend philosophy of science lectures, since there, he would learn nothing of the professional practice of science or scientists.
29.1.2002
Returning after a 3-month interval, one of the telling aspects is that I read about Feyerabend and Lakatos above, and the names meant little to me. That is, if anybody yesterday had said “Feyerabend”, I doubt if I would even have connected the name with recent reading, let alone with any idea of who or what he was. This is not only forgetfulness, although that may play a part too. It is that, really, Feyerabend is of zero importance. He had a career, he made the rounds of lecture rooms talking to other people with careers, then he retired or is dead, and nothing of value remains. The question then is, as often posed before, should I continue? The lure, as always, is that there will be a nugget at the end of the path, that it will turn out that it is my lack of comprehension which will fall away, and behold, I will be fully informed. It really has not worked so far - Smith has withstood the passage of time, Marshall less so, Keynes hardly at all, Barro I dismiss as a capable careerist, Friedman too, Von Neumann and Nash a dead end. Heigh ho, and on we go, at least for a bit.
I read a few pages, especially the notes, which are largely quotations. The trouble with this stuff is that it is quite entertaining, a good old pillow fight between clever and argumentative people. However, as said above, it is destined not to leave a lasting impression. It simply does not matter to the world whether Kuhn or Feyerabend or Popper or Lakatos was right. Any choice has no consequences. Of course, it mattered and mattered greatly to them, just as the outcome of a football match matters greatly to the opposing managers. To us bystanders, both scenes have the same entertainment quality, and the same inconsequentiality.
30.1.2002
Back to Redman. The stuff I am at is entertaining but inconsequential. I am tempted to skip 20 pages to escape the review of the philosophy of science (of which I am in the midst), and get on to the consequences thereof for economics. However, maybe I can skim.
p77. OK, I am there, via that name from the past, Stephen Toulmin (1953), a guy called Norwood Russell Hanson , who flew a “brute of a war-surplus F-8-F Bearcat” into a mountain in 1967, and Kuhn. However, no nugget was extracted.
p91. ECONOMICS, at last. I am not in the least surprised, of course, to read almost at once that “the application of a philosophy of science framework to economics has as yet failed to yield a major conceptual or historiographical breakthrough.”
A useful word: “scientism” - the imitation of the physical sciences.
Adam Smith is accused of this, in that allegedly he was imitating the system of Newton. I wonder. Does Smith at any time even mention Newton? Thankfully, Redman pooh-poohs the notion too.
A while after writing that, I checked that nowhere in the complete Wealth of Nations does the word “Newton” occur. Oddly, the word “economics” does not occur either, although “economy”, “economical”, and “political economy” do. As I noted a long time ago, Smith was no scientist or engineer. In a book about the wealth of nations, written amidst the industrial revolution, he never once mentions water, wind, or coal in any sense related to motive power.]
Redman now wanders as in a daze into the field of the opposition: positive/normative. I wait with baited breath. She starts by quoting Schumpeter to the effect that “the word ‘positive’ has nothing whatsoever to do with philosophical positivism”. She goes on, “the origin of the usage of positive among economists is not clear”. Is anything in economics clear, thinks I.
1.2.2002
Redman quotes John Neville Keynes (1917) to the effect that positive science is about what is, i.e., about facts, while normative science (science, thinks I?) is about what ought to be, i.e. (he stumbles on), about “the ideal as distinguished from the actual, an art as a system of rules for the attainment of a given end ….. the determination of ideals … the formulation of precepts”. Ah ha! So that’s the sort of science it is!
Confusion is piled on confusion by harking back to Cairnes (1888) who is cited by Keynes. He talks “in the first place” about physics as being positive, while mathematics is hypothetical, but in the second place, that maybe all “advanced” science is hypothetical, only taxonomy (I imagine) being positive.
Keynes says this is not the antithesis he intends - he dismisses in turn hypothetical, theoretical and speculative, because these terms seem to imply “second best”.
Redman skips lightly to Friedman (1953). He is apparently to blame for founding or naming “positive economics”. This economics provides, in his words, “a system of generalisations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances ….. [there is no] fundamental distinction between the two groups of sciences [economics and the physical sciences]”. One can only read this with disbelief. “Correct predictions”? What planet was he on? A man who cannot find a “fundamental distinction” between economics and physics is a man who is implicitly defining the word “fundamental” as so fundamental that there would be no fundamental distinction between anything and anything else.
Redman continues, “Positive has since taken on multifarious meanings, relegating it to the host of ‘weasel words’ of the social sciences”. Isn’t “weasel” itself a weasel word? What has a weasel got to do with anything?
[Interpolation. I have just picked up a book of essays entitled “Studies in the ontology of economics”. Does economics fail because it does not pick out natural kinds?, asks one author. Well, that is one way of putting it says I. Is ontology the new positivism?]
(p93) T W Hutchison (never heard of him) is apparently the guy who connected the use of the word “positive” in economics with Popperian logical positivism. He represents “a major turning point” according to Redman. She quotes somebody as saying that “Hutchison’s primary objective was to demarcate scientific economic statements from the non-scientific”. Oh dear. No mention of what the terms might mean. No citation of even one actual “scientific economic statement”. Could even one be found? Even Redman uses a bit later the words “confused, confusing and involved”.
p104. I skip on. I notice a quotation from Popper that “the success of mathematical economics shows that one social science at least has gone through its Newtonian revolution”. To me, this simply shows that Popper did not know economics, or mathematics, or physics, or, one might add, the meaning of the word “success”. The statement is simply not just wrong, but utter and complete nonsense. If economics has “gone through” its Newtonian revolution, who is its Newton? Samuelson? Friedman? Come on. Redman quotes, seemingly with approval, some guy who said “neoclassical economic theory is bowdlerised nineteenth century physics”. What sense is there in this quotation? Clearly it is nonsense if the word “bowdlerised” is missed out. So its meaning, if any, depends entirely on this totally (in this context) meaningless word.
I now close Redman’s book. Economics is largely nonsense, the philosophy of science is largely nonsense, and the attempt to apply the latter to the former just piles nonsense on nonsense.
That is my opinion!
4.2.2002
However, not so fast. This morning I gave Redman a last browse. This perhaps showed a weakness of my sentence by sentence, laptop at the ready, procedure. A good, rapid, flip through the remaining part of Redman showed at least some pages where she abandons the newspaper-reporter style, and descends, via quotations, to stuff as dissident as I can possibly require. From memory, I recall references to “academic nepotism”, censorship, fawning on politicians, lack of foundations, uniform tendency to run only good news and to avoid any Popperian falsificatory nonsense, American pre-eminence based on American power.
I go back to the book (p108). I find that my last dismissive snort, just above, about Popper and his Newtonian revolution, is echoed quite strongly by a quotation from the same Hutchison I lightly dismissed just above. He says (1977!), as I have done many a time above, that economics mathematics is purely formal - there is no content. Contrary to Popper, not only was there no revolution, there probably never will be one.
I quote T W Hutchison, cited by Redman, p108, from “On the history and philosophy of economics and science”, an essay in his “Knowledge and ignorance in economics”, 1977, U of Chicago Press:
“Certainly one might find similar claims [regarding ‘Newtonian’ revolutions in economics] suggested by mathematical economists. But the mathematical ‘revolution’ in economics has been one mainly (or almost entirely) of form, with very little or no testable, predictive content involved [Hutchison’s italics]. In accepting as ‘Newtonian’ a purely, or almost purely, formal or notational ‘revolution’, Sir Karl seems to have allowed himself to be taken in by over-optimistic propaganda. Not only has nothing genuinely describable as ‘a Newtonian revolution’ taken place in economics, it is reasonable to suggest that it is not probable that anything of the sort is going to occur in the foreseeable future.”
And then:
“One must distinguish between the vitally important issues of Popper’s general methodological principles, and his highly over-optimistic, but more-or-less incidental, comments regarding a ‘Newtonian revolution’ in economic theory, and the comparability of economic laws with those of physics. Such comments as these latter are bound to be highly popular with ‘theoretical’ economists and their influence could probably be shown to have been quite important in the fifties and early sixties.”
