Are the laws of physics mere social conventions? No, they are social conventions.
Mere? So much confusion has been caused by one seemingly innocuous adjective.
A commenter named Jian asked me this question after my previous post:
Your point about the arbitrariness of CPI is well taken, but if you were really serious about physical laws being social constructions, I’ll quote Alan Sokal: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”
I am very serious. As I indicated in an earlier post, my views of “reality” are similar to those of Richard Rorty. He takes a pragmatic view of things. There is no difference between subjective opinions and objective reality, or at least no difference that is discernible to humans. But many people wrongly infer that this means that human knowledge is useless, simply because there is no such thing as objective truth. Rorty says that the real question is not whether some belief is “true,” but rather whether it is useful. The laws of physics tell us not to jump out of windows in tall building, and hence they are useful. That is all we can really say. But haven’t they been “proven” to be true? Let’s take a quick look at the history of one of the most important parts of physics, astronomy.
1. Assume that the early cavemen regarded the stars and planets as mere pinpricks of light, and had no theory of planetary motion.
2. Gradually the ancient civilizations paid more and more attention to apparent planetary motion, and through observation and theorizing they developed models such as the Ptolemaic system, with all it orbits and epicycles.
3. Copernicus argued that the planets revolved around the sun in circular orbits. In school we are taught that Copernicus was right and the ancients were wrong. Copernicus had the “true model.” But did he? Kepler showed the he was wrong. So why is Copernicus right and the Ptolemaics wrong? You might say that his model more accurately described the Solar System than the Ptolemaic model. But one could equally say that the Ptolemaic model more accurately described the Solar System than the caveman model. So is it true? Or is it partly true? I think Rorty would say that the Ptolemaic system is more useful than what preceded it, and the same is true for the Copernican system.
4. Then Kepler came along and showed that orbits were actually ellipses, and Newton expanded Kepler’s findings into a complete model of reality. Now we had finally arrived at objective truth. There’s just one problem, Newton’s theories are wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but they completely fail to provide a correct model of reality, or rather reality as we now understand it. Gravity isn’t a force that operates in flat space, but rather actually reflects the curvature of space. This is a radically different vision of reality.
5. OK, but at least Einstein got things right. Now we know the ultimate reality of the universe. I doubt it. Anyone who reads any cutting-edge physics, either at the smallest quantum level, or the largest cosmological level, comes away with the feeling that we have only scratched the surface of reality.
What we are doing in physics is constructing models that can predict, and that therefore are very useful. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we are doing any more than that. This doesn’t mean that prediction is the only way to test a new model. In earlier posts I argued that the more elegant model often proved superior in the long run, and thus by induction we can infer that this might be true of future models as well.
The problem with debates over objective and subjective beliefs is that we have no God-like entity to referee the debates. So all we can do is muddle through on our own. Science can make a lot of neat predictions, and hence is very useful, but only for our purposes. The way I like to think about these issues is to imagine a cat taking a nap on top of a big old boxy TV set. Does the cat know what he is sleeping on? She thinks she does. She thinks she knows that it is a 3 foot cube with a hard surface that gets a bit warm when noise and flickering light are emitted.
Now ask yourself this question: If the nature of the TV’s interior was explained to the cat, would it even be smart enough to understand what it was told? I doubt it. (Even many people would have difficulty understanding a cathode ray tube even if you explained it to them.) So what makes us think we are doing anything more than the cat, anything more than predicting things that are useful to us? Consider these two questions:
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
2. What is consciousness, and why does it feel this way?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d be smart enough to understand the answer to either question even if some extra-terrestrial showed up and explained it all. I cannot even envision a possible answer to either question. So in terms of “‘reality” I just assume that humans are like cats napping on a TV set. I’m not suggesting that “reality might be like the Matrix, man.” Or a big computer game. Or The Truman Show. That’s child’s play, I actually can imagine all those things. But of course they don’t at all answer the two questions I just posed.
Now let’s look at the term “mere,” why does Sokal think knowledge would be unimportant just because it represents things we believe to be true? Because he is thinking about it in the wrong way—in a sort of “well that’s YOUR opinion” context, which children will use while debating each other. But we should have outgrown that by now. And to show why, I’d like to turn to the field of ethics.
The scientific community is full of people who think religion is bunk and the humanities are not providing “real knowledge,” but rather just some light diversions to keep us entertained. OK, so then where does ethics come from? I suppose scientists might say it develops through evolution (evolutionary psych) or they might attribute it to the forces of culture (a mere social convention.) But even evolutionary psychologists like Stephen Pinker say that just because we (men) have evolved to think a certain way about violence and rape, doesn’t make it right. And most people would also say that merely because a culture is bigoted against a minority group, doesn’t make it right. So where do our moral intuitions come from? Science is unable to answer that question in a way that doesn’t sound like we are describing morals as “mere social conventions.”
So when the Alan Sokal’s of the world sneer at those who think Newton’s laws of physics are mere social conventions, I could sneer back at those in the scientific community by asking whether they regard our abhorrence at genocide as a “mere social convention.” So how do we resolve this? One way is through religion. Perhaps religion provides objective truth about ethics. But my solution is to meet the problem head on, and admit that everything we believe in both science and ethics is a social convention. Instead, let’s contest Sokal’s use of the term “mere.”
Our views of ethics have been refined over millenia. They probably reflect a complex combination of innate moral intuitions, culture, and reason. Very wise people have wrestled with these issues and gradually convinced the rest of us that we should no longer view slavery and wars of aggression as a “good thing.” This is not a mere social convention, our laws of morality are one of the most important achievements of our civilization. And so are our laws of science.
A lot of scientists suggest that it is immature to rely on religion as a crutch. I won’t take sides in this dispute. But if being grown-up is realizing that we have no one to fall back on but ourselves, then in what sense can we say there is a distinction between what we believe to be true (i.e. what predicts pretty well) and what is objectively true? Who will tell us when we are wrong?
So what about inflation? Does the CPI measure the “true” rate of inflation? What kind of question is that? Tell me what you want to use the CPI for, and then we can starting working out how useful it is. For instance the CPI that keeps old people on Social Security at the same utility will be very different from a CPI based on hedonics, which will be very different from a CPI useful in the Fisher equation, which will be very different from the CPI that if targeted by the Fed would best stabilize the economy.
PS. Sokal is famous for a hoax where he tricked a humanities journal into publishing drivel. He argued that this showed how post-modernism was actually a sort of fraud. If true, good for him. I haven’t read much post-modernism other than Rorty and a few bits of French pomo. Perhaps much of the stuff in those journals is useless. But his argument against Rorty’s philosophy isn’t at all impressive.
PPS. I’d like to thank 3 philosophers for very fruitful discussions; Lorne Smith, Richard Garrett, and Joel Lidz. But they shouldn’t be blamed for this post, as they’d disagree with almost everything I said here.
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2. August 2009 at 18:00
You are right that physics is “useful” rather than “true”. But you are wrong to not distinguish “objective reality” from “subjective opinions”. The latter can be improved with faith: the more you believe in something, the stronger your opinion about the matter. That’s not the case for objective reality. It isn’t _merely_ a matter of (personal) opinion.
As Philip K. Dick once said: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Also, for your two questions, I think you should be less confident that you would be unable to understand the answer, were someone to present it to you. Especially given that you have no idea what the answers might be. The dark is always mysterious, until someone lights a candle.
(In particular, the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science have a lot to say about consciousness. If you haven’t been educated in these fields, you should be more cautious about claiming that it is not possible to explain it to you.)
2. August 2009 at 18:44
I agree with you if you are saying that “true” and “useful” are the same, but your astronomy example is silly. You are only showing that physical laws don’t have infinite precision. I don’t see why you can’t call an approximation true. Do you think the error bars really have such grand philosophical import?
What we are doing in physics is constructing models that can predict, and that therefore are very useful. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we are doing any more than that.
I don’t see how constructing a good model is anything “less” than perceiving an objective fact.
2. August 2009 at 18:56
I hate to be one of those guys that say “you should really read such and such” but I do think you’d find Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue an interesting read. And no, he’s not some obscure crackpot, but in fact a well-known philsopher (at least as well-known as a philosopher can get nowadays).
As a very brief synopsis, he follows the direction of the social convention side of ethics, but his primary aim is to critique the ethics of classical liberalism that started with the Enlightenment. He argues that the Englightenment project to come up with a logical set of ethical rules from universal axioms is a failed one, and merely ended up stitching together bits and pieces of ethics from richer cultural traditions in an incoherent way. He thinks that this incoherent construct of ethical ideas stripped from their broader cultural contexts is the cause of much moral confusion in the present day.
2. August 2009 at 18:59
It’s not a good sign when so many economists endorse a vulgar version of Rortyism. Relativism of this kind is an inevitable consequence of an academic careers steeped in the fake science dictates of the positivism picture of science, the fake science picture of science imposed on the economics profession by Friedman, Lipset, Samuelson and the econometricians — and those who forced this picture on their grad students and anyone who wanted to get published in the peer reviewed economics journals.
One reason economists have produced so much fake science is because they believe in a fake picture of science “” and of course Rorty-relativism is just the flip side of fake science positivism.
See the many papers and books by F. A. Hayek on this topic, esp. where Hayek explains how historicism /relativism of the German historicist economists and the American institutionalist is simply the flip side of the coin of positivism. Mises also has some good papers and books on this topic.
Positivism of the kind you find in Friedman, Lipset, Samuelson, the econometricians ALLOWS leads to relativism “” they come together as a philosophical team.
2. August 2009 at 19:00
Do scientists (or money/macro-economists) need to believe they’re talking about real things (and not just social conventions)? If you know something is not real, it is harder to get into heated debates about it. If heated debates produce useful knowledge, then it may be a bad idea for people to appreciate what you’re saying.
2. August 2009 at 19:07
I should also say that it’s not an accident that Rorty was a socialist first — and a relativist second.
