For those who did not pursue the links in the Larry Boland CR Scholar post, you missed a treat in the anthropological study of the economists. A sample: Continue reading
This is a response to a post that was made last May in this blog by Elliot and can be found here. I’m making this a post as opposed to a comment in an attempt to renew interest in this topic. I did make some comments on the original post, and while I don’t disagree with what I stated there, I don’t think I directly addressed the issues raised, I will do so now.
Any criticism of my own view would, of course, be welcome.
This is lifted from a paper on Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge, prepared for a short radio talk. The paper started with the four-stage problem-solving schema P -> TS -> EE -> new P and there were four aims. Continue reading
The GMU Program is a label that I used for a line of research that links theory and practice in the appropriate manner. It comes from the work that is done by a mix of Austrians, quasi-Austrians and fellow travellers at the George Mason University, though it is also proceeding at other places, so it is a bit unfair to call it GMU.
Thanks to the Wall Street Journal, Peter Boettke has become the most visible GMU person right now, and this has triggered some angst in other parts of the Austrian empire. I don’t want to puruse that (nothing new there), instead I want to compare the GMU program with another line of work described and promoted by a really brilliant and ambitious scholar named Jeffrey C Alexander. Continue reading
This is a summary of a really helpful paper which introduced the idea of problem-solving as a feature of effective thinking and learning. The paper was in a collection of papers that I bought from the remaindered books table in the Uni of Tasmania bookroom circa 1966.
How and Why Do We Learn including ‘Learning to Think” by W D Wall. I still have a faded filing card with the main points that I took out of this paper. The key point was to adopt a problem-solving approach. Continue reading
Joe Agassi (1927 – ) is one of several first generation Popperians who served an apprenticeship as Popper’s research assistant. He has a huge record of publications and he deserves a special mention for his work on metaphysics which turned up in Popper’s writing as the theory of metaphysical research programs.
This is a nice gloss on Agassi and Popper.
He shares a website and other things with his better half, the gracious Judith Buber Agassi, daughter of the remarkable Margarete Buber-Neumann.
Their house is full of books and music, with a steady stream of interesting visitors and an atmosphere of good humour and good will.
Larry Boland, like Ian Jarvie, patrols the ramparts of critical rationalism in that great outpost of the empire next to Alaksa. On a good day he can probably see Sarah Palin. He comes to the club by courtesy of a course with Joe Agassi and he has made his way in the bleak and dismal lands of the Econ.
He has a huge track record of quality publications in the field.
I am pleased to count him as a friend after we met on the Hayek list (probably) and later on face to face in Vienna and Sydney.
Amazon has added permalinks and also the opportunity for comments on reviews. A couple of people have responded to a comment that I posted on a review of a book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. These are the three comments. This is the book with the reviews at the bottom.
I have inserted a link to my paper on fallible apriorism. I have sent it to Barry Smith and he replied that it looks OK to him.
Taking up Tony Lloyd’s comment on Ryle’s review of The Open Society and its Enemies, and the hint that there were juicy anti-Wittgenstein notes. One of Wittgenstein’s followers, Rush Rhees, was so angry with Ryle’s review that he sat down and produced a hot and hasty diatribe against Popper and his book. I have it in my filing cabinet, it first appeared in the journal where Ryle placed his review (probably Mind) and it is reprinted in a book of Rhees essays. This was a gross over-reaction because I recall next to no criticism of Wittgenstein apart from the note that I recycled, there may have been other comments but they were not the point of the book as a whole. Continue reading
O’Hear wrote a book called Karl Popper (1980) in The Arguments of the Philosophers Series. He argued that we cannot do without both justification and induction. Since that time he has been immune to the counter-arguments of non-justificationists. The following extracts come from O’Hear’s 1989 book on the philosophy of science that Papineau cited for follow-up reading as a rejoinder to the first two chapters of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Continue reading