I am intrigued. Who is this guy? How did he escape censorship? Who paid his salary?
Well, one of the wonders of the library is that you just get up and look. He was born in 1912. Still alive in 1998. Cambridge graduate. War in India. Lectured in Hull and LSE, before being promoted to be professor - of economics! - at Birmingham in 1956, retiring in 1978. Get it? He is yet another retiree! The library has 8 works by him, of which the 1977 one (“Knowledge and Ignorance in Economics”) is the earliest! The latest is 1997 (age 85 years!) on Sir William Petty. [Later, June 2003: The library have updated their catalogue. He now has 15 entries, the earliest 1938, the latest 2000! ] Redman’s bibliography has18 entries against his name, 11 of which were written after the age of 60. He was 24 when Keynes’ General Theory came out. But I’ve never come across his name, so presumably he was never eminent. This throws light on my continual paradox - how come a dozy guy like me can state rather confidently that god-like professor so-and-so is talking nonsense? The answer is that any fool can do so, provided he is retired, and therefore free of the need to earn a living. If you are a retired professor of economics you clearly have a head start, since you know ab initio where the bodies are buried. It took me years gradually to realise that my bafflement with economics was not due to my stupidity but due to the fact that the stuff is incomprehensible to anyone with scientific training.
In my browsing, I come across (p114) a quotation from Popper that I find quite staggeringly idiotic. I quote: “There are good reasons, not only for the belief that social science is less complicated than physics, but also for the belief that concrete social situations are in general less complicated than concrete physical situations”. I said above that Popper did not understand physics, and this is additional proof. I have remarked somewhere on the Russell/Planck joke. I quote myself:
“There is a story that Bertrand Russell and Max Planck both said they were attracted to do economics, but they did not, Russell because it was too easy, Planck because it was too difficult. They were both right. Russell meant I suppose that he could too easily pass the exams and too easily outshine the existing professionals. Planck no doubt meant that as a physicist, used to the great difficulties in elucidating process involving one or two bodies moving in one force-field, or one homogeneous fluid moving in a conduit of simple geometry, he would feel impotent in the face of a system involving the emotions and motivations of innumerable actors, acting individually and in groups of hugely varying size.
“This is the frequently recurring paradox that the easy is difficult, the simple complex.”
I think with all due modesty that I have put my finger there on a point that escapes Popper. The simple is not necessarily easy, the complex not necessarily difficult. An atom is simple but not at all easy, whereas, say, family relations, are complex, but just as discussable by an unschooled peasant wife as by Aristotle. Note: “discussable”, but the wit of man will never produce laws or theorems of family relations. They are too complex for that.
7.2.2002
I find in the blurb on the back of the book a quotation from a reviewer, saying that Redman “makes the strongest case … for Bartley’s critical rationalism”. I had not so far noticed. Nor had another summariser, who says that Redman is “accurate, critical, yet neutral”. I’ll bear all that in mind if and as I go on.
14.5.2002
Three months later. And so to Deborah A Redman. I seem from the last entry above, to have given up on her around page 104, and then found more to interest me around page 114.
I’ll try to pick up the thread.
Oh dear! I find on p108 that “historicism” is Popper’s bête noir, as applied to the social sciences, but the word does not occur at all above. Moreover, Popper “coined” this word. Unfortunately, Redman says that “despite his efforts to clarify what he means, his usage of historicism remains problematic in many ways”. It seems to mean using historical stories as models for predicting the future, or maybe the attempt to see one cycle of history as a re-run of a previous one. Apparently Marx, Plato, Hegel, Mannheim, Comte, Mill and Toynbee are targeted here. These all thought that there were discoverable “laws of history”, whereas Popper says there are none. The word “holism” also pops up here. Popper was agin that too. What on earth does it mean? References back to previous pages do not help. It seems to mean that everything affects everything else. A holist, presumably, not only thinks there is such a thing as society, but thinks there is nothing but this cohesive living blob called society. Popper, on the other hand, joins Mrs Thatcher in believing that there is no such thing as society, only individual “men”. Oh dear! A plague on all of them. Surely there is such a thing as society and such a thing as individuals, just as we groundlings have always thought. These idiots will argue next that there is no such thing as a river, only molecules of water, or no such thing as molecules of water, only rivers.
Redman makes the novel claim that Popper is “important … because of [his] confusions”. Oh well. And out of this confusion, he “develops his theory of situational logic”. Can these guys do anything without giving it a multi-syllabic name? Redman quotes Popper’s “most recent discussion of situational logic” (p112). This leads on to a previous Popper formulation - “the zero method” - also given a paragraph, leading in turn to a paragraph from Schumpeter. I read all three paragraphs. The first is incomprehensible. The second is comprehensible but inconsequential - that one should measure human behaviour in relation to a zero-point defined by cold rationality. How is not said. The third is totally comprehensible, and total nonsense - that “politicians and businessmen” will pay attention to economists only when they can furnish exact proofs, via econometrics. We know, don’t we, that 70 years later, econometrics has given, and was condemned to give, exact proof of precisely nothing.
3.2.2003
Nine months later. I pick up at T W Hutchison, who wrote in 1977 (see above):
“Certainly one might find similar claims [regarding ‘Newtonian’ revolutions in economics] suggested by mathematical economists. But the mathematical ‘revolution’ in economics has been one mainly (or almost entirely) of form, with very little or no testable, predictive content involved [Hutchison’s italics]. In accepting as ‘Newtonian’ a purely, or almost purely, formal or notational ‘revolution’, Sir Karl seems to have allowed himself to be taken in by over-optimistic propaganda. Not only has nothing genuinely describable as ‘a Newtonian revolution’ taken place in economics, it is reasonable to suggest that it is not probable that anything of the sort is going to occur in the foreseeable future.”
And then:
“One must distinguish between the vitally important issues of Popper’s general methodological principles, and his highly over-optimistic, but more-or-less incidental, comments regarding a ‘Newtonian revolution’ in economic theory, and the comparability of economic laws with those of physics. Such comments as these latter are bound to be highly popular with ‘theoretical’ economists and their influence could probably be shown to have been quite important in the fifties and early sixties.”
6.2.2003
I am about to be diverted into the Two Cultures of C P Snow.
1.5.2003
Three months later. Snow took up some time, and did not really lead to any elucidation of the “two cultures”. On the contrary, he seemed to think that what was needed was for non-scientists to learn more about science. This, to my perception, would not grasp the problem, because essentially I have come to believe that non-scientists are incapable of scientific thinking. A sort of illustration of this was furnished just before I entered the library today. I was listening to the last minutes of the last (fifth) Reith Lecture given by a neurologist V. S. Ramachandran. He was asked by a seemingly rational “philosopher, with a special interest in theology” if he believed he had a soul. Ramachandran havered around the point a bit. The questioner returned and insisted on an answer, yes or no. Ramachandran said that like most scientists, he was agnostic. Sue Lawley, who was chairing the meeting, asked “does this view flow from your scientific work?” His answer was “no, it is mostly common sense”. Exactly. The most intelligent and clever and well-informed people who have ever existed can believe passionately in gods, in God, in Christ, etc., while to another class of people, which can go from a ploughman leaning on a pub counter up to Einstein, these entities are simply dismissable on grounds of commonsense or sheer implausibility. How can the Archbishop of Canterbury, by all accounts a clever man, believe in the odd and quite specific ideas of the (relatively) little sect he leads? For such a man, it would make no difference if he had “done science” at school, or attended “technology for all” lectures as an undergraduate. He simply has the scientific screw missing. Ramachandran did in fact say at one point that certain visionaries, people whose visions amount to insanity, could have God surgically removed from their minds. The God-bit of their brain could be cut out. Maybe if the Archbishop of Canterbury had the operation, he would then be capable of becoming a scientist. I argue in my notes on Snow that Snow himself was constitutionally a non scientist - he was in fact the novelist he became - in spite of the fact that as a poor boy, he had been routed into science, and as a basically clever chap, had gone a certain way up the ladder.
