Method or madness? · Rebel Economist (Free)

Method or madness?

I think it was the economist Romer who said that orthodox economics is methodologically unself-aware.

Steve’s lectures on methodology are therefore particularly relevant. I knew that Karl Popper, as Steve explained, didn’t properly describe the methods of science.

But I didn’t know some things that I subsequently saw in Wikipedia’s page on Popper - that he was a firm opponent of those alternative routes to knowledge (variants of epistemology, the theory of knowledge) that were not based on empirical testing. He argued for falsification-through-test rather than confirmation-by-selective-observation that characterised the inductivist method of classical science.

I therefore also read Wikipedia’s voluminous page on epistemology, which says -

“Epistemology explores how people should acquire beliefs.”.

I was surprised by how many different variants of that ‘how’ the page goes on to describe, such as ‘justification’, ‘rationality’, ‘contextualism’, ’skepticism’, ‘internalism, ‘externalism’ and ‘empiricism’ among others.

Later it says -

According to the correspondence theory of truth, to be true means to stand in the right relation to the world by accurately describing what it is like. This means that truth is objective: a belief is true if it corresponds to a fact.” and then

“The coherence theory of truth says that a belief is true if it belongs to a coherent system of beliefs. A result of this view is that truth is relative since it depends on other beliefs.”.

So ideas that are coherent can - in the ‘coherence’ definition- be seen as true even if they don’t correspond to reality.. I confess to shock at just how much of a ‘loose-fit’ to reality some of these methodologies about knowledge allow themselves to be. I guess science may have made me naive, in the sense that C P Snow was on about …

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Method or madness?