Relativism is the way that leftist have always avoided addressing the unavoidable facts of like — the “facts of the social science” esp. as identified by Hayek in his many books and papers.
Socialists NEED relativism — it’s the core of the constant appeal to the genetic fallacy to dodge the devastating facts lined up against them by scientists like Hayek.
2. August 2009 at 19:08
I should also say that it’s not an accident that Rorty was a socialist first “” and a relativist second.
Relativism is the way that leftist have always avoided addressing the unavoidable facts of life “” the “facts of the social science” esp. as identified by Hayek in his many books and papers.
Socialists NEED relativism “” it’s the core of the constant appeal to the genetic fallacy to dodge the devastating facts lined up against them by scientists like Hayek.
2. August 2009 at 20:23
could sneer back at those in the scientific community by asking whether they regard our abhorrence at genocide as a “mere social convention.”
Yes, in fact that is what I believe. Normative statements have no truth value, they do not pay rent. Brian Green has a paper on the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality that was discussed at Less Wrong a little while back.
I don’t buy into Austrianism, most importantly for their position on evidence/positivism, but if you want papers expounding Greg’s points on the Scylla of people who are too X vs the Charybdis of people who aren’t X enough (relative to the correct middle ground held by Murray Rothbard) you can read The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics. Pete Boettke is less combative than Rothbard and a chastened former proponent of hermeneutics by way of Don Lavoie, but has pushed a similar narrative. I can’t remember the name of the paper though.
2. August 2009 at 20:39
Groan.
OK, let’s ignore using ethics as any sort of analogy for science. Ethics is about human purposes and how we can manage together. This is rather different from experiencing the world: as Hume famously pointed out, one cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
There’s just one problem, Newton’s theories are wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but they completely fail to provide a correct model of reality, or rather reality as we now understand it. Gravity isn’t a force that operates in flat space, but rather actually reflects the curvature of space. This is a radically different vision of reality.
No, actually, Newton’s theories provide a rather good model of reality except for the very small and the very large. Like most relativism, what you are pushing rests on putting up some sort of strawperson of “truth” as perfect, certain, complete objectivity. If we accept the reality of error, uncertainty, partial truth, partial understanding, etc a lot of the “problem” various sorts of relativism seek to solve go away.
is that we have no God-like entity to referee the debates. So all we can do is muddle through on our own.
Which is precisely what we do not do: that is the breakthrough of science, it gives us a mode of learning which genuinely provides better and better answers. Of testing our theories against reality.
That we experience reality subjectively, including from particular points of view, does not mean all is subjective or that subjectivity is all we have. Kipling’s “unforgiving minutes” is a good poetic rendition of the brute reality of that. Sokal’s point remains a fair one.
2. August 2009 at 20:59
While I am at, and I know you meant ‘model’ in a more general sense, but let me spruik my post on the problems with computer models (concentrating on finance, economics and climate models).
3. August 2009 at 03:19
I find it entirely misleading when anyone calls Newton’s laws “wrong”, as if one is trying to justify their philosophical inclinations post hoc. “Incomplete” is, to me, the more accurate description. To consider science a social construct for these types of reasons is not satisfying because it assumes that science can only be reality if it is absolutely complete – an unrealistic standard (that will almost certainly never be acheived.) There will always be discoveries, additions, paradigm shifts – these do not invariably lead one to conclude that previous science was “wrong” – only in (eternal) need of elucidation. And as the marginal elucidation of reality for each addition becomes increasingly small over time, the only pragmatic conclusion, to me, is that science may as well be reality – the postmodern word games become background noise.
3. August 2009 at 03:42
Don Geddis, I have read some of the stuff in consciousness theory, and I do not think it has anything to do with my question. it may be because we understand external things by comparing them to conscious experiences. But with consciousness there is nothing to compare to except itself.
Most metaphors come up short. So someone might say that thoughts are like a little theatre inside the head, but then who’s watching the play?
Beliefs are beliefs, we can argue some are more or less useful, but we have no objective way to distinguish between objective and subjective beliefs.
greenish, First of all, the people in philosophy who disagree with me, who think there is objective truth, consider the Ptolemaic system to be “false.” You are arguing that anything that has some correlation with reality, enough to allow some crude predictions, is true? OK, but that is a very different definition than most people use.
What about a theory that is wildly off base, but leads to predictions that are right 55% of the time? Is it true?
David, I have heard of MacIntyre, but I haven’t studied him, or indeed much philosophy at all. I do agree that the enlightenment project to deduce ethics using logic is flawed, if that is what they were doing. But again, this isn’t my area. All I feel confident in saying is that scientists have not come up with an “objective” ethics.
Greg, What does Rorty have to do with relativism and positivism? Rorty would say that good economics is useful economics, he doesn’t favor any particular methodology, or alternatively “he has no dog in that fight.” He is very clear on that point, he says it is not for philosophers to tell economists what methodology to use. Indeed I think he would be quite critical of Friedman’s dogmatic essay on methodology. Certainly Rorty’s followers in econ (like Deirdre McCloskey) are critical of that essay.
pushmedia1, I think objects are real in the only sense in which we are capable of even discussing the issue, which is prediction. The sidewalk seems real because if we fall out the window it hurts. Do scientists need to believe in “reality.” I don’t see why. Some people don’t believe in free will, and yet go through life making exactly the same sorts of decisions as those who do believe in free will. And some people don’t believe in religion, and yet display the same sort of ethical intuitions as those who do believe in religion. So if we applied to ethics the analogous question to what you are asking about physics, it would be “Do people have to believe something is objectively wrong, in order to believe it is wrong?” Obviously not.
Greg, I don’t consider Rorty a socialist at all. Indeed many on the left didn’t like Rorty because he wasn’t a socialist, he was a liberal. (At least in the mature stage of his career, I have no idea what he believed when he was young.)
TGGP, I don’t believe our ethical views are “mere social conventions” rather I believe they are “social conventions.” Thanks for the tips on philosophy.
I think normative beliefs do have embedded predictions. Putting aside religion, (the after-life is a sort of prediction) there are still implied predictions in ethics. A novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, might be written with at least the hope that people who read it will come to feel differently about slavery, and also a prediction that if they act on those new beliefs, they will feel better about society. Our moral views are not a given, they are shaped by moral arguments. Our complex society is built up of 50% scientific advancements and 50% ethical advancements. It is all a seamless whole.
Lorenzo, Even a guy as smart as Hume was wrong once and a while.
You said:
No, actually, Newton’s theories provide a rather good model of reality except for the very small and the very large. Like most relativism, what you are pushing rests on putting up some sort of strawperson of “truth” as perfect, certain, complete objectivity. If we accept the reality of error, uncertainty, partial truth, partial understanding, etc a lot of the “problem” various sorts of relativism seek to solve go away.
I don’t get what you are saying here. Suppose predictions of orbits with Newton’s laws are 99.7% accurate, and predictions with the Ptolemaic system are 97.2% accurate. Are you saying one is objectively true and the other isn’t? Or that both are true? Or that one is truer? I think of something as being objectively true if it would exist even if no life had ever existed in the entire history of the universe. Do you think a theory that is not even completely correct would have existed had it not been created by intelligent life? That makes no sense to me at all, but maybe I am missing your argument.
I said:
“is that we have no God-like entity to referee the debates. So all we can do is muddle through on our own.”
You replied:
“Which is precisely what we do not do: that is the breakthrough of science, it gives us a mode of learning which genuinely provides better and better answers. Of testing our theories against reality.
That we experience reality subjectively, including from particular points of view, does not mean all is subjective or that subjectivity is all we have. Kipling’s “unforgiving minutes” is a good poetic rendition of the brute reality of that. Sokal’s point remains a fair one.”
We are not testing our theories against reality, because we have no way of knowing how well they mirror reality other than by prediction. We simply assume that if it predicts well it must mirror reality. Well the Ptolemaic system predicted very well from the vantage point of earth, but it is now widely viewed as false. Newton’s theories predicted very well from the vantage point of low speeds and low masses, and yet we now know it is false in exactly the same sense that the Ptolemaic system is false, once you take it out of it’s comfort zone, it predicts poorly. I just think it is silly to talk about reality when we no more understand reality than a cat understands what a TV set “really is.”
People who talk about reality want us to believe the following two statements have different meanings:
1. Scientists believe X is true.
2. Scientists believe X is true, and it is true.
The sad truth is that these two statements have identical meanings. But if you made this distinction, it would be valid:
1. Scientists once believed X is true.
2. Scientists believe X is false, and it is false.
Now those are two different statements, and comparing the two different pairs of statements shows that science really is a “social convention.”
BTW, I am not pushing “relativism” at least as I understand the term, as in moral relativism. Perhaps you could give a definition.
Everyone,
To sum up, I think many of you have a false view of science, a view that it has been pretty successful in explaining reality. We know virtually nothing about the building blocks of “reality.” Scientists don’t have a clue as to what even something as basic as an electron is. They don’t even know if it exists in the way we usually imagine “existence.” Obviously they know that models assuming electrons predict.
At the other extreme we don’t know much of anything about reality at the largest scale, such as whether anything that can happen does happen (in ever-splitting universes.)
We feel good about science because it predicts the behavior of middle-sized objects that are nearby pretty well, at least well enough to suit out needs. The cat also found a cozy place to take a nap on the TV set, and feels it knows what it needs to know about TVs.
3. August 2009 at 03:51
Lorenzo, Thanks, That’s a nice blog.
William, You are right. I was using “wrong” in a sort of sarcastic way, to highlight the inconsistency of those who say the Ptolemaics were wrong but Newton was right. The Ptolemaic system was a vast improvement over cavemen astronomy, and we shouldn’t denigrate it. I’m not saying there “really are” epicycles, but then I don’t know if there “really are” elliptical orbits either. All I know is that the Kepler/Newton model of the Solar System predicts better than the Ptolemaic model, but worse than even more recent models.