Another diversion was a book called “Does education matter?”, but this too was written by a non-scientist. The title was rhetorical, and so in the end was the discussion. It led nowhere.
So now I have to find out where I was with Redman, apparently all of 15 months ago! I re-read some of the stuff above, and arbitrarily select p110 as my new starting point.
Ah yes. Popper’s “situational logic”! Popper wrote a great deal of verbose nonsense, as Redman satisfactorily acknowledges, and situational logic was part of this. Reading on to p118, it becomes clear that Redman herself is rather on my side of the fence. She is far from feeling that great names must be talking sense. But she is not retired! She has a living to make. So, if she was asked if she believed in the soul, she would not say, “no, it is against common sense”. A book has to be produced, and it has to have a certain number of pages, and hence a certain vast number of words. Thus by p123, she has proved over and over again that what she is writing about at such length is not worth writing about.
8.5.2003
I quote: “Popper’s ‘standards’ for social science are so inconsistent that they create confusion and leave one wondering if he has a methodology of social science.” Later (p124) she asks: “Why do economists - and good ones - still hang on to falsification (disproof) of theories?” This exactly mirrors my query above: “Why do Anglicans - even good ones like the new Archbishop of Canterbury - still hang on to the absurd tales said to be believed by Anglicans?”
She gives reasons, but mine is simple. The Archbishop of Canterbury is making a career in the Anglican Church. When he meets other highly clever heads of other churches, he deals with them as if he was the foreign minister of a country, or the head of a firm, i.e., as guys pursuing a career like himself, paid by a different employer. You can bet your last dollar that they spend zero time arguing, still less fighting, over the truth of the irreconcilably contradictory stories which in their respective pulpits they claim to be of overwhelming importance and truth. So with economists. They have trained in their seminaries. They have learned the language and the sacred texts. They can turn out a polished sermon at the drop of a hat. They have learned to talk to politicians and to write the occasional newspaper article. They know (surely!) that they are talking unprovable nonsense, but if any small boy onlooker says so, he will be dismissed and ignored as an ignorant outsider. They are on the make!
I read on. Apparently a guy called Niehans (1981) put my view in an arresting way: “Economic doctrines are usually tested, not by systematic methods, but by a DARWINIAN (Niehan’s upper case, presumably) struggle for survival in the arena of history”. I.e., the cleverest guy with the most powerful debating style (Keynes rushes to mind) wins the audience. But Niehans did not add that the real Darwinian struggle does select the best, and the best then persists more or less unchanging, whereas the struggle of economists is like the struggle of the actor. The audience changes or gets bored and the actor/economist becomes, not wrong, but unfashionable.
Redman, in my view then gets carried away by her own scepticism. She says (p128) that “there is no demarcation criterion for any science. The foundations of natural science, like social science, are not solid.”
This is literally true, but throws hordes of babies out with the bathwater. There is a matter of degree. The statement “this book weighs 834 grams” is totally different in its degree of solidity from the statement “the trouble with the German economy is the structural rigidity of its labour institutions”. The foundations of F=ma and of any Keynesian theory both qualify as “not solid”, but in practice neither I nor anyone else cannot possibly disagree with the first whereas it is perfectly open to any Tom, Dick or Harry to disagree with any economic theory whatever. Or to put it another way, a lot of human talk involves prediction of one sort or another. The predictions of traditional physics (up to 1952!) have in no case ever been wrong (they deal correctly with very simple situations), the predictions of biology, say, are sometimes right sometimes not, but the predictions of economists and social scientists are more of less on a par with those of guys leaning on pub counters.
Oddly, whereas Redman presents Popper as insisting too strongly on demarcation (and I have no reason to doubt she is right), my view of Popper is that he most usefully put water in the wine of scientists. Whereas your average practising scientist thinks he is engaged in discovering truth, Popper points out irrefutably that he is elaborating a sort of explanatory picture which serves as a truth until someone comes along with a better, but still not a true, picture. It just happens that the F=ma picture has survived unscathed for 350 years! So for the scientist, Popper puts water in their wine, but for the economist, he is apparently seen as putting whisky in their water! That is, he tended to make scientists a little bit less sure of their mission of truth-finding, but made economists imagine - wrongly in Redman’s view - that they were on a par with scientists as regards objectivity.
17.6.2003
One month later. Trying to find my place (around p128), the first thing I read is that Adorno, who was an anti-positivist, hence anti-Popper, although Popper was not a positivist (confusing?), had to have police protection at “his last set of examinations before his death”, because he was “threatened with leftist violence” associated with the student unrest of 1968-70!!! Let no one say that economics is entirely ivory-tower stuff! The second thing I notice is Redman saying (p128), “In addition, I might add that …..”. A quibble, but these people are used to slack talk disguised (but not sufficiently in this case) by grave expression.
Redman effectively changes the perspective of the falsification argument by noting that Popper’s main point (which presumably he did not notice himself) was that the way to scientific advance was simply the will to criticise, to constantly call into question. Obviously, this is related to falsificationism, which would say that a theory is not “true” but simply so far resistant to all criticism. But if Redman is right, it did not need a Popper to say this, since everybody knows that the Reformation and the Enlightenment were both propelled by a growing tendency to question the established authorities, to replace God and the Pope with man and ME. This is what I think, this is MY criticism. No, what Popper said was not what everybody knows, it was that “man and me” were wrong if they thought they were replacing superstition with truth. They were replacing stuff which, undefended by force of arms or the pulpit, crumbled before criticism, with a series of images or statements which so far have stood up to criticism.
I now come across some more loose talk. Redman says “Returning to economics, Popper wrote …. ”. This reads as if Popper, after an absence from economics, returned to it to write ….. . But from the context, it is pretty clear that she means “I am now returning to the subject of economics (from a general discussion of epistemology) to remark that Popper wrote …. .”
Now (p142) I get on to what may be interesting stuff (my optimism is indestructible, in spite of constant rebuffs) - a chapter called “Lakatos and Kuhn”. I must confess that I thought we had already done Lakatos. I check above and find that Lakatos is mentioned quite a lot. However …..
I note too that the sub-title of this chapter is “Science as consensus” - one of my constant themes.
18.6.2003
Redman starts off by saying that Lakatos has now supplanted Milton Friedman’s positive methodology (what on earth could have been positive about Friedman’s myth-making? thinks I) and has “swallowed up the Kuhnian wave of the seventies”. The vehicle for this is “MSRP”, meaning methodology of scientific research programmes. Isn’t it odd that the blokes who actually do scientific research have rarely given a moment’s thought to their methodology, and got on perfectly well before Kuhn or Lakatos (to say nothing of Friedman) were born?
Lakatos died in early middle age in 1974. The economics of Lakatos (Redman says he was a mathematician interested only in the natural sciences, referring to economics only once in a footnote) was promulgated by a guy called Latsis.
Curiously, Redman pours scorn on this footnote, quoting a longish passage from Hutchison (again) to do so. Lakatos merely mentioned in one sentence that perhaps economists did not welcome Popper because the idea of falsification would kill their “budding research programmes”. Hutchison says that he has failed to find any economist who cared tuppence for falsification, i.e., for confrontation of theory with adverse evidence. Precisely, but is that not exactly why Lakatos is saying that they do not want to hear of Popper? In the very next paragraph, Redman, now writing in her own voice, supports some other guy who says economists simply latch on to the latest fashion (only she calls it the latest “developments in the philosophy of science”), thus showing first a “fascination with Popper, then Kuhn, and finally Lakatos”. So they did care tuppence for Popper, and indeed were fascinated by him?! Ah well.
Redman quotes approvingly someone who latched on to Lakatos’s idea of the uncriticisable “hard core” of an “SRP” (scientific research programme). I recall the key quote from Lakatos already scorned somewhere above:
“All scientific research programmes may be characterised by their “hard core”. The negative heuristic of the program forbids us to direct the modus tollens at this “hard core”. Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent “auxiliary hypotheses” which form a protective belt around this core, and we must direct the modus tollens to these.”
