critical rationalism blog

This is a 1400 word summary and go here for a more extended account of the main arguments and evidence. 

Summary of Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, Macmillan, 1996. pb, 380 pages.

The take-home message from this book is that governments should pull back from their dominant position in funding and from trying to direct research and development. The historical record indicates that wealth-generating technology is mainly developed on site, not in academic research laboratories and private enterprise can supply most if not all of the funds required for both pure and applied research.

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Playing around with the idea of a Preface or maybe an addendum to attach to several essays in the Rathouse that were written years ago. The idea is to give a sense of the bigger picture of Popper’s ideas before people read about the particular topic of the essay.

This is the way it shapes up at present.

Preface 2010

Popper’s Conjectural, Objectivist, Social, and Metaphysical Turns

Since this essay was first written it has become apparent that the reception of Popper’s ideas has been limited by widespread misconceptions that readers bring with them to the texts. This applies especially to people with a background in philosophy. It is widely accepted that Popper was a kind of eccentric positivist who simply substituted falsification for verification, and distorted versions of his ideas are circulated with the label “falsiciationism” attached. Quite likely one of the most influential books in this regard is What is this thing called science? and I trust that this review of that otherwise admirable text will clarify the situation.

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Updating, this is the original Page of Rafe Champion. It is free of charge but it became colonised by advertising popups and that plus other limitations helped to prompt the change of site.

More additional stuff below the original post.

My late wife, the author and artist Kilmeny Niland set up a website on Homestead in September 2002 to display my work on Popper, Bartley and Hayek. An earlier site at Fortune City was too clunky and limited in the colours, fonts and other features for her liking. We called it The Rathouse, an irreverent Australian tribute to the Rathaus, the Great Hall of Vienna which was one of the venues for the Popper Centenary Conference earlier that year.

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Responding to a comment from Lee Kelly, picking up some loose thoughts that I put out about Hayek and Popper. My initial response was to say that I got it wrong and more work is required.

Although Hayek opposed the state monopolisation and regulation of money, when confronting the reality of those institutions he gave pragmatic policy prescriptions. In particular, he seems to have favoured some type of nominal income target as a rule for monetary policy — not unlike Friedman in later life.

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Mario Rizzo made a passionate appeal to Austrians and friends of classical liberalism to rally at the barricades. He mentioned the need to stand with allies.

“I venture the prediction that they will fare much better this time – especially if we close ranks with those of a similar mindset. There are many more Austrian economists now. In the thirties and forties the profession had become depleted of Austrians.”

In this post I want to signal some of the wider program that classical liberals need to pursue, outside our strongholds in philosophy and political economy. I don’t mean that the philosophers and political economists are all rabid classical liberals, I just mean that this is where our principles have been most clearly articulated.

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This is a draft for some thoughts to put on the Austrians email list.

The uneasy relationship between Popper and von Mises has persisted with many of  their followers. Most Popperians are social democrats and many Misesians detest Popper’s epistemology and methods (in addition to his social democratic tendencies).

There are striking exceptions to that pattern such as the late Bill Bartley and Gerard Radnitzky and contemporaries such as Jack Birner, Larry Boland, Bruce Caldwell and Pete Klein. However I see hardly any citations of Larry’s work, or Jack’s in the Austrian literature on philosophy and methods, which is where their work is outstanding IMHO.

What Popper offers the Austrians.

1. Fallible or conjectural apriorism, supporting Barry Smith who is very much at home in the Austrian literature.  (That reminds me, someone should nominate Barry for the CR Scholar award). This has the potential to focus the energies of Austrians on economics rather than philosophy and also to mount a challenge to other economists to bring their methods into line with the real methods of the natural sciences instead of the distorted version put about by the positivists and logical empiricists.

2. Support for the Weber/Austrian approach – the action framework (Parsons), situational analysis (Popper), praxeology (von Mises) with methodological individualism, subjectivism etc.

Boettke et al have signalled that economics is finding its way back to the big picture approach of Adam Smith and the political economists and moral philosophers who paid some attention to institutions and cognate influences. How did economics lose its way? At least Popper pointed in the right direction (even though e thought that methematical economics was going to pay off!). The institutional focus is explicit in the concluding sections 31 and 32 of The Poverty of Historicism and it is unhelpful that philosophers of economics have written so much criticism of Popper’s “falsificationism”, that distorted version of Popperism, without coming to grips with the book where he specifically addressed the social sciences. He hardly published anything on that topic after 1945 but he did draw a comparison between institutions and traditions in one of the Conjectures essays. The suggestion of the institutional turn in Poverty are very compacted, so sections 19, 20 and 20 should be read, followed by 30 and 31. People working in the relevant fields should not need more than those hints to get the message. Lately Ian Jarvie has traced the social/institutional turn in Popper’s thought from the very first published works, and this calls for a complete re-reading of Popper, to take account of the various “turns” that he initiated.

3. The theory of metaphysical research programs (MRPs) and some of the metaphysical theories which underpin Austrian economics. That paper “Austrian Economics as a Popperian MRP” makes three points.

First, the theory of MRPs shows that the Austrian program cannot be dismissed as “unscientific” quite as easily as many critics suppose.   The theory of MRPs legitimates the use of untestable principles to provide the framework for a research program. The basic principles of Austrian economics can be regarded as working assumptions, either methodological or metaphysical postulates, of the kind that occur in all sciences. These need to stand up to criticism but they do not have to be testable or falsifiable.

4. Support for classical liberalism  (limited government under the rule of law)

A general statement of liberal principles (a Mont Pelerin address)

On leadership, chapter 7 of The Open Society and its Enemies.

On justice, chapter 6 of The Open Society.

On Misesian piecemeal social engineering.

On essentialism and the organic state.

At the Vienna Conference in 2002 I talked about Austrian economics as a Popperian Metaphysical Research Program. The paper that emerged from the notes for that talk was not accepted in the published proceedings due to an adverse referee’s report and it is on line in the Rathouse. There three points:

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This is the transcript of a science show program about Popper on ABC (public) radio, run by an Oxbridge-trained philosopher. There is archival material from the likes of Eccles and more recent contributions from Malachi Hacohen, Jeremy Shearmur and others.

In other contexts he has been rather scathing about Popper’s work on induction and at one stage he wrote that it was amusing to see that Popper was receding from visibility in the profession while the major Popper websites were run by amateur enthusiasts.