BTW: In many areas of science we have not improved one iota over the cavemen science—such as the prediction that if an earthling drops a big rock on their toe it hurts. When science hasn’t changed since cavemen days, we are inclined to think we see “reality” most clearly. I’m surprised no one mentioned that argument, as it is one I get from my philosopher friends.
3. August 2009 at 05:53
Fantastic post! I love the example of Ptolemaic vs Newton vs Einstein vs whatever is next. With this example in mind, a entire semester course could be taught on how science, reality and morality are all more gray than what is conventionally taught.
I agree how you sum up the validity of using the CPI for certain tasks may be useful but we need to keep the fact that it is just a “tool” in our minds at all times. We need to remember that any tool or model has a certain “comfort zone” and we need to be mindful to only use it in that zone.
So then, if this is how you feel, why do you think targeting NGDP growth is such a good idea? Part of why I disagree with many of your suggestions on policy is because of the stress you place on NGDP. I guess I feel that you are using it as a tool out of its comfort zone much of the time.
I will try to look back at some of your old posts today to cite some specific examples.
3. August 2009 at 06:14
“Like scientific theories, [rules of conduct]
are preserved by proving themselves useful ( NB DON ), but, in contrast to scientific theories, by a proof which no one needs
to know, because the proof manifests itself in the resilience and progressive expansion of the order of society
which makes it possible.”
F.A. Hayek, “The Errors of Constructivism” in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the
History of Ideas. London: Routledge, 1978, p.10.
3. August 2009 at 06:31
Scott, Rorty comes out of the “analytic” tradition and his most important work in that tradition is the development of an “eliminative materialist” position in the philosophy of mind.
Hayek or Edelman will tell you that an original mistake in the false picture of science which finally gave us positivism was the fact that there was no place for mind in this picture of science. You can’t do good, causal economic science with the learning entrepreneurial mind as the central causal element in the explanatory structure. Rorty attacks Descartes, but he doesn’t come up with a sound picture of mind or the mind as a causal element in the world and in our picture of science.
Rorty ends up being the pied piper of “pop” Continental philosophy & Wittgenstein & “pragmatism” — because he gets mind and science wrong _as an analytical philosopher_.
More in a later post.
3. August 2009 at 06:31
Sorry, make that “You can’t do good, causal economic science without the learning entrepreneurial mind as the central causal element in the explanatory structure.”
3. August 2009 at 07:37
I’m not sure why Rorty would have a problem with Friedman’s “as if” version of instrumentalism — looks fairly “pragmatic” and “what works” to me. And I don’t see Friedman’s test as at bottom that much different, Friedman could argue that only stuff that had proved itself useful empirically was useful, regardless of whether it were “true” or “real”. Ironically, Rorty was suppose to have gotten us away for talk of capital T and capital R “true” and “real”.
Rorty was reacting against the Carnap tradition which stipulated the nature of science. If you look deep, Carnap’s full position actually isn’t that different than Rorty, ironically. We’re on the positivist / relativist (pragmatist/ instrumentalist) knife edge here.
The irony is that every economists has a picture of science in his head — almost every one of them a false picture. And they enforce this picture on the profession. The false picture of science actually comes mostly from the philosophical tradition — and a little bit from rumors of how science works overheard in the hallways of academia.
It’s part of a false picture of knowledge — a false picture I don’t believe Rorty was all that successful in escaping.
If one has read and understood such folks as Wittgenstein, Darwin, Hayek, Edelman, Kuhn, Wright, Popper, etc., it’s hard so swallow the pop-Continental philosophy, pop-pragmatism pop-Wittgenstein of Rorty — which is essentially grounded in eliminative materialist analytic philosophy, and is a less of an escape from that program than it is a peculiar version of it.
3. August 2009 at 07:47
Rorty’s “pragmatism” quickly descends into this — What narrative is useful for achieving my political goals, and for “unmasking” views I despise. The real causal structure of the world gets thrown out the window.
E.g. the causal structure understood by Smith and Hayek gets thrown out the window, it’s not useful to Rorty from the perspective of his political tastes, and it can’t prove itself useful the way a bridge “proves itself”. And instead this genuine causal knowledge gets “unmasked” as an “ideology” by Rorty and his friends in The Nation.
And all this is sanctioned / made possible by Rorty’s false view of knowledge and science.
3. August 2009 at 08:48
[…] up is a provocative post by the ever-interesting Scott Sumner. Rafe in particular should read it because Sumner starts […]
3. August 2009 at 09:11
ssumner wrote: “I have read some of the stuff in consciousness theory, and I do not think it has anything to do with my question”
I agree that consciousness is a big topic, and there’s a lot you could find that doesn’t relate to your original question. What I’m suggesting is that there is also material there that does relate to your question … only, you may not yet have encountered it.
“thoughts are like a little theatre inside the head, but then who’s watching the play?”
Yes, the Cartesian Theater is silly, and it answers nothing.
I have not been trying to give you a commonsense explanation of what consciousness is (although perhaps I could, if you want). I’ve only commented on your surprising assurance that it is not possible, even in principle, for you to understand the explanation. You are self-admittedly ignorant about the topic, and yet also confident that it is something which must remain a mystery to you for your whole life. (And perhaps to all of humanity, forever?)
That really seems like an absurd position to take. That your current ignorance gives you much information at all about the mystery itself, especially about what is possible to learn about it in the future.
Worse yet — but as a mere side point — I was commenting that some people (in AI and cog sci) [but perhaps not everybody in those fields] actually have already made some significant progress on the question, even leaving aside what might be learned in the next decades or centuries.
But that’s a mere aside. The real question is why you think you have any insight into the fundamental nature of consciousness, such that you believe it must necessarily remain opaque to humanity for all time.
3. August 2009 at 09:19
ssumner wrote: “Beliefs are beliefs, we can argue some are more or less useful, but we have no objective way to distinguish between objective and subjective beliefs.”
I really think that’s just false.
The scientific method, placebos, various kinds of cognitive biases … these are exactly procedures we use to cleanly carve objective from subjective beliefs. Why bother with double-blind studies? Because otherwise, it’s easy to convince yourself that something is true, but we later find that these “truths” can’t be repeated by other people in other locations at other times.
There are arts of persuasion, rhetoric, marketing, outright lying … we can see how these processes alter subjective beliefs. We can also easily see how they have no effect on objective reality. They are able to change how much people believe in something, without changing at all what data a scientific experiment will measure about the same thing.
You are right to distinguish scientific theory from metaphysical truth. (Maybe we’re all living in the Matrix. Science can’t prove that is false.) You are wrong to fail to distinguish objective reality from subjective belief.
3. August 2009 at 11:09
Some comments on your philosophizing:
“There is no difference between subjective opinions and objective reality, or at least no difference that is discernible to humans.” A couple of months before the election, I had the opinion (need we really add the term ‘subjective’?) that Obama would win. As it turned out, *there was no difference* between my opinion and reality (do we really need to add the term ‘objective’?). But an acquaintance of mine held the opinion that McCain would win. There turned out to be a major difference between his opinion and reality. Moreover, I, who am human, was able to *discern* this difference–and twitted him about it.
Do you think it is just my opinion, or our opinion, that Obama won? I agree that it is our opinion, but I deny that it is *just* that: it is also *true* (as not all of our opinions are).
“What we are doing in physics is constructing models that can predict, and that therefore are very useful.” It is trivial to remark that they predict *reality*.
“[The cat] thinks she knows that [the TV set] is a 3 foot cube with a hard surface that gets a bit warm when noise and flickering light are emitted.” I doubt that the cat has such self-conscious thoughts, but if she does–she’s right; and no one ever claimed any more for human beings than that sometimes they are right, though always there is more that they don’t know, or even suspect. (“Objective” reality must outrun our “subjective” opinions, else this last remark–that there is much that we do not know, or even suspect–would obviously be misguided.)
“[W]e should no longer view slavery and wars of aggression as a ‘good thing’. This is not a mere social convention, our laws of morality are one of the most important achievements of our civilization. And so are our laws of science.” Fair enough; but note that laws of neither kind are accurately described as “social conventions,” “mere” or otherwise.
“[I]f being grown-up is realizing that we have no one to fall back on but ourselves, then in what sense can we say there is a distinction between what we believe to be true (i.e. what predicts pretty well) and what is objectively true? Who will tell us when we are wrong?” Obviously, *we* may tell ourselves, and sometimes we do; i.e., sometimes we find out we were wrong. Unfortunately, sometimes we never find out we were wrong, though we were. (Again, this remark would make no sense if there were no distinction between reality and “our” opinions. But it *does* make sense!)
3. August 2009 at 11:22
What about a theory that is wildly off base, but leads to predictions that are right 55% of the time? Is it true?
The correctness ratio would depend on which questions you’re asking. What about a theory that is useful 100% of the time at nearly all time and distance scales? That’s Newton. There’s more to it than how many predictions out of the universe of predictions will achieve some minimum accuracy.
A better logical construct is
Scientists have failed to disprove X.
Scientists have failed to disprove X, and X makes useful predictions.
Those are two statements with different meanings.
3. August 2009 at 15:59
Scott,
Your astronomy example doesn’t seem to do what you want. Realists don’t deny that people have and will change their beliefs, or that some beliefs are useful or whatever else.
There is a real world. The claims we make either describe the world or they do not. If they do describe the world, then they are true.
You might follow Rorty and point out that they are imprecise, that they might be understood as special cases in the future, that they are accepted as conventions, that they are useful to believe, that they have the potential to be false, or whatever else you like but that’s not an argument against metaphysical realism, only a change of subject.
3. August 2009 at 18:19
I’m repelled by the notion that the real question is not whether something is true but if it is useful. Newton may have been an alchemist, but many scientists are driven by what could be called a search for beauty, much like a poet or a painter searches for beauty. To such a scientist, the role of prediction only serves to prove their elegant theory corresponds with reality, not necessarily to create value (except for the value of the beauty of an elegant theory).