“Modus tollens” is an extremely fancy way of saying falsification (see above). Redman seems to agree with her source that this is a “carte blanche” to exempt anything you like from falsification by declaring it to be “hard core”, and so “it is no wonder that Lakatos has become economists’ methodological darling”. At this point, I feel like wishing a plague on all their houses. I’ve no idea, of course, what Lakatos actually meant by the “hard core”, and maybe he did not exactly know himself, but he could easily have meant those parts of scientific knowledge on which a de facto consensus has already been achieved, and the “protective belt” consists of the stuff which is still being argued about. That is, he may have coined the phrase “hard core” merely to describe an existing observed situation, or one as it existed at some past time, and not as a theologically laid-down do-not-touch area. It comes to something when I find myself defending one woolly word-spinner from others of the same kind.
Needless to say, I am approving of the new assertive Redman. I nod along happily when she goes on to say, “Plain talk is just what economists intend to avoid. MSRP and paradigm sound scientific and hence more persuasive”. But really, she is in a cleft stick. She is like the vicar who has ceased to believe in God - he should resign and get a job at a supermarket checkout till, but he has a wife, a house, and children to bring up. Thus, with this view of economists, Redman’s book could more honestly be completed in a few terse dismissive sentences, but then there would be no book, and she does have a living to make. That is exactly my position - my views are clear, not clever, demonstrably correct, but unpublishable, since there would be no obvious buyers. Economists do not want to read that they are useless and unnecessary, and non-economists couldn’t care less one way or the other. Among the latter, I add, were Lakatos and Kuhn, who were both principally talking about science as normally understood, not so-called “social” science. Kuhn is apparently on record (Redman p145) as being “not very enthusiastic” about the mangling his terminology received from social scientists.
With a heavy heart, I read of the enormous confusion caused by these people interpreting Kuhn and Lakatos as allowing them to restrain or try to forbid argument on the grounds that there was a “hard core” or paradigm or area of “normal science”. One groans in disbelief. Is it possible that grown men could look at real science, observe that there was a large textbook body of consensually accepted knowledge, and draw the conclusion that the success of science was due to imposing a consensus?
Redman goes on, very satisfactorily from my point of view. Indeed, I would say that she is labouring the obvious - the lack of consensus among economists allied to the lack of interest of each in the views of the others. A personal example is that there seemed to be a total lack of interest in my arithmetical demonstration that there was no correlation between a country’s inflation rate and its GDP growth rate, although this contradicted the views of virtually everybody at that time (Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 17 No. 1 1993). It is rather as if, in physics, one proved definitively that gravitational attraction was not as the inverse square of distance, and nobody stirred.
Redman (or Kuhn) makes one point that had not occurred to me, although it is also obvious. In physics, the young genius is, if not the norm, then a quite frequent occurrence. One thinks of Heisenberg coming straight from school, half wondering whether to become a pianist, having fundamentally new conceptions of quantum physics while still a student, and nearly failing the viva voce for a lectureship because he (in actual fact) knew little about physics! How is this possible? Why, because physics is about looking at a fundamentally simple physics universe, one in which nothing ever changes, and about which demonstrable truth can be uttered, and once is enough. Here a cat can look at a king. The king can try waving his sceptre, and professors sometimes do try, but in a simple world like physics, the truth travels fast and unstoppably. I in fact knew (not well - I had to look him up) a more mundane example than Heisenberg, namely Rudolf Mössbauer who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1961. This guy was not in the least eminent, but happened while a very young researcher to discover “the Mössbauer effect”, no less, and there he is, along with the real eminences like Fermi and Dirac. Another near-Nobel physicist, also not eminent, whom I knew much better as a student, was Peter Higgs, whose name will be attached for ever to the “Higgs boson”. This “discovery” (it has not been found yet, 40 years later, but they are still looking, and he will have a Nobel prize if it is, and if he is still alive) was almost the first thing he ever did. Economics is a different matter entirely. Since it is to do with the behaviour of people, nothing is for ever, nothing is unchanging. There are thus no “truths”, no irrefutable evidences. Samuelson has been quoted as saying that economics has produced no true and non-trivial theorems, except (he said) Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which to my mind is not an exception - it is clever, sounds good, and its logic is sound, but as for non-trivial, the world of commerce and trade would go on just the same if nobody had ever heard of it.
19.6.2003
Thus, it is not open to the young fresh-minded would-be economist, more or less straight from school, to perceive or stumble upon a truth of nature hitherto unperceived by experienced elders of the discipline. Such truths are simply not there to be stumbled upon. If the youngster is to make progress in the profession, he must master the rhetoric, get his papers past the referees, deliver popular lectures, write at least one popular text book, and in general raise his profile with the audience. Judicious journalism is also a good thing, although probably the reputation of no one but Keynes could survive the amount of popular journalism he wrote.
Mind you, this observation of Redman’s or Kuhn’s is not particularly apposite to a discussion of economics. It is rather that it is the hard sciences that are unique in being open to the discovery of truths by mere beginners. After all, not only is it that in these subjects, the truths are there to find, it is also a fact of common observation that truths are often invisible to older people whose mindsets are fixed. It is at times an advantage to have a fresh and relatively blank mind. This was undoubtedly the case with Heisenberg, and, I imagine, with Higgs.
In all other subjects, admittedly in varying degrees, learning counts. The greasy pole of esteem and preferment has to be climbed by convincing an audience of superiors and peers, whereas the young scientist can conceivably jump up and say, “this is demonstrably true”, and will carry the day no matter what view is taken of the discovery by the elders. As said so often in these notes, in science the appeal is to nature, everywhere else it is to an audience.
Now, according to Redman, Kuhn was essentially addressing the philosophy of science, meaning what I have referred to as hard science. Redman is quite clear that it was sociologists and economists who really jumped on his bandwagon, as they already had done earlier with Popper, and later with Lakatos, although they too were centred on hard science in formulating their prescriptions. It would be my guess that the scientists, whose work was supposed to be at issue, ignored all three, more or less completely.
Redman gives a one-paragraph quote from Kuhn, to the effect that his invention of the word “paradigm” in the Kuhnian sense, came from his observation of unanimity among hard scientists on their “hard core” of knowledge, as opposed to the cacophony of opinion he saw in the social sciences. This makes me wonder just who Kuhn was, just as I was moved to wonder just who C P Snow was (another humanistic author whose credentials were claimed to be rooted in hard science). It seems to me just mystification, to apply an obviously jargonic word to what is prosaically just the pile of so-far accumulated knowledge. Kuhn, judging from this quotation seems to be blind to this obvious, banal, and boring perception. If this seems strong, listen to this (Redman p150, Kuhn, 1970):
“Particularly I was struck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognise the role in scientific research of what I have since called ‘paradigms’.”
I must admit that I read this first without any feeling of amazement. As so often, it is only when I pause to write down and consider, that a feeling of incredulity grows. Who is this guy, of whom I know next to nothing except that he is spoken of as one of the most famous “thinkers” of my own time? What the devil does this famous thinker mean by implying that scientists bother, or perhaps should bother, tuppence about “the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods” (my italics)? Never in all my experience did anyone raise a query as to whether what anybody was doing was legitimate or not, let alone the method he was using to pursue it. What on earth would any scientist make of such a question? Legitimate to whom, and in what sense? Why does this great thinker not realise that physics is a very simple activity? Nothing that is done is much different in essence to the simple farmyard question, “what does this bag of potatoes weigh?” Is that a legitimate problem? Is weighing a legitimate method? The bag of potatoes question is answered over and over again in scientific research, with the words “bag of potatoes” and “weigh” changed, so that ever more elaborate and novel methods and equipment are involved, but in the end, what you have is thousands of answers to such questions, not really much different in quality from those given by the weighings of thousands of different bags of potatoes. Each “weighing” yields a number, an incontestable number (or if there is contest, it is resolved by re-weighing). Even after the production of thousands of such numbers, the basic situation is unchanged. Kuhn paints his truly absurd picture that “somehow” (i.e., by some process which he find mysterious), this “fails to evoke controversies over fundamentals” among scientists. Why the devil should it? Would Kuhn solemnly stroke his chin over the lack of controversy among farmers on the weights of bags of potatoes? Of course, Newton did more than weigh bags of potatoes. He found incontestable algebraic relationships between such measured results. If a result, either primary (a weighing) or secondary (an algebraic relationship), is incontestable (or in Popperian language, not yet falsified), why the devil should there be controversy?
