critical rationalism blog

Some interesting discussion about anti-discrimination laws here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1375774

(The posts by xenophanes are me.)

Excerpt:

Fundamentally, it’s irrational to force people who disagree with you to do things your way if they don’t see why it’s best — to make them go against their best judgment (also irrational to deny they have best judgment, attribute their ideas to things other than thought, and so deny the disagreement exists at all, and forcibly override them on that basis). The only rational thing to do if you want a (B) style world is persuade people, which is not at all the same as campaigning for laws to force people.

What do you think? And what do you think Popper would have said about it?

Deduction is a bad idea which Popper accepted. The idea is that certain arguments are “deductively valid”. A valid argument is one such that if the premises are true then the conclusion MUST be true. Deduction thus has an anti-fallibilist character because it seeks certain knowledge about the implications of premises.

Deductivists believe that we can create valid arguments, and we can evaluate whether arguments are deductively valid or not. They believe philosophers accurately do this dozens of times in their life. Validity isn’t an impossible ideal but is within our grasp. This implies that violating fallibility can be done routinely.

Note: This is not an attack on logic in general. We can and do have conjectural knowledge of logic, the implications of premises, and so on.

Rafe discussed “Popper’s legacy in economics and the social sciences”.

The most important principle of this sort is that disagreements should be resolved rationally. That means we do not assume which idea is right, especially not based on attributes of its source, but instead seek the truth, and try to correct errors in the current ideas.

This principle underlies property (which disallows theft), capitalism (with its voluntary trade), libertarianism (that hates initiation of force), democracy (which uses political discussion and criticism to create agreement), and so on.

Popper made great contributions to the issue of what rationality is, and how to create knowledge rationally. He understood that reason is not about holding beliefs justifiably, but rather holding than fallibly: open to criticism and change. He spoke of letting ideas die in our place, and doing one’s best to improve rival ideas, and self-criticism, and how to help each other across frameworks. His work in this area is his biggest contribution to the social sciences, though not his only.

Natsuka Tokumaru is a doctoral student at Kyoto University in Japan. At the 2007 Rethinking Popper conference in Prague she delivered a paper titled “Popper’s analysis of the probems of induction and demarcation and Mises’ justification of the theoretical social sciences”. The proceedings of the conference have been published by Springer. Continue reading →

I will argue that the expansive claims that are made regarding the content of the essence of action, sometimes called the Action Axiom is not plausible. It is possible to dispute the claim on more or less commonsense grounds, and the same case has been made in a more scholarly manner by Barry Smith. The claim is central to the arguments mounted by Hans-Hermann Hoppe who is now the leading exponent of the strong from of  apriorism. Continue reading →

“The more fruitful debates on methods are always inspired by certain practical problems which confront the research worker; and nearly all debates on methods which are not so inspired are characterized by that atmosphere of futile subtlety which has brought methodology into disrepute with the practical research worker”. The Poverty of Historicism, page 57.

Actually there are two topics in this post, one regarding the effort that has been expended to little advantage in the methodology of economics since the field became a growth area in the 1970s. The second topic is the question of Popper’s grasp on the nuts and bolts of economics.

Continue reading →

In 1972 Jeremy Shearmur reminded me to be alert to the difference between falsifiability and falsification. He was Popper’s research assistant at the time so he was well placed to offer this kind of advice. Unfortunately I did not take it on board, being obsessed with the bigger picture of Popper’s ideas and what they could do for problem-solving of all kinds, from the theory of literature to the integration of the human sciences and humanitarian social reforms. Continue reading →

A few years ago I joined a group of economists on a blog  called Oysterium. We never met, it was all done in cyberspace and then after a year or two the other contributors faded away (nobody ever said why) and I was left as the sole active contributor until I faded away as well, to a couple of other blogs.

This is the list of my posts on Oysterium.

Most of my blogging was on Catallaxy. Most if not all of the archives were lost in a server crash, though my son has retrieved many of my posts they are not in a form that I can put on line at present. 

So the following links indicate the contents of each post but the links to individual posts are dead. This is the list of posts for 04-05, for  2006, and  for 2007 .

The list for 2009 and 201o is yet to be collated.

This is the record for Club Troppo. Because I dropped off the list of contribors for a time, the name of another contributor was assigned to my posts, so they appear with the name Tony Harris!

The most immediate task, quickly becoming urgent, is to finish a paper for a Rothbard edition of an Italian journal. The papers will address the theme of Rothbard’s development of Austrian economics. Papers need to be submitted in June and if accepted they will be translated into Italian.

Sometimes papers come together smoothly but usually they do not. That is why my convergence of Mises, Parsons and Popper paper has hardly progrssed in a long time.  But this year…!! Assisted by several months of long leave.

The Abstract

This paper argues that the best way to develop the economics of von Mises is along the lines of Smith’s  “fallible apriorism” rather than the strong program of apriorism advocated by Rothbard. This position is supported by Popper’s epistemology which can also be descried as conjectural (fallible) apriorism.

Smith presented his views as a part of the “Aristotelian” framework that he detected in Menger’s work. This framework is practically identical to the “metaphysical research program” that Popper developed in dialogue with the physicists.

One outcome of the Popper/Smith program is a form of  methodological monism that supports the main lines of the program of Carl Menger and his followers in political economy and the social sciences (and classical liberalism).