If God himself is a mathematician then I would be willing to say the laws of physics are not human social conventions. Or if is true that through reason we gain access to the mind of God (I think Emerson said something like that).
But as an atheist I tend to agree that the laws of physics were invented by man and they just happen to work well. After all: even if there were no laws of physics, man would need to invent them.
3. August 2009 at 23:46
I don’t get what you are saying here. Suppose predictions of orbits with Newton’s laws are 99.7% accurate, and predictions with the Ptolemaic system are 97.2% accurate. Are you saying one is objectively true and the other isn’t?
Incidentally, Ptolemy himself realized that his model was more of a useful way of calculating and not much of a description of what actually happened – he comments at some point that if you take his system at face value, the Moon must be at some times four times closer to the Earth than at other times, and this is obviously not the case.
So if you take “the Ptolemaic system” to mean the conjecture that the planets actually follow his specific complicated combinations of epicycles, then that conjecture is false (but even Ptolemy didn’t believe that). But if you take it to be what it is, a mathematical device for predicting the motion of planets to within a specific set of tolerances, then it’s true.
You are arguing that anything that has some correlation with reality, enough to allow some crude predictions, is true?
I’m saying it’s OK to call a statement true even when the context requires that it be approximate or provisional, and that if you want you can make all those qualifications explicit, and because you can do that, “true” has meaning (and if you want to argue this meaning is identical with that of “useful”, I have no further quarrel).
4. August 2009 at 08:06
hibida, Thanks. I have lots of posts that discuss NGDP targeting, but I think it would keep inflation low and smooth out the business cycle better than inflation targeting. Also reduce “bubbles” which others worry about more than me.
Don, Thanks, that’s a nice (pragmatist) quotation. I love Hayek’s stuff–someday I’ll have to read more of it.
Greg, You should read McCloskey’s discussion of Rorty. Rorty is opposed to all methodological dogma. And Friedman’s claim that the only test of a theory is how well it predicts is very dogmatic. Rorty says that each field should decide which methods are best, and generally the methods that survive will be those that are most persuasive, not some rigid dogma. For instance, some economists might think it is important to have realistic assumptions, others might not. Rorty says we shouldn’t impose any rigid dogmatic rules over that debate, but let 1000 methods bloom.
I have read Hayek, Kuhn, Popper, although it’s been a while. But I don’t recall them having any good argument against Rorty’s theory that “truth is what your colleagues let you get away with.”
McCloskey (a Rorty fan) also says economists have a model of science in their heads, and it is the wrong model.
Greg: You said;
“Rorty’s “pragmatism” quickly descends into this “” What narrative is useful for achieving my political goals, and for “unmasking” views I despise. The real causal structure of the world gets thrown out the window.
E.g. the causal structure understood by Smith and Hayek gets thrown out the window, it’s not useful to Rorty from the perspective of his political tastes, and it can’t prove itself useful the way a bridge “proves itself”. And instead this genuine causal knowledge gets “unmasked” as an “ideology” by Rorty and his friends in The Nation.”
With all due respect this seems nonsensical. Rorty is a pragmatist, not wedded to any political ideology, but rather wants to achieve liberal aims. So do I. I don’t think Rorty would have any fundamental problem with my views. He’d say “show me empirical evidence you are right, and I’ll become a libertarian too.” That’s is not the way those at the Nation look at things. I’d be a leftist too if I didn’t believe in supply-side economics. He not an economist, why would you expect him to know anything about supply side economics, which is highly counterintuitive? So I’m not surprised he favored left-wing causes
Remember that after 1989 Rorty said that world events showed that socialism didn’t work; he was very pragmatic about these things, not tied to any particular ideology.
Don, You said:
“I have not been trying to give you a commonsense explanation of what consciousness is (although perhaps I could, if you want). I’ve only commented on your surprising assurance that it is not possible, even in principle, for you to understand the explanation. You are self-admittedly ignorant about the topic, and yet also confident that it is something which must remain a mystery to you for your whole life. (And perhaps to all of humanity, forever?)”
I don’t think that is fair. I have read enough consciousness theory to be pretty confident that no one has come up with such an explanation. Of course someone might, but I doubt it. It is actually the why is there something and not nothing that is easier to explain. I see all answers to “why” questions as starting with “because”. But the “why is there something and not nothing” can’t really be answered that way, as the term “because” implies something, even if merely laws of science, or God.
Everything I know I know by virtue of comparing it to something in my consciousness. But that won’t work for consciousness itself, as comparing something to itself is hardly an explanation. Thus the only reason I can understand why a car moves, after all the technical explanation, is that my consciousness can understand the concept “force” as it is something that I can feel when the wind blows against me, and thus I can visualize how it moves cars.
So I think both question are “special cases” Obviously you might be right, but I doubt it. I think the explanation of consciousness that scientists come up with (and they will come up with one) will seem nothing like our subjective experience of consciousness. It will be a bunch of mathematical formula.
Don, You said:
“The scientific method, placebos, various kinds of cognitive biases … these are exactly procedures we use to cleanly carve objective from subjective beliefs. Why bother with double-blind studies? Because otherwise, it’s easy to convince yourself that something is true, but we later find that these “truths” can’t be repeated by other people in other locations at other times.”
I don’t understand this. What do you mean by “objective?” I thought “objective” means the world really is that way. Obviously lots of stuff considered objective beliefs are later found out to be wrong. How is that different from subjective beliefs later found out to be wrong? And of course the “later” is still a highly provisional belief.
If you are arguing that science predicts better than astrology, sure I agree with that. I still think the useful distinction is good and bad at predicting, not objective/subjective. I hate these binaries because they lead to endless, pointless arguments about where to draw the line. The scientific methods you describe are instituted so that we can get more accurate predictions from our models.
I’ll answer the others after lunch.
4. August 2009 at 10:50
Philo, You said;
“Do you think it is just my opinion, or our opinion, that Obama won? I agree that it is our opinion, but I deny that it is *just* that: it is also *true* (as not all of our opinions are).”
This is exactly the point I was trying to make in my essay, when I focused on the term “mere” as the cause of all this confusion. Why say “just an opinion?” Aren’t our beliefs (a term I like better than opinion, which is ambiguous) just about the most important thing in the world?
In a debate with Rorty, Pascal Engles (what a name for a philosopher!) raised this issue:
What if someone says “People now believe X, but I think later that will be shown to be wrong.” Doesn’t that imply two distinct concepts, subjectives beliefs and objective reality?”
Rorty responded that when people say “something will later be shown to be wrong, they are merely predicting that at a later date, people will come to have different beliefs from what they have now.
Your question also raises another issue. Can’t we distinguish between things that are uncertain and things we are sure about? As a practical matter we often can, but these aren’t rigorous categories with sharp boundaries. Are we sure Obama won? Maybe 99.999999% sure. Are we sure Bush won in 2004? maybe 99.9% sure. Are we sure Bush won in 2000? Maybe 20% or 80%, depending on your ideology. The point is that there is a continuum of subjective cofidence levels for different beliefs. Often we almost all agree on those confidence levels. But this smooth continuum is not conducive to a bright line distinction between subjective beliefs and objective facts.
Most of the things that society regards as obviously true, are true. That is, they will never be regarded as false at a later date. But some “objective facts” will later be shown to have been false. This blog is working on refuting one of those obvious facts—the idea that the financial crisis caused the recession.
You said:
“[W]e should no longer view slavery and wars of aggression as a ‘good thing’. This is not a mere social convention, our laws of morality are one of the most important achievements of our civilization. And so are our laws of science.” Fair enough; but note that laws of neither kind are accurately described as “social conventions,” “mere” or otherwise.
Sorry, but i think you are letting the word’s connotation obsure its meaning. I understand that many people are dimissive of social conventions, but they shouldn’t be, as society os very imoportant.
It’s like saying “how dare you call an unmarried woman a spinster.” Um, the definition of spinster is an unmarried woman.
You said:
“[I]f being grown-up is realizing that we have no one to fall back on but ourselves, then in what sense can we say there is a distinction between what we believe to be true (i.e. what predicts pretty well) and what is objectively true? Who will tell us when we are wrong?” Obviously, *we* may tell ourselves, and sometimes we do; i.e., sometimes we find out we were wrong. Unfortunately, sometimes we never find out we were wrong, though we were. (Again, this remark would make no sense if there were no distinction between reality and “our” opinions. But it *does* make sense!)
This is exactly Pascal Engels argument discussed above. You might enjoy the small book that carries their debate. Rorty wins on points, although obviously that doesn’t mean he is right. But he is a strong debator.
David N. The cavemen had a theory that the sun went around the earth. It’s predictions were good in ther local neighborhood. And they were good 100% of the time. The sun never once failed to rise in the east and set in the west. Does that mean it is true that the sun goes around the earth? Obviously not. I think truth and prediction are two separate things. But prediction does help us unterstand where society gets its ideas of truth.
An extraterrestrial race that rockets between galaxies might regard Newton’s theories as almost useless for navigation, and instead rely on Einstein’s. Just as the cat’s model of TV sets is useful for its purposes, Rorty would say that Newton’s theories have proved very useful for humans because they very accurately predict what we need predicted.
James, You said:
“There is a real world. The claims we make either describe the world or they do not. If they do describe the world, then they are true.”
Check out the previous example with cavemen and the sun. Their theory described the world as they saw it, but we now think it is false. I agree that our theories describe the world (or reality) as we see it. But there is nothing more that can be said. We are in no position to know which of the things we regard as certain, will later be shown to be not so.
We have no picture of “ultimate reality” (say a God’s eye view) with which to compare our puny theories.
Rob, You said:
“I’m repelled by the notion that the real question is not whether something is true but if it is useful. Newton may have been an alchemist, but many scientists are driven by what could be called a search for beauty, much like a poet or a painter searches for beauty.”
You said:
“But as an atheist I tend to agree that the laws of physics were invented by man and they just happen to work well. After all: even if there were no laws of physics, man would need to invent them.”