Once you move away from hard science simplicity begins to depart, and the scope for controversy increases. There is not the very slightest mystery about this, no need whatever to “attempt to discover the source of that difference, leading one to recognise the role in scientific research of what Kuhn calls ‘paradigms’.” The difference is crystal clear to lesser minds. Disciplines can be ranked according the ratio of fact to opinion. Hard science is 100% fact. The body of accepted fact is what Kuhn feels moved to call the (collection of) paradigms. I suppose perhaps some branches of philosophy get near to 100% opinion. There is more and more room for “controversy” in each discipline as the ratio of fact to opinion decreases. Why? Well it is obvious, isn’t it? A fact is by definition something everybody can agree on, and an opinion is by definition something which can vary from person to person. That is the reason, Mr Kuhn, why “the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals”, and why those controversies “often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists”.
The mind simply boggles to read that Kuhn thinks that “history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science”. How can anybody, let alone an allegedly great thinker, imagine that firm and permanent answers are as easily come by in psychology (!!!!!) as in, say, elementary mechanics or - a bit more difficult - metallurgy????? What sort of history and acquaintance had he in mind? Did he simply mean that when he asked a simple scientist-acquaintance about the legitimacy of his problems and methods, he got a dazed and incoherent reply? Had he tried to ask agricultural labourers about the legitimacy of their problems? Had he noticed that agriculture too has its paradigms?
20.6.2003
The next section (p151) quotes a defence of run-of-the-mill “normal” scientists against Kuhn’s description of them as “puzzle-solvers”. But presumably the defender is another philosopher. The defence is unnecessary. When I was doing post-graduate research, we regularly referred to our job as “stamp-collecting”. At the direction of our supervisors, we were just filling in fairly evident gaps in factual knowledge. It is not a huge exaggeration to say that any reasonably bright non-scientist youngster could have done it, with a bit of guidance. We did not in the very least feel defensive about this status. Scientists, as a breed, are a fairly dull un-intellectual bunch. Has nobody noticed?
This morning, I read in the New Statesman the word “freezed”. In my time I have had a lot of exposure to illiterate speech but I don’t think I have ever heard “freezed”. And now on p152 of this book, I find Dorothy A Redman writing that certain people “do not like to be outshined”!!! Maybe it’s because she is (I suppose) an American!
In a quick go at checking Redman’s Americanism, I looked at the foreword. There was no clue there, but I got bogged down in more inanities (page vii). “Part of my aim has been prohibitive”, she says. Eh? I look at Chambers’ Dictionary. The Latin word literally means “to have before”, presumably meaning to anticipate with a view to forbidding. Well, what does she mean by this seemingly incomprehensible word? She follows up: “For instance, I hope to show that falsification (as conclusive disproof) does not exist in science, and that defending a theory because it has not yet been ‘falsified’ may sound sophisticated and scientific but is in reality indefensible”. I groan. And groan again. Could she in a month of Sundays explain what it might mean to say (let alone to show) that “falsification” does not “exist”? Would you not need to start by defining what each word means? And if the answer is, “don’t be pedantic - everybody knows what they mean”, does that not immediately allow me to say on the same basis that falsification in science most certainly does exist, in the ordinary meaning of those words? If you say, “this bag of potatoes weighs 2kg”, and I say, “no, it doesn’t - I’ve just re-weighed it ten times to be sure, and it weighs 3kg”, is this not falsification? More generally, could I not say that science, comparatively simple though it is, is vastly too complex a process to be subjected to two-word semantic quibbles. The second part of the quotation about the defence of a theory on the grounds that it has not yet been falsified is of course correct, but so self-evidently correct that one wonders about this being pulled out for special mention in a 2-page foreword of a 180-page book. Would Redman know of any specific case where even an economist has been daft enough to make this defence? Most economists in my experience “state and run”, to use my usual formulation, i.e., they assert something, add a few sentences to avoid an abrupt transition, change the subject for a page or two, and then say somewhere, “ …. as I showed above”. They would not risk saying, “I stated this above, and I am not aware that anybody has falsified it, so I am now going to treat it as true”. That would be too explicit even for economics students. To say that such a statement might be inserted in order to “sound sophisticated and scientific” is too laughable for words. It is of course deeply insulting to the shade of Popper to imply that he meant anything other than a prolonged and painstaking process when he used the idea of falsification. He was saying I think that a physics theory could be relied on to the extent that it had been known to survive many severe confrontations with the facts of the world, but that this reliance could never, at least in theory, be total.
Her second “major prohibitive contribution”, she says, “deals with the interpretation of Kuhn’s philosophical position that science is consensus”. To be fair, she is only flagging what is to be dealt with in the book, but surely one expects a sentence to make sense in its actual context. Maybe she means simply that she is going to show that Kuhn is wrong. I have already covered this above. Kuhn, I imagine, was stating the obvious - that in the world of scientists, there is, in clear objective observational fact, consensus. It is the most immediately striking thing about science that all participants not only say the same thing, but almost universally use the same vocabulary, very often the same algebraic symbols. If F=ma in Edinburgh, one could be pretty sure that F=ma also in Hong Kong. As I’ve said above, there is no mystery about the reason - it is that all participants are expressing the same verifiable and incontestable truths. There is no question of indoctrination or coercion. Now if economists misuse the idea of a paradigm to arbitrarily promulgate, ex cathedra, the core beliefs or teachings of Nobel prizewinner X, as an obligatory paradigm for followers of X’s school, that cannot be laid at the door of Kuhn. That is to treat a neutrally observed truth as a prescription actively to be pursued. To dismiss Kuhn as I do, not as wrong, but as needlessly muddying the clear water of science with his jargon, is enough of a criticism. Economics, on the other hand, thrives on muddy water, and it is Kuhn’s misfortune to be co-opted to lend an illustrious name to the process.
Redman says in her foreword that it is the misfortune of commentators to criticise the people they in fact respect and admire (she cites Blaug and Hutchison). I feel rather like this vis-à-vis Redman. In the part of the book I’ve reached, she has revealed herself as a fellow de-bunker. We de-bunkers should really stick together. If de-bunkers all de-bunk each other, the scallywags will escape!
So much for my digression on “outshined”.
Back on p153, we now have Schumpeter proclaiming another banality, namely that economists as a group are more sociologically organised than physicists. Well, of course. As said above science is about facts, economics leaves a huge amount of room for opinions, and hence for tribalism. In science, there is simply no analogue of the situation in which one economist may be a Keynesian, another an “Austrian”. Economists may be different from scientists sociologically or they may not, but if they are, that is not the nub of the matter. The nub of the matter is that scientists deal with simple factual matters, and economists do not. The difference lies in the subject not the people.
23.6.2003
I have now noticed that the quotation just above from Schumpeter begins a section headed “A Short Digression on the Development of Economics as a Profession”. This sounds fairly fundamental. I check that it goes on for 15 pages. Odd that a book called Economics and the Philosophy of Science should have this inserted as a “short digression”. [I later find that if I insert “club-like” between “a” and “profession”, the title gives a better indication of content.]
I groan a little that in Redman’s view, Schumpeter’s view warrants a closer look because, she says, “Kuhn rightly stresses the role of the scientific community in science”. Would any scientist even dream of stressing this? Of course science is part of human history, and of course scientists are people, and Newton acknowledged that he stood on the shoulders of giants. But to a scientist, science is about things. Things analogous to the weight of a bag of potatoes. I’m pretty sure a Chinese scientist does not think of science as having more than a historical connection with specifically Western scientists. Science is truths about things (there is no claim that it is the whole truth about them), not western things but all things. A scientific truth, in the view of scientists, is something there, like North America, just waiting for someone, Chinese, Canadian or Burmese, to come along and uncover it. So why is it important to stress the scientific community? Important to whom, and why? Possibly, in this welter of confusion, she means the “economics community”, whose members claim to be scientists, social scientists!
