Author Archives: Rafe

Deirdre McCloskey on Popper and rhetoric

Deirdre McCloskey is a passionate advocate of rhetoric in economics as opposed to “big M” Methodology. She is a well-qualified and hugely published economist with a current project to produce several fat volumes of history and rhetoric to demonstrate the … Continue reading

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A nice site

This is a very attractive and informative site, has it been around for long, I may have seen it and forgotten about it.

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A Popper Prize in Western Australia

Out of the blue, or at least from the western edge of the known world, a Popper Prize at the University of WA.  Who is John Saunders? Thanks to David Miller for the feed.

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Literature from the Antipodes

Troy Camplin points to the productivity of writers from Australia and New Zealand.

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Mark Blaug – would-be but not really Popperian

 On line. Not only an economist – autobiographical reflections of a historian of economic  thought. Mark Blaug probably did more than any other single person to make the philosophy and methodology of economics a growth area during the 1980s. The … Continue reading

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Extracts from The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Mostly from the beginning. Preliminary comments. Something very strange has happened to the thoughts of Popper. For some time he was mostly described as an eccentric contributor to the Received (positivist) View of the philosophy of science. So Popperian falsificationism … Continue reading

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Another Popper resource

Created by an Australian who recently died in the US. Interesting but somewhat eccentric. A few years ago I tried to make contact but did not suceed.

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Popper on scientific method

Popper wrote a 1956 Preface for The Postscript to The Logic of Scientitic Discovery: After Twentyfive Years. This appeared after almost 50 years in Realism and the Aim of Science (1983). The Preface is the text of a talk titled “On the … Continue reading

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Popper and Economic Methodology

REVIEW OF Thomas A Boylan and Paschal F O’Gorman (eds) “Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges” Routledge, 2008. In recent decades the philosophy and methodology of economics has become a thriving academic industry. Ten years ago Wade Hands noted that … Continue reading

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Kuhn’s ashtray

A strange story, claiming that Kuhn threw an ashtray at a grad student, then threw him out of the course. I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably … Continue reading

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