The forces of evolution push us to develop strategies that predict well. Sorry to keep going back to the sun going around the earth, but that theory was very useful to cavemen. So we invented a useful theory even though there is really no “law of physics” that the earth goes around the sun. So this example beautifully supports your last point.
I agree, and I expressed myself poorly. I am a fan of the “art for art’s sake” idea, and there is certainly an important aesthetic beauty in science. I even find a bit of aesthetic beauty in the ugly field of economics. (Trade theory, QT of Money, competitive GE model, etc.)
Greenish, I think we agree. I agree that the term ‘true’ is ambiguous, and I’ve probably used it 5 different ways just in these essay. If you say true is useful, then I agree. But this supports my point against the other commenters, when I said there is no sharp boundary between objective and subjective, just as there is no sharp boundary between useful and not useful.
4. August 2009 at 11:12
The refutation to Rorty is the following:
http://oolongiv.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/davidson_on-the-very-idea.pdf
Davidson simply destroyed these relativistic ideas. Why they should continue to float around is just beyond me.
Dondald Davidson – On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.
Read it.
4. August 2009 at 12:04
Scott, your the first person I’ve ever run across who denied that Rorty was a leading philosopher of the left.
He didn’t title one of his books_Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America_ for no reason — this is what he was interested in. I challenge you to find a reference to Hayek in all of his work — leading neurscientsts find Hayek’s work on brain and mind still cutting edge, Rorty blackballed it. Ditto Hayek’s work on the philosophy of social phenomena, social science, law, etc. This was hardly an accident. Rorty was one of my professor’s roommates in college. Rorty read everything. If he didn’t take on Hayek — among a handful of the most significant thinkers of the last 100 years, it was for a reason. I’d suggest a big part of the reason is politics.
A bog comments section isn’t a good place to think hard about hard problems at the groundwork of economic science and human thought.
And I’m not that interested in Rorty.
I’d simply suggest again you have a very unsophisticated view of Rorty and human knowledge, and not one that stands up to examination, especially when you are talking of the science of human social phenomena. Providing a causal explanation for global economic order is different than attempting to answer the ancient philosopher’s demand for justification using the example of a bridge that doesn’t fall down. By own philosophical position — and that of Hayek, Wittenstein, Popper, and Bartley — is to reject the demand and the picture of knowledge that falls out of that demand, and to reject Rorty’s bogus “solution” to that demand.
Rorty is my view is a guy who wrestled with the problems of being “trapped in the fly bottle” but offered remained still flying around in te bottle, even as he believed he’d escaped from it. Rorty’s start from his eliminative materialism — essentially a form of the scientism of “behaviorism” is just one clue to the fact that Rorty is trapped by a false picture — a false picture that is anathema to the causal explanatory structure of good economic explanation.
4. August 2009 at 12:19
Read Hayek’s “Principles vs Expediency” or his _The Fatal Conceit_ or his _The Road to Serfdom_ for an account of how “pragmatism” is used as a justification for disregarding the negative rules with make the market order work, in order to pursue specific goals doing directly and observably “works”. Pragmatism in the social domain is deeply naive and anti-scientific, unworkably opposed to what the science of Smith and Hayek teaches us. That’s one reason it’s been attractive to leftist from Dewey to Rorty.
A bridge is something planned and built by a single mind, working from a blue print — most “pragmatists” have the same picture when they turn to “making the world better” through “pragmatic” efforts just “doing what works”. It’s hard not to see Rorty in this naive tradition — as you point out there is nothing is his work that reveals Rorty as someone who understands the explanatory science of undesigned social order. His leftist tastes and sympathies suggest he’s one of those who have no idea how “pragmatism” in the social realm is destructive of wealth producing cooperative social order
4. August 2009 at 12:29
Scott, here’s the bottom line.
Causal explanation of global economic order is explained by real causal element, known mostly by analogy with our own mind.
None of this knowledge is “justified” the way Rorty attempts to answer the ancient philosopher’s demand for justification by citing a bridge that doesn’t fall down.
The central causal explanatory elements are entrepreneurial learning in the context of changing relative prices and local conditions, and human rule following of the sort that constitute the institutions of private property and contract and social cooperation, etc.
Rorty’s grappling with the philosopher’s demand for justification, his appeal to bridges that don’t fall down really has nothing to contribute to understanding this achievement of economic science — and his eliminative materialism and his various Continental philosophy efforts and his cultural critique agendas are in many ways hostile or incompatible with the explanatory picture behind our understanding of global economic order.
It would take a book to go through all of this in detail.
4. August 2009 at 12:32
I’m sure it’s my own fault but I’m not sure how I got tarred with the “useful predictions” brush. It’s not my notion at all. Useful is a loaded word anyway. Useful to who? I agree with you that truth and prediction are separate things. But then in your response to Greenish you wrote “If you say true is useful, then I agree.” Maybe it’s not my fault.
An extraterrestrial race that rockets between galaxies might regard Newton’s theories as almost useless for navigation, and instead rely on Einstein’s.
Yes, but they would hold Newton’s theories in high regard both in the interior of their rocket and back on their home planet, where the theories would continue to be an excellent approximation of reality.
The geocentric theory didn’t predict that the sun sets in the west, it explained it. The sun doesn’t set in the west by social convention, except the conventional definition of “west.” What is subjective about it? Likewise, the truth is that momentum will be conserved whether we are on Earth or traveling near light speed, or even if we are not around to observe.
4. August 2009 at 14:57
I think another way of thinking about this is: can the language of mathematics perfectly describe the universe? If given perfect information, there is any margin of error, then no. Math may be a language which works just fine in describing the universe for humans, but a god might laugh at the limitations of the language of math. No squirrel will ever grasp algebra. Why should we think our brains are big enough to even slightly comprehend something we don’t have a capacity for? Math simplifies the world in a way we can grasp it, but it is a simplification. Perhaps the reason no one has come up with a satisfactory unification theory yet is because the language of math simply won’t do.
4. August 2009 at 16:24
Scott,
Sure, cavemen believed their theories described they world and that belief was false. But how is this an argument for pragmatism versus realism? Realists don’t deny that false beliefs are possible.
Let me ask this differently: Do you believe that “someone was wrong once” implies “no natural laws exist”? That seems to be your argument and it doesn’t follow.
Nearly every philosophy is compatible with the existence of errors, the existence of diverse beliefs, the gradual refinement of theories, the impossibility of establishing empirical claims with certainty, etc. Citing any or all of these doesn’t lend any special support to pragmatism.
By the way, I stated that beliefs have to describe the world in order to be true. If you inject clauses about “as they saw it” you are responding to a position I didn’t express.
4. August 2009 at 22:46
I don’t get what you are saying here. Suppose predictions of orbits with Newton’s laws are 99.7% accurate, and predictions with the Ptolemaic system are 97.2% accurate. Are you saying one is objectively true and the other isn’t? Or that both are true? Or that one is truer?
I do not believe in the “bucket of shit” theory of truth (if you take a bucket of shit and add a teaspoon of wine, you have a bucket of shit: if you take a bucket of wine and add a teaspoon of shit, you have a bucket of shit). That is, I do not believe in either perfect truth or simple falsity as the only options. So, yes, Newton is a better theory of reality than Ptolemy’s (to use your comparison though it is really Kepler v Ptolemy). Newtonian mechanics describe reality quite well over a wide range of phenomena: that is why people came to believe it and could make things that worked using it.
I think of something as being objectively true if it would exist even if no life had ever existed in the entire history of the universe. Do you think a theory that is not even completely correct would have existed had it not been created by intelligent life? That makes no sense to me at all, but maybe I am missing your argument.
Well, if you cannot accept the difference between particular thoughts in particular heads and propositions/sentences/statements then I can see the difficulty. Everything then is subjective. There is the problem of exactly how anyone could ever communicate. Clearly we do, so clearly there is content we all have access to.
So, yes, thoughts need thinkers (or at least thinking brains/minds). But the content of thoughts can either connect to reality with sufficient accuracy to be ‘true’ or not.
We are not testing our theories against reality, because we have no way of knowing how well they mirror reality other than by prediction.
Really: tell me what prediction that your post about reality leads to? Moreover, your entire post rests on a presumption of objectivity. That you are accurately describing how the world is. This is where Rortian subjectivism (I retract my use of ‘relativism’ as too distracting) just gets irritating. It always rests on an appeal to objectivity while pretending otherwise.
My point about the “unforgiving minutes” is precisely the brute way reality forces itself upon us. Such as death. Or the need to eat. Or to breathe. We experience reality quite directly every second.
What we have lots of problems with is abstraction. Then it can all become all too easy to slip into all sorts of errors.
1. Scientists believe X is true.
2. Scientists believe X is true, and it is true.
The sad truth is that these two statements have identical meanings.
2. Christians believe Christ rose from the dead.
3. Christian believe Christ rose from the dead, and He did.
(2) and (3) do not have the same meaning. The difference is cosmic in its implications.
(1) makes a sociological statement (what scientists believe). (2) conjoins a sociological statement with a statement about the world. You have provided a splendid example of how this sort of scepticism rests on confusing sociology with epistemology. It comes from defining science as being only what scientists do.
4. Scientists believe X.
5. Scientists believe X is true.
Have the same meaning, since to believe something is to believe it is true.
6. X is true.
Does not have the same meaning as either (4) or (5).
Glad you like my blog. I like yours too, except when you get into philosophising 🙂
5. August 2009 at 09:26
I’m curious. Is it normal practice on this blog to continue discussions from a prior post in the current post, when the topic is completely different?
5. August 2009 at 09:48
JimP, I read it, but don’t really see how it relates to Rorty, or at least the Rorty that I have read. It was written in 1974, which was before Rorty developed his theories, so how could it possibly refute theories that hadn’t been developed yet? Rorty’s name is not even mentioned.
Again, I see Rorty as saying that drawing a distinction between subjective and objective beliefs is not useful. I don’t see how Davidson refutes that idea.