Odder still, she announces that what she is going to write about is American economics. She quotes someone to the effect that the second World War changed American economists from country bumpkins to world leaders. Apparently, Americans first went to Germany for lessons. This “peaked in the early 1890s” (so presumably we are not going to hear about Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill), “but was in decline by 1900”. Jevons gets a mention for “the value of mathematical economic enquiry”. Nothing about his contemporary, Marshall, or for that matter, Edgeworth. We jump to the 1970s, and a nice quotation about a cartoon(!) on the cover of the magazine, Life(!), which showed a “wanted” sign, reading “ … a young man of submissive disposition … a reasonable amount of scholarship will not be a disqualification, but the chief requisite will be an obsequious and ingratiating behaviour towards millionaires and an ability to RAKE IN THE DOLLARS … no gentleman with a backbone need apply”. Well, that certainly is my impression of most modern economists, in the sense that they follow power. Apparently Thomas Carlyle said, “Of all the quacks that ever quacked, political economists are the loudest”. Good. Didn’t I say above that the only qualification needed to criticise economists was not to be one, or to be a retired one?
Galbraith is quoted as saying that economists eventually escaped from control by business, but only to leap into imposed conformity, “defining scientific excellence as whatever is closest in belief and method to the scholarly tendency of the people who are already there … a pervasive and oppressive thing .. both self-righteous and unconscious”. Of course. What else is peer-review for? Peer review exists in every discipline, but in subjects with a high fact-to-opinion ratio, there is a reality-check as well. And in physics or chemistry, the latter almost rules, the reviewer judging competence only.
There is then confused discussion of McCarthyite witch-hunting, tending towards sheltering in mathematical models, with protests at this tendency both by students and by pre-Samuelson oldies. One begins to have an impression here, which, come to think of it, is quite probably near the truth, that Redman is really inserting linking text between quotes assembled in her research notes.
This applies to a long quote about how Morgenstern was shunned by economics students when he first lectured in the beginnings of game theory. Redman rebounds from this to say that “since the sixties, quantification seems to have become a goal in itself”. Then very oddly, in a book issued in 1993, she says that “there is a dearth of information about economics as a profession since 1960”. Clearly, the important phrase here is “as a profession”, but I have no idea what exactly she might mean by that [added later - again the insertion of the qualifier “club-like” begins to make sense of it]. Surely a writer specialising in any aspect of the history of economics can hardly complain about a dearth of information on her subject over the previous third of a century! There follows a long quotation of fairly obvious comments on what an economist would tend to do to “obtain tenure”. One not-so-obvious remark, perhaps, is that compliant economists are self-selecting - the youngsters who feel in the least dissident leave and take up something else.
Redman quotes Leontief (the name is familiar - he is 1973 Nobel prizewinner, but I check that I have no further knowledge of him) as saying in 1982 that in his own experience, the training methods of economics departments resemble those for US marines.
The impression that Redman is merely linking together as best she can a disparate collection of quotes from her notebook is strongly reinforced by three lengthy citations on the stuffiness of Prussian universities, the last being a puzzling essay on the slender chance that the name “university” survived this reputation for stuffiness. “The seemingly simple act of calling the new institution the University of Berlin may have been one of history’s close calls”, it says solemnly. I check in the OED that the English use of “university” goes back for ever. The Petit Robert traces the French word to the Papal teaching institutions, Bologna, Paris and Oxford. What on earth has barbaric Prussia got to do with this?
24.6.2003
Redman says that “one is forced to conclude that external control of economics has been replaced by an equally pernicious internal control”. Of course.
There follows another puzzling citation from Redman’s notebook about the “fact” that the first lectures in England on economics “as late as 1669” (!) were based on Aristotle’s Economica. Puzzling because everyone knows that the Greek word meant something quite different from “economics” in its modern sense. Presumably this is why our more literate Victorian predecessors called the subject political economy, to stress that it was not about economy as then known, namely household economy.
This is the bridge which Redman uses to somehow turn to the place of women in economics, although what this has to do with Lakatos and Kuhn, etc., I do not know. Arthur Marshall takes the stage, cited from Keynes. He was, apparently all for women in his youth, but voted to keep them out in middle age. She then goes straight to the American scene, and says that the situation is hopeless for women there. Only 10% or fewer of economics PhDs go to women. The prominent and rare case of Joan Robinson gets a mention.
Redman then mentions, hardly more, two rather contradictory observations, that the foreign born are prominent, but “minorities” (what can she mean? - at a guess, black, certainly not Jewish) are “not visible”.
Next diversion (p164) - the proliferation of journals and papers. And a lack of scholarliness, whatever that means. At a guess, detachment, a look at the wider view, less navel-gazing.
Wow! An attack on Samuelson! Redman: “Economists are known for their shamelessness. Economics’ first American Nobel Laureate, Paul Samuelson, for instance, is simply shameless [oh! oh! oh!] when discussing his accomplishments”.
And what was this shameless behaviour? He asserted that “no one else” in Cambridge, Mass. (except himself) knew about Keynes’ General Theory for a year or more (presumably after publication). And he thought “there was reason to believe” that Keynes himself did not understand his own stuff until the mathematical models (due in part to Samuelson) came out.
Oh, I like this, but unfortunately I cannot share Redman’s apparent reverence for Keynes. Neither Keynes nor Samuelson had the faintest idea what a scientific assertion means. I suppose that proves that I too am shameless, maybe doubly shameless, in seeming to imply superiority to these luminaries, one of world class in his field (which was neither science nor economics, but debate), the other brilliant enough to bestride his field for decade after decade. Apart from the laugh raised by the pot calling the kettle black, both parts of Samuelson’s view as expressed seems quite credible to me.
Redman rounds off with a reminder that Marshall, according to Keynes, died unhappy that he had been an economist. He would have preferred to be a psychologist!!
She returns to the apparent mutual opposition of Popper and Schumpeter. pp 166-7
25.6.2003
I pause at this point to recall how varied an impression Redman gives. Right at the beginning of these note (9th October 2001 - oh mon dieu), I wrote:
“I doubt if Redman is going to get down to the basic problem of the lack of seriousness of economists, their satisfaction at grandstanding and pointscoring rather than with the attainment of truth. However, let’s see.”
In February 2002, my doubts fully confirmed by the first 104 pages, I wrote:
“I now close Redman’s book. Economics is largely nonsense, the philosophy of science is largely nonsense, and the attempt to apply the latter to the former just piles nonsense on nonsense. That is my opinion!”
At the very next entry, I wrote:
“However, not so fast.”
I had flicked forward and noticed one or two signs of cheeky dissidence, and decided it was worth while to continue. I must say that calling economists “shameless”, and Samuelson “simply shameless” goes beyond even the language that I would use (e.g., grandstanding, pointscoring).
Anyway, back to “the apparent mutual opposition of Popper and Schumpeter (p166).
Redman presents Schumpeter as saying that “sociological factors play a greater role in economics than in physics”. She says that this is “quite a controversial thesis”. Popper, on the other hand, is presented as “attempting to refute” this very thesis.
Her conclusion is that both are right “in a limited sense”, but both wrong “in a much more substantial way”! I await the explanation with anticipation. She says first (and merely states) that Popper was right (in the limited sense presumably) that “there is equal potential for the social and natural sciences to be objective”.
I read this with incredulity. In what, even limited, sense can you be equally objective about “does this bag of potatoes weigh more than that one?” and “is this woman more beautiful than that one?” OK, that last question is not exactly social science, but social science by definition requires the judgement of people on the behaviour, impulses and attitudes of other people. The sociologist of course recognises the need to try or to seem to be as objective as possible, but the natural scientist does not even need to try, unless one answer will get him a Nobel prize and the other will not. So for me, Schumpeter was not just unarguably right. He was stating the obvious.
When we come to the longish paragraph on why both are wrong, it turns out that Schumpeter is wrong because he “actually misses the point” that economists claim to be scientific and rational. And why was Popper substantively wrong? Because he did implicitly grasp this point, but “he does not develop it very well”.