Greg, Rorty may have started out as a socialist, lots of liberals did. But I recently read a 200 page dissertation that focused heavily on Rorty’s political views, and he seemed more like a left liberal, than a socialist. I had the impression that he preferred systems like Denmark as he got older. I am a right wing liberal, but I think Denmark has a pretty good system, so I don’t think Rorty and I are that far part, although he is obviously to the left of me. Of course that has no bearing on his epistomology, which is what I was discussing.
You said,
“Rorty is my view is a guy who wrestled with the problems of being “trapped in the fly bottle” but offered remained still flying around in te bottle, even as he believed he’d escaped from it. Rorty’s start from his eliminative materialism “” essentially a form of the scientism of “behaviorism” is just one clue to the fact that Rorty is trapped by a false picture “” a false picture that is anathema to the causal explanatory structure of good economic explanation.”
I’m not sure if I quite follow this paragraph, but as far as I know Rorty had no views as to what constituted “good economic explanation.” Rather he argued that economists themselves should determine which methods worked best. That seems reasonable to me, when philosophers start dictating methodology, they often don’t know enough about the field that they are studying to give good advice.
It may be unfortunate that Rorty ignored Hayek, but that isn’t really an argument against Rorty’s ideas.
You also may be right that I am ignorant of philosophy, but if you will read through the comments to this post you will see that no one has put forth any good reason why Rorty is wrong. If you have a good argument as to why Rorty is wrong, feel free to provide it, and I will respond.
Greg#2, You said:
“Read Hayek’s “Principles vs Expediency” or his _The Fatal Conceit_ or his _The Road to Serfdom_ for an account of how “pragmatism” is used as a justification for disregarding the negative rules with make the market order work, in order to pursue specific goals doing directly and observably “works”. Pragmatism in the social domain is deeply naive and anti-scientific, unworkably opposed to what the science of Smith and Hayek teaches us. That’s one reason it’s been attractive to leftist from Dewey to Rorty.”
Sorry, but I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I like the free market views of Smith for 100% pragmatic reasons. As you know, pragmatism does not say that every issue should be decided on a cases by case basis on pragmatic grounds. It is perfectly consistent with “rules utilitarianism,” the notion that society might be better off with broad rules like free speech, private property, etc, on the eminently pragmatic grounds that deciding each situation on a case by case basis would be wasteful, and would involve special interest politics, etc. You are interpreting the term “pragmatism” far too narrowly. If you think the free market provides for a greater well-being of society, however you define well-being (I’ll leave that up to you) then as far as I am concerned you are in agreement with the pragmatists.
The type of pragmatism that Hayek is discussing has absolutely nothing to do with pragmatism as defined by Rorty. Nothing at all.
Greg#3, The fact that Rorty changed his views on economics as he grew older refutes your argument that his philosophy was anti-free market. Rather, as he developed a better appreciation for how free markets worked, he became more pro-free market. What could be more sensible than that?
David, You said:
The geocentric theory didn’t predict that the sun sets in the west, it explained it.
Sorry, but I don’t follow this at all. Of course it predicted it. When the sun rose in the east, it was possible that it would go half way up, stop, go back, then set in the east. So there was a prediction. Just as we “predict” that Newton’s laws will be useful for local conditions tomorrow just as they were yesterday. BTW, some respected scientists (cosmologists) speculate that there are different laws of science in every single universe of the “multiverse.”
Of course I agree that Newton’s laws are very useful in local conditions, but that has no bearing on Rorty’s theory of epistomology.
Just to be clear, I agree that humans are pretty good at predicting certain things. And I agree that this fact makes people assume these predictions represent objective truth. What I deny is that there is any way of discriminating between objective truth and subjective belief. But I would never deny that if there was a God, and he came down from heaven, in all probability many of the things we regard as true, would in fact be true according to that all-knowing God. What I deny is that we have any God-like view that allows us to separate out the things that we regard as objectively true, and that are true from a God-like perspective, and the things we regard as objectively true, which are in fact not true from a God-like perspective. We lack an “objective” view of objectivity itself. Thus let’s forget about objectivity, and stick with what we are pretty sure about because it predicts very well.
I think you are right that in my previous response I misspoke regarding the relationship between truth and prediction. I meant that we tend to equate the two. But sometimes (as in the geocentric universe), we later realize that a different model (the solar-centric) out-predicts the earlier one, and thus we come to view the earlier one as wrong, despite the fact that it predicted well in our local neighborhood.
Rob, Math is very interesting, as it seems to be more than a human creation. But I heard a philosopher of math once argue that it is very possible that an extremely bright civilization from another planet might regard all of our math as nothing more than a series of trivial, obvious, tautologies. It’s food for thought.
James, My point was different. My point was that cavemen were in no position to judge whether their theories were false, after all they came up with them. And Ptolemaics were in no position to judge whether their theories were false, after all they came up with them. We know that things once regard as objectively true later were found to be false, and I think it will happen again.
So my point is that there is never an endpoint were we can say “now we know for sure” as all knowledge is tentative, subject to revision. Sure, some knowledge we are confident about, but even some of that will be shown to be wrong.
A statement like “scientists believe X, and it is so,” is redundant, as the first part of the phrase is the best we can do. The next 4 words add nothing, because we have no outside way of judging whether the scientific consensus is right. It would only have meaning if we could somehow adopt a God-like perspective, and check out what the best and brightest of our scientists believe is so. But we can’t, so let’s just say what we know—say that to the best of our scientific knowledge we believe X, and leave it at that. To say it is also “true” is either making a claim we can’t make, or just restating the claim about what we believe.
I don’t know much about relativism, but I don’t think that is the right term for Rorty’s philosophy. He regards himself as a pragmatist, as do I.
Lorenzo, You said;
“So, yes, Newton is a better theory of reality than Ptolemy’s (to use your comparison though it is really Kepler v Ptolemy). Newtonian mechanics describe reality quite well over a wide range of phenomena: that is why people came to believe it and could make things that worked using it.”
When you say “better theory of reality,” I just assume you mean “predicts better.” We don’t see directly into reality, rather we make predictions. Even the “obvious fact” that there is a computer screen in front of us, is really an implied prediction that if we reach out our hand will hit a hard object, not a hologram. And I’m 99.9999999% sure it will.
You said:
“Well, if you cannot accept the difference between particular thoughts in particular heads and propositions/sentences/statements then I can see the difficulty. Everything then is subjective. There is the problem of exactly how anyone could ever communicate. Clearly we do, so clearly there is content we all have access to.
So, yes, thoughts need thinkers (or at least thinking brains/minds). But the content of thoughts can either connect to reality with sufficient accuracy to be ‘true’ or not.”
That’s not at all what I meant. I agree that humans are similar, have similar sensory impressions, and use similar logic. Cavemen communicated the fact that the sun rose every morning, even though it doesn’t, and obviously without humans there never would have been a geocentric model of the universe. I accept that it is theoretically possible that even without any life form there could be “laws of nature” although I doubt it. But what I can’t imagine is that if there were no life forms there could be laws of nature that are also WRONG. The earth-centric solar system, or Copernicus’s circular orbits, for instance. These are not objective facts, because they are wrong. Approximately true is well and good, but approximations are for humans, not God. God would have an exact blueprint for his/her universe, not a bunch of laws that are wrong but approximately true.
You said:
“Really: tell me what prediction that your post about reality leads to? Moreover, your entire post rests on a presumption of objectivity. That you are accurately describing how the world is. This is where Rortian subjectivism (I retract my use of ‘relativism’ as too distracting) just gets irritating. It always rests on an appeal to objectivity while pretending otherwise.”
This is just not true. Rorty has worked out a very clearly articulated “coherence theory of truth.” This is a view that we are convinced by arguments that hang together, or help us make better sense out of the myriad of data we receive. These tend to use an eclectic methodology. He has clearly made the implied prediction that the entire 2000-plus year old project of epistomology to find the ultimate basis for truth will fail. We will never find agreement on a standard that can be used to definitively show that something is true. We will always pragmatically use multiple methods, and we shouldn’t waste time looking for a magic bullet, for a one size fits all way of showing something is true. Neither Rorty nor I would argue that our critique of epistomology is objectively true, rather that if people look at things this way we can avoid wasting a lot of time on epistomological dead ends. It is a pragmatic argument.
You said:
“We experience reality quite directly every second.”
Rorty has nothing to say about reality, he is talking about beliefs. Your statement proves far too much as our brains are also a part of reality, as are our dreams. Dreams are probably some sort of brain activity while we sleep. That is a part of the physical universe. Are you claiming that statements we make about our dreams are true? Obviously not. The dreams are remembered rather poorly, and we have no way of even knowing whether the way we remember a dream is the way it actually happened. I once dreamed about something, and then woke up, but I woke up in my dream, I was still dreaming and I thought I had woken up from a dream. Then I really woke up, and remembered thinking I had woken up from the dream in the dream. I was very disappointed because something good had happened.
So you are right that we directly experience reality, but as soon as we try to interpret the reality we directly experienced, we start making statements. And some of those statements that we believe are true are later believed to be true, and some of those statements that we believe are true are later believed to be false. And we have no way of knowing which are which.
On the last point, I think when people say X is believed, and it really is true, they are making a prediction that later humans will believe it to be true. I agree that if there is a God, and a sort of day of reckoning when we will know all, then the concept of objective truth does has a different meaning from subjective belief. But in that case it doesn’t help us today, only on that day of reckoning will we know what is objectively true.
5. August 2009 at 09:52
David, It is best to put comments in the post they are most closely related to. I will try to respond to all. But if two posts are closely related, and one has a more active comment section, you can put comments there.
5. August 2009 at 15:24
Scott, you wrote:
Sorry, but I don’t follow this at all. Of course it predicted it. When the sun rose in the east, it was possible that it would go half way up, stop, go back, then set in the east.