Redman sums up (I think) this extremely confused thought-process with:
“Schumpeter’s description of the [economics] profession clearly shows [my italics] that this principle of scientific rationalism that Popper assumes binds all scientists is contravened.”
To my simple mind, this can only mean that Redman agrees with me that the view she attributes to Schumpeter was right, and the view she attributes to Popper was wrong, in every conceivable limited and substantive sense.
She ends the “short digression” with a statement that I flatly reject:
“The philosophy of science leads us to the admission that science rests ultimately on human decision.”
If so, then tant pis for the philosophy of science. Of course, at one level, the statement is a truism. Everything that human beings do is by definition done by human decision. But Redman is presumably not in the truism business, nor is she talking about everything, but about “science”. Throughout the book she has written as if science is whatever anyone cares to call science. If the philosophy of science goes on in that aimless way, does it matter what “admissions” it “leads us to”? If one distinguishes actual examples of those “human decisions” along the whole spectrum of activities whose own “activists” choose to label themselves as scientists of one sort or another, it is blatantly obvious that a corresponding spectrum of latitude or “room for manoeuvre” exists for these “human decisions”. In the established parts of the hard sciences, say physics and chemistry, the room for manoeuvre is nil. The bag of potatoes is definitively either heavier than 40kg or it is not. There is no open alternative to these two possibilities, and only one can be true. This is exactly the same as saying that physicists and chemists are unanimous. There are no dissidents. In a subject like biology the room for manoeuvre is, at a guess, a little more, but in medicine, when people begin to be the object of study, there must be a certain space for prolonged disagreement, and a certain “clublike” (as Redman would put it) tendency for the panjandrums of the club to impose social restraint on too much dissidence. In economics, the sky is the limit. The sociology of the club becomes a study in itself.
To me, all that is more or less obvious. But unlike the philosophers of science, I am looking at the world, both social and material, as it is, in all its variety, and not making the initial mistake, which makes everything thereafter wrong, of putting a huge range of disparate human activity under one name, “science”, just because any idiot who thinks it sounds good to call himself a scientist is free to do so.
And now (p167) we come to a section headed “Communis Opinio Doctorum”. Not sure what exactly that means, but maybe it will become clear [added later - it did not]. No doubt something to do with unanimity, or maybe “received opinion”.
I groan when she writes in her first sentence of the “pathological drawbacks of normal science”. This, of course, harks back to Kuhn, who gives the name “normal science” to what I and my pals used to call, quite proudly, “stamp collecting” - the humdrum and unclever filling-in of well-known gaps in current knowledge. Redman obviously looks down her nose at it, maybe led by Kuhn - I do not know about that. What the pathological drawbacks might have been, I also cannot begin to guess. This sort of view reeks of the study, a view of persons who have never done anything. It is rather as if one named, looked down on, and moaned about the “pathological aspects of”, “normal cooking” or “normal novel-writing”, and dismissed its practitioners as people working unquestioningly on the current paradigm, while the clever guys are busy questioning and at length changing the current paradigm for a new one.
Again, it seems quite evident to me that even to consider as being in the same logical category, a current paradigm in science, say Ohm’s Law, and a current paradigm in economics, say the merits of zero or low inflation, is simply to invite confusion and error from the beginning, since it is blatantly obvious that Ohm’s Law has resisted falsification for two centuries, whereas anything whatever about inflation and its consequences has never come within miles of being demonstrated to a hard science level, and in the nature of things, will never be so demonstrated. It rests on fashion, debate, persuasiveness, power, money, and so on. Redman actually has the cheek to describe one of the drawbacks of “normal economics” as the prevalence in that discipline of “technicianlike scientists”. She does not elaborate, but no doubt she means people like econometricians, who fill their papers with ever more elaborate correlation theories, while never, never, coming to any useful conclusion. Please, Ms Redman, such people may fill pages with abstruse-looking algebra, but they are not scientists. “Normal scientists” of the stamp-collecting variety are actually doing something, like carpenters.
Just as I was beginning to think that Redman was beginning to rant, running through a whole list of her attitudes and prejudices, I came across the phrase “I want to conclude on two optimistic notes”. Wow! I leafed forward, realised that a lot of well stocked pages ahead were in fact notes, leafed back, and found that the page I am on (p171) is in fact the last but one! Well, I feel that I have not yet dealt with “Lakatos and Kuhn”, the title of this last chapter, let alone come to any rounded view of “economics and the philosophy of science”, the title of the book, and here I am at the end of both. I cannot really recall this chapter dealing with Lakatos at all, although Kuhn has been at least mentioned, quite frequently. However, my main feeling is one of astonishment, that this book, which in my mind had gone on for ever and would keep on doing so, is in fact almost finished!
I calm down and prepare myself for the two optimistic notes.
The first one is that dissidence is not quite dead. She cites two “relatively unknown” researchers who showed that a government-friendly piece of analysis by a prominent academic contained an absurd error.
The second rests on a long quotation from Phyllis Deane. This is to the effect that economists should keep open minds, admit nothing is going to be very predictable, be fair, be modest, etc., etc.
God help economics, say I, if a close student can find only two optimistic notes, and they both turn out to be almost inaudible!
Economics and the Philosophy of Science, Deborah A. Redman, Oxford University Press, 1991
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract:
E O Wilson’s book "Consilience" is a notably unscientific plea for science to take over the so-called social sciences, from economics to psychology, and extend also into art and religion. The text rambles on, with exalted brilliance according to one reviewer, over this whole field, but the brilliance sheds no new light, and fails to explain exactly what consilience is, how it might be achieved, and what benefit would result if any of these subjects (for example, art) was connected back to genes, biology, chemistry and finally physics. It is not mentioned that such a connection to the "harder" sciences is in any case a pipedream.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. It has been said, fairly plausibly, that "Bayesian inference is one of the most
widely known eponyms in all of science". But unlike common scientific eponyms, it is
by no means clear exactly what "Bayesian" means, and what it has to do with Bayes.
"Bayesian", and the dozen or so words and phrases which are usually associated with
it, seem to be more like unspecific words of the English language, deployed by an
author as he wishes, rather than fixed technical terms. The obscurity of the language,
relative to the precise meanings associated with, say, Newton's laws or Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle, is matched by the obscurity of the history - the virtually unknown
Bayes, the posthumous paper, the impenetrable and incoherent style, the muddled
logic, the virtual silence on his work for 200 years, the sudden emergence in the last
several decades, not of new knowledge, but of new Bayesian additions to the
vocabulary. This note surveys the notions and the history. It concludes that the
Bayesian vocabulary is vague and pretentious, and serves no useful purpose.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract:
When Pigou vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. These reading notes follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Keynes was one of the most fluent and plausible rhetoricians of his age, and it could be argued that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to expose the total logical vacuum which in cold objective fact the General Theory is.
Keynes’ book was seemingly written at speed, contains no bibliography, virtually no mention of factual data, little evidence, pseudo-algebra only for appearances, no attempt at anything which could be called scientific method. His acknowledged greatness lay in his cleverness, and his great skill as a debater, negotiator, journalist, and politician, not at all in his ability or interest in searching out the truth. His “theory” is presented in terms of mechanistic cause-and-effect models of economic society, but quite demonstrably, these models are based on nothing but the repetitious re-statement of Keynes’s prior and evidence-free conviction that the cure for unemployment and recession is to stimulate spending, any spending, useful or useless, either by individuals or by governments. Keynes used every rhetorical trick imaginable to hide the empty centre of his work, from “as I shall show … ” onwards. His mainstay, as Pigou remarked, was a deliberate lack of precision and clarity. The great sociological mystery is - how did this transparently fact-free “theory” sweep everything before it?
Paper in HTML form
Abstract:
Wittgenstein and Russell both in their different ways showed that they believed that ultimately, there were better things to do with one’s life than study or talk about philosophy. Both were remarkable men. The words of both appear in the English translation of the Tractatus, Russell’s in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s book. This note comments on these words, almost one at a time. The lack of clarity, logic and coherence of both authors raises the puzzling question – in what does greatness lie? Is it in personality, debating skill, membership of a mutually admiring elite? This note discovers nothing of interest or importance in anything actually written between the covers of this book.