You can’t mean that. I’ll try again. The sun setting in the west is an observation, not a prediction. You don’t need to predict something you’ve observed, you need to predict something you have not yet observed. This is incredibly obvious, yes? Galileo observed a 10 lb weight and a 1 lb weight falling at the same speed. These things happen whether there is a prior theory that predicts them or not, and personally I tend to side with Dr. Johnson when questions about objectivity and perception of reality come up. The fact that the theory that explains observations makes predictions that are inaccurate at extreme time or length scales just doesn’t matter. Nobody is claiming Newton or Einstein is reality, we claim it explains reality. Technically a theory doesn’t have to predict anything previousy unobserved. Even if we later find that it fails to explain some aspect of reality, that doesn’t mean there is no objective reaility!
Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that scientists should be more careful now than 200 years ago about throwing around the word “law,” but honestly their track record is pretty good. Conservation laws have survived Relativity.
5. August 2009 at 15:29
Scott,
Can you express your argument for pragmatism more compactly? It now seems to be “People have revised their beliefs in the past and may never know the truth about those beliefs at any point in the future, therefore no natural laws exist.” That doesn’t follow. So far, you seem to be defending pragmatism by citing facts that are compatible with just about every philosophy.
Also: Saying that “x is true” is not equivalent to claiming that “I believe x”. The first is a claim about the world and the second is about my mind. “X is true” is not a claim we cannot make, unless you believe we cannot make claims which might be wrong.
5. August 2009 at 18:40
Scott, clearly you have Rorty more freshly in your head than I —
esp. Rorty’s politics.
It’s false to believe that economists proceed outside of a philosophical tradition, and Rorty doesn’t know the science or the literature one way or the other to weigh in in an intelligent way. Using the rejection of Carnap dictates for science as case against pointing out then false philosophical picture and picture of science at the base
of mainstream economics makes no sense at all — esp. when that picturemof science shares a geneology with Carnp’s picture ofmscience and knowledge.
The philosophy is built into the economics — and telling philosophers not to point this out and explain the pathologies involved is not helpful.
5. August 2009 at 18:46
The point I just made above is one reason Kuhn’s work is much better and more profound than Rorty — and more evidence of how Rorty is still trapped in the fly bottle — imagining that “philosophy” could only be a stipulatory thing laid out by e.g. Carnap, and not something wrapped up in the middle of all efforts
at science, most especially the human and social sciences.
6. August 2009 at 05:56
David, There is a difference between an observation and a prediction. Watching the sun set in the west is an observation. Predicting that tomorrow the sun will again set in the west is a prediction. Watching a big and small rock fall at the same speed is an observation, predicting that next time you drop a small and big rock they will fall at the same speed is a prediction. So my use of terms is completely consistent.
You said:
“honestly their track record is pretty good.”
I agree that many beliefs are very well-supported, and very unlikely to be altered in the future. But “pretty good” isn’t perfect. Only if we had been perfect could you even begin make an argument that you are seeing directly into reality, rather than merely imposing your own mental interpretation on the data that is inputed into your brain.
I think people keep assuming that I am arguing that scientific theories are MERELY opinions, whereas that is not at all what I am arguing. Rather they are rigorously established and well-founded opinions.
James, Rorty says “truth is what my peers let me get away with.” Thus it isn’t a question of things being intrinsically true and false, but rather regarded by society as true or false, or regarded by individuals as true or false. Of course how we regard facts can change over time. We used to believe the shape of one’s head predicted personality. Then we realized that this theory was nonsense. Now studies again show that phrenology is true. The “reality” doesn’t keep changing, rather our models of reality keep changing.
In everyday language most people use the term ‘true’ to refer to well-established expert opinion, about which there is little or no debate. Or obvious facts, like that I am sitting in a chair. So that is how the term ‘true’ is used. Now what does it really mean? There is no “really,” it’s meaning is implied by the way it is used.
Yes, I think natural laws exist, it is just that I regard them as human constructs, not a part of nature like a tree. Thus in economics you have market behavior, and then you have models like supply and demand that are used to explain that behavior. I don’t see the model as “reality,” rather it is a model that helps us understand the world around us. And it is very useful, even though there aren’t really any 100% perfectly competitive markets, so it isn’t literally describing reality. It is a useful model for helping us to think about problems that we deal with in economic policy-making, for instance. I hope this helps.
Greg, This is a complicated issue, and perhaps my views are contradictory. I do think economists can benefit from reading epistomology. What I am opposed to is dogmatic methodology–the view that there is only one way to truth. McCloskey argues that Friedman didn’t even follow the dogmatism in his famous essay that suggested all that mattered was predictive power. Friedman used a wide variety of methods in his famous Monetary History of the US. So on the one hand I am saying that good economists will work out a variety of methods that best suit their purposes. For instance, I don’t know much econometrics, but I gather there is an ongoing debate about what techniques work best. That is healthy.
I think the way that I have benefited from reading epistomolgy is that it expands one’s mind a bit. My essay on Rorty and the EMH is an example—I got to thinking about what sort of implications the anti-EMH theory should have.
So I guess this sounds contradictory. I like philosophy as a mind expander, but not as a dogmatic set of rules about the one road to truth.
Greg#2, You might be right, I don’t know as much philosophy as you, and am not able to offer an intelligent opinion. Of course the quality of Rorty’s critique of philosophy is a separate issue from the usefulness of his pragmatic approach to epistomology. Nonetheless, what you say sounds plausible.
6. August 2009 at 07:49
Rorty was a leader in going after major flaws in the philosophical tradition.
All I’m saying is that ultimately Rorty wasn’t sussefull in escaping from it.
Moreover, these flaws remain embedded in practices of economic science — you can trace the history of the incorporation of mistakes of the philosophical tradition into econ, naming leading economists. Economists don’t do simply “what works”, the are always attempting to meet epistemological demands from the philosophicL tradition — and they rejected Hayek’s powerful explanatory frame on philosophical grounds.
6. August 2009 at 07:55
The “rules” that govern most strongly in econ are background rules from the philosophical tradition and the twin “scientific” tradition that economist live within and aren’t even aware of.
My suggestion is that Rorty and econimists share some of these tacit dogmtic stipulations from the philosophical tradition.
6. August 2009 at 08:00
Philosophy isn’t outside economics, it inside.
The mistake is to see it flying from outside tellin people what to do — it’s already there telling people whatnto do and always has been — and you can map this, chart the history and personalities.
6. August 2009 at 13:14
I meant “scientistic”.
6. August 2009 at 13:36
Scott,
When realists use the word truth, they refer to the first definition that you’ll find in nearly any dictionary. That’s why it comes first. If you or Rorty or whoever want to assign an alternative referent for the label “truth”, I have to wonder why. There are plenty of words in English like “useful idea” and “consensus”. If you had it your way, what label would you assign to “the state of being the fact of the matter”? Or would the result be a newspeak language with no label for that referent?
This may sound uncharitable, but it seems like most of pragmatism consists in making outlandish claims and then defending them by announcing that pragmatists are actually speaking some language other than English in which those claim mean something less controversial. In all seriousness, why don’t pragmatists express their differences in the same terminology that nearly all other philosophers use?
Again, can you state compactly and in standard terminology your agument that natural laws do not exist as a part of nature? So far, everything you’ve said in defense of this position is compatible with the view that natural laws do exist as a part of nature.
7. August 2009 at 05:35
You might look at W.V.O Quine. Social constructs and coherence are not at all alike.
7. August 2009 at 07:39
Greg, You said,
“The “rules” that govern most strongly in econ are background rules from the philosophical tradition and the twin “scientific” tradition that economist live within and aren’t even aware of.
My suggestion is that Rorty and economists share some of these tacit dogmatic stipulations from the philosophical tradition.”
I agree with the first paragraph, but note that even dogmatic economists like Milton Friedman frequently (and fortunately) break their own rules.
What dogmatic ideas does Rorty share with economists?
James, The dictionary definition of words is not the same as the way they are used in real life. In real life “truth” is used in a variety of ways. Those statements that experts are nearly certain about, for instance. This is also Rorty’s view. He is using the term the way others do. People often think they see directly into reality, and thus can be certain about some things, but this is simply people deceiving themselves. Even most realist philosophers that I have met agree that we can never be certain about anything. Thus if you are going to attach the term “truth” to a human utterance, it will refer to things we believe to be true.
You said:
“Again, can you state compactly and in standard terminology your argument that natural laws do not exist as a part of nature? So far, everything you’ve said in defense of this position is compatible with the view that natural laws do exist as a part of nature.”
I see natural laws as human creations. They are something we create to describe nature. But nature itself is different, it is not perfectly explained by these laws. If there were some sort of natural laws or “blueprints” that were a part of nature, it just seems intuitively obvious to me that those laws would explain reality perfectly, not approximately. If this is confusing, think back to my physics example. We keep coming up with better and better models of the Solar System. Each time we do, we discard the early model. Doesn’t that make it seem like the earlier models are human constructs? If they were literally true, why would we discard them?
gavagai, I agree. I think of social constructs as a sociological phenomenon, whereas coherence is an epistomological concept
Thus a social construct is a model created by society to better understand reality. Coherence is a characteristic of models that makes them appealing to Rorty, and to many other people as well. Society gravitates towards social constructs that are coherent, although of course one can find exceptions. So I agree that they are not the same at all. If I said otherwise, I misspoke.
Because I haven’t studied philosophy, I may be using these terms incorrectly, but that is the idea I had in mind.
7. August 2009 at 12:53
Scott,
When any sort of realist uses the term “truth”, we mean the first definition that you’ll find in a dictionary. That’s what makes us realists. If you have to insist that people mean something other than what they claim to mean to defend pragmatism, that ought to give you pause.
Your argument, as you give it still doesn’t follow, but this time the problem is clearer. Your conclusion is about the world, specifically, that natural laws do not exist as a part of it. You can’t get to there without a premise about the world, but all of your premises are about people’s mental states.