The note is essentially reading notes, as was my note on Keynes’ General Theory. I recall that when Keynes’ friend and rival, Pigou, vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. The notes below follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Pigou chose to challenge Keynes on the latter’s home ground, as a debater, a predictably hopeless task. For Wittgenstein, as for Keynes, I might argue that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to lay bare its lack of discipline, of coherence, of logical development, and of content.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract:
We all, including economics professors, statisticians and journalists, know just by looking around that our comfort and prosperity is determined by the plethora of objects produced by technical innovations over the millennia, centuries and decades. The earnings of billionaire investment managers may come from their “services”, but their prosperity is manifest in their possession of, or ability to buy, things which have been grown, cooked, mined, constructed, or manufactured. However, by some quirk of social psychology, those economics professors, statisticians and journalists (and no doubt bankers too) apparently believe, simultaneously, that things are not “important”. Agriculture has already been written off as “contributing only 2% of the economy”, and manufacturing is “declining” towards the same invisibility. Recently headlines appeared in the Financial Times and the Daily Mail that “business and financial services eclipse manufacturing” and “the City is supreme as factories fade away”. What was the source of those preposterous views? None other that our Office of National Statistics, whose own press release had been headlined in a similar way. As usual there was no response from any quarter, not even from the CBI Manufacturing Council, to point out that the ONS data had absolutely nothing to do with the only aspect of manufacturing that matters for national prosperity, namely physical output. This note suggests that the ONS should put its house in order. We need not only facts, but a balanced presentation, without attention-seeking headlines.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. The general view of the media, bankers, business and politicians, not noticeably contradicted by academics, is that one of the main functions, or the main function, of the central bank is to analyse the progress of the economy, and then to steer it with skilful judgement towards health and growth, by making decisions to change their base interest rate, with carefully chosen timing, amount and direction. The data presented here show that it is impossible to sustain this notion of skilful time-critical steering, or even that the central bank does in fact lead or determine the short term interest rates available to savers or business. The contrary proposition, that commercial short-term interest rates are in fact observed and followed by the central bank, is mathematically sustainable, and generally in accord with the observed facts.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract: Following on from the note entitled “The Function of the Central Bank” (see above), this note brings the data up to date. It will be re-issued at intervals. It will monitor the tendency of short-term interest rates, give the author's judgement on the likely movement of the central bank rate in the UK, US and EU zones, and enable the reader to make his own judgement. An addendum shows that by the normal standards of statistical testing (which by their nature must always fall short of proof), the 3-month bank rate leads the changes announced by the central banks in their base rates.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. The notion of de-industrialisation arises from the fact that industrial
employment, having risen rapidly, is now in equally rapid decline. This paper presents
the view that agriculture and industry together form, and have always formed, a
"primary" sector which from the beginning, because of its inherent capacity for
productivity gains, has progressively freed labour for non-productive work. The
"industrial" revolution was really a "primary sector" (in the above sense) revolution.
There is no new phenomenon of de-industrialisation, merely a speeding up of a process
of labour-freeing from the primary sector, whose ever decreasing work force produces ever increasing output.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. Economic theory is dominated by abstract structures. Underneath, there is no firm foundation. Above, there is a lack of rigorous confrontation with established fact. Basic theoretical concepts have no acknowledged definition. The apparatus of graphs, algebra and technical vocabulary are often vehicles for rhetoric rather than descriptions of truth. In this abstract world, it seems to be accepted without embarrassment that all opinions are possible, while adopting the style of science in delivering each conclusion as if it was a fact. The closest parallel is perhaps with theology, where also each practitioner presents his story as fact, but there are differing stories. This paper illustrates this theme, with particular reference to "deindustrialization".
It points out that it is tangible things which are the primary measure, literally the sine
qua non, of all material, cultural and intellectual progress. Official statistics necessarily
aggregate market transactions involving tangibles and intangibles at monetary
exchange values. However it is an error, in the sense of being a misperception leading
to wrong action, to mistake this equivalencing of things and non-things as more than a
necessary procedural fiction. In this system, one opera performance equals, say, 100
lorryloads of gravel, but the logical reality is that gravel is part of the primary
inventory, opera and all other intangibles are secondary or consequential. This
inversion of the important and the estimable lies behind the paradox of the
deindustrialization which is in process and the deagriculturalization which has already
run its course in some parts of the world - namely that our entire civilisation rests (and
logically and factually must always rest) on the output of this (in employment terms)
disappearing sector. Eventually, the sector which ultimately produces all value
will appear in the statistics as one which adds zero value in current terms.
Fortunately, the real word of affairs shows no sign of acting on this erroneous
perception. For those accustomed to see the world in abstractions, misperceptions still
seem to obscure the reality.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract: Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.
Paper in HTML form
WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL December 2002 Paper in pdf form
Abstract: The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic manufacturing must continually keep pace with gross domestic product, provided that the necessary "things" are not imported from elsewhere. However, many people are persuaded that domestic manufacturing is in terminal decline, and that the lost output is being replaced by imports from the developing world. Almost daily, one may read of manufacturing jobs being "exported" to the Far East. However, it is simply impossible to import goods without a more or less balancing volume of exports, and there is in reality limited scope for exporting a sufficient volume of services. Imports of goods must more or less be balanced by the export of domestically produced goods. How can a widespread perception of decline be reconciled with a reality of growth? The answer is that the "decline" which is perceived is a decline in employment in the industrial sector, but this decline is more than counterbalanced by the rise of productivity, so that the domestic output of goods by and large keeps pace with the growth of GDP. This note summarises the statistical evidence for the accuracy of this view. A substantial footnote discusses the role of journalists and academics in sustaining the perception of the decline of manufacturing.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. It seems rash even to raise the question in the title. The universal belief is
that the answer is and must be "yes". Yet factual evidence for this belief is curiously
lacking, maybe even felt to be unnecessary. This paper takes what is thought to be all
the, not very voluminous, post-war factual data which exists and which may bear on
the matter, and treats this data in every plausible way to find if any convincing
demonstration is possible that low inflation is associated with high long term growth
rate in GNP. This includes special attention to Germany, the country which is the
popular (and sole) paradigm among UK authorities and commentators. The paper
concludes that no such demonstration is possible.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that
low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In this note, he examines a
paper by R. J. Barro which tends to the opposing view. He suggests that the evidence
of this paper in fact reinforces his conclusion.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that
low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In a later note, he examined a
paper by R. J. Barro which tended to the opposing view, and suggested that the
evidence of that paper in fact reinforced his conclusion. In this note he comments on a
paper by W. R. J. Alexander, concluding that time series analysis, especially with
additional variables as in this paper, is unlikely to be able to contradict cross-section
results.
Paper in HTML form
Abstract. Politicians, journalists - commentators on economic matters generally - evolve a sort of quasi-stable rhetoric. They select two or three foreign countries with which they like to compare their own, either as models to be followed, or traps to be avoided. Other countries are rarely or never mentioned. They repeat over and over again mantras such as "we are the fourth largest economy in the world" in the UK, or variants of "the dot.com revolution" or "the new paradigm" in the USA. In arguments in the UK over the replacement of sterling by the Euro, it is almost a daily occurrence to hear growth in the UK contrasted with recession in Eurozone Germany. It appears likely that these stories emerge in part from appraisals of GDP expressed for the purpose of cross-country comparison in a currency unit (the Euro or dollar, say) calculated at the ruling rate of exchange. This calculation can be done instantly. It is "news". The more recent method of using purchasing power is much more complex and its results are published late. They are not "news", and do not affect the established rhetoric. Nevertheless, they are the truth, or as near to that as economic data can be, and often quite strikingly at variance with the current story.
Paper in HTML form
This is my own translation of a work which appears from the bibliography to have a significant English-speaking audience, but of which there seems to be no readily accessible English version.
English translation