7. August 2009 at 20:24
Rorty is an eliminative materialist — rejects the idea that we have minds or know other minds, i.e. he rejects the central causal explanatory component of Hayekian economics — reference to learning minds in the context of changing local conditions and changing relative prices. Most “mainstream” economists similarly attempt to avoid reference to changing subjective understandings using a strategy appealing to. math models which pretend to map out objective relations between things (Samuelson’s revealed preference construct for example).
Neither Rorty or math economists can handle changing individual understandings — the stuff can’t be modeled as demanded. And this is the key causal component of economics — know because we also share subjective learning minds.
8. August 2009 at 05:26
James, You said;
“You can’t get to there without a premise about the world, but all of your premises are about people’s mental states.”
My mind doesn’t have direct access to reality, rather I have mental states based on my 5 senses, which give me enough information to construct very useful models of the world. These models are useful because they predict extremely well.
Greg, You said;
“Rorty is an eliminative materialist “” rejects the idea that we have minds or know other minds, i.e. he rejects the central causal explanatory component of Hayekian economics “” reference to learning minds in the context of changing local conditions and changing relative prices.”
I don’t agree, I think Rorty acknowledges that by observing local conditions we can learn to predict better and make better choices. He is a fan of the scientific enterprise, for instance.
I really don’t think Rorty’s theories have any implications for whether or not math is helpful to economics. He’d say that is up to economists to determine, not philosophers.
8. August 2009 at 12:56
Scott, you don’t engage the fact that Rorty is an eliminative materialists.
8. August 2009 at 13:13
Rorty takes sides in how to think about social phenomena and the human mind within the domain of social phenomena — he has a picture, a false one that allows for bad/scientistic thinking about social phenomena. That isn’t a feature that’s a bug.
A picture of science which is happy with fake science / bad science is a very poor picture of science.
An the issue isn’t the use of math in economics, the issue is the misuse of mathematics, a problem I thought we’d already agreed
upon.
It’s actually not true that Rorty’s work isnindependent of science
— the growth of knowledge and mind and science are themselves understood within the relm of social phenomena subject to explanation involving much in common with sound causal explanation in economics — this is contested territory and Rorty isn’t an innocent bystander, takes sides.
8. August 2009 at 13:24
When Rorty says “philosophy” and “philosophers” have nothing to say to scientists, Rorty is talking anout the Carnap/Hempel program. And philosophers talk about science I’ve hardly met when who includes economics in the category.
Where is the evidence that Rorty identified economics as a science, and on what grounds. The “pragmatic” criterion certainly doesn’t tell us what professional communities to trust. I’m guessing the next move is to go back to positivistic and quantitative empiricism to secure the “scientific” status and “pragmatic” success of economics. I.e. the word “pragmatic” is just a way to sneek the positivism and crude empiricism back in through the side door.
8. August 2009 at 13:36
If you dump Rorty’s falsevparadigm of what “philosophy of science” has to be, then what Rorty has to say about “philosophy” and science loses it’s reason for being.
Let’s look a real science — Darwinian biology — and the real role that philosophers and careful conceptual thinking play in that genuine science. Take a look at the work of David Hull or Ernst Mayr. This kind of work is part of the advance of that science.
And as I’ve said — and I can back this up– economists workbup to their eyeballs in particular philosophical traditions, and it isn’t just Friedman, and it isn’t just Friedman when he is writing a paper on testing in economics. You can identify different aspects ofbthe philosophical tradition in justbabout ever book and paper Friedman wrote. The problems and Friedman’s efforts to dealwith those problems dominate his work. Friedman had multiple strategies but they all asumed a particular picture of knowledge and science — and largely a false one.
8. August 2009 at 14:24
There are some good papers one how the problems of evidence identified by Henry Schultz and others emprically studying consumer demand shaped Friedman’S approach to his Monetary History Amon other things. These literatures didn’t fall to earth out of a vacuum, they came pre-packaged within a
philosphical tradition with a picture of how ‘Science’ is done and how knowledge is produce — if Rorty thinks that economics or any science is not done within
a wider background picture of what science is or how knowledge is to be produce then Rorty simply has a false picture of science — and a demonstrably ignorant inderstanding of the history of economics.
8. August 2009 at 15:01
The philosophical tradition has been telling tacitly telling economists what to do since the beginning — and economists have bee thenphilosophers producing economics exemplifying ‘philosophical’ pictures of what explanations should look like, what form knowledge should take — true in the 50s true in the 90s and true today.
8. August 2009 at 15:02
Still working on theniPhone typing.
8. August 2009 at 20:32
This blog is now simply named “The Illusion.”
9. August 2009 at 08:02
Greg, You said;
“A picture of science which is happy with fake science / bad science is a very poor picture of science.”
I’ve read a lot of Rorty, but I don’t recall him saying he was happy with bad science. can you provide a quotation?
You said:
“I’m guessing the next move is to go back to positivistic and quantitative empiricism to secure the “scientific” status and “pragmatic” success of economics. I.e. the word “pragmatic” is just a way to sneek the positivism and crude empiricism back in through the side door.”
I hope not, I’m a pragmatist but I would strongly oppose that move.
You said:
“Where is the evidence that Rorty identified economics as a science, and on what grounds.”
I was under the impression that Rorty did not draw this kind of sharp distinction between different intellectual disciplines. Rather he argued that they all were involved in the same sort of intellectual pursuit—trying to convince others of their point of view. And also that it was misleading to view some fields as “objective” and other fields as “subjective.”
On the question of philosophical influence, I can’t speak for Rorty but I would draw a distinction between logic (correlation doesn’t prove causation) and grand theories about what constitutes knowledge (such as positivism.) I think Rorty was more opposed to the latter. I have been influenced by philosophy that I have read, so I would never suggest that reading philosophy is useless.
In another thread I used the analogy that economists can offer a lot of useful insights about the economy, but can’t tell the government how to manage, plan and regulate it. The market does that best. But that’s not to say that businesspeople can’t benefit from studying economics–concepts like sunk cost are useful in the business world.
Regarding Rorty’s politics–I believe he said his values came form the assumption that “cruelty is the worst thing that we do.” He also said there was no way to prove that, it was just something that “liberals” believe. Of course when you get into complex public policy debates it is not clear which position is more “cruel,” and I think Rorty would be the first to admit that. Hence I have the same “liberal” values, but very different policy views.
I haven’t read as much philosophy as you, so it would help if you fleshed out your arguments a bit more, perhaps with examples, as I am not familiar with all of the ideas and philosophers that you referred to. For instance, the following is a bit too obscure for me:
“When Rorty says “philosophy” and “philosophers” have nothing to say to scientists, Rorty is talking anout the Carnap/Hempel program. And philosophers talk about science I’ve hardly met when who includes economics in the category.”
Nick, Good one. Of course the title I choose reflects (among other things) that fact that I think many economists have a distorted view of monetary economics.
11. August 2009 at 12:22
Carnap and Hempel were logicians who sought to understand human learning, science, language, and knowledge using developments within their own science — they were scientists studying logic and language and science. They came up with something which eventually had at its core something called the “covering law” model of explanation. There was lots more to it, and the whole effort evolved over time.
Most of Rorty’s work is a reaction again the false picture of science and the rest which Carnap et al thought that “science” and the rest must follow. Rorty then extrapolated and extended his reaction to other philosophers earlier in the philosophical tradition.
Rorty was objecting to Carnap and Hempel “telling” science how to do science — “dictating” that science was really induction and the covering law model, and all of it could be “translated” into this program. (Some of modern physics came out of similar efforts — von Neumann’s work, for example.) Rorty was ignorant of how various parts of the philosophical tradition were already inside the thinking of such folks as the economists — you can document this with the biggest names in the field, Samuelson, Schumpeter, Friedman, Mill, whoever you like.
Scott wrote:
“When Rorty says “philosophy” and “philosophers” have nothing to say to scientists, Rorty is talking anout the Carnap/Hempel program.”
11. August 2009 at 12:30
Folks studying the science of mathematics came up with a new science of logic. Folks studying the science of logic attempted to use there science to understand language, science and knowledge, etc. Economists like Schumpeter and Samuelson derived their picture of how economists works as a science from the picture of science that the great scientist Ernst Mach developed. Carnap and Hempel and the rest derived their own picture of how science works from the same source — Ernst Mach, and they attempted to “improve” it using the new developments in the science of logic. “Positivism” entered economics even _before_ it entered “analytic” philosophy, and it has been just as influential.
Scott writes:
I haven’t read as much philosophy as you, so it would help if you fleshed out your arguments a bit more, perhaps with examples, as I am not familiar with all of the ideas and philosophers that you referred to. For instance, the following is a bit too obscure for me:
“When Rorty says “philosophy” and “philosophers” have nothing to say to scientists, Rorty is talking anout the Carnap/Hempel program.
11. August 2009 at 14:51
Greg is certainly right about history here.
Early 20th century economists were very concerned with philosophy of science. Some of them knew quite a lot about it and some had quite an effect on it.
Piero Sraffa influenced Wittgenstein by making a rude gesture. (I’m not making this up see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Sraffa ). The “Cafeteria Group” at Cambridge explored Hayek’s theories and Keynes’ probability theories.
Hayek was a friend of Popper and his second cousin (I think) was Wittgenstein. Ludvig Von Mises brother was Richard Von Mises, a prominent logical positivist.
12. August 2009 at 09:42
Greg, That is very helpful. But I think it important to distinguish between the low level philosophical speculations of economists, and the methodology of economics. Those are two very different things. It is clear that economists don’t always follow their own professed methodology. But let’s say they do. And let’s say they learned that method from epistemology. I still think there is a big difference between offering methods, and insisting that there is only one method to the truth. It seems to me that Rorty was criticizing the latter—the view that philosophers could referee methodological disputes in the sciences, and tell scientists who was right. Who was using the proper method.
For instance,consider “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” Does that mean that arguments that rely on correlation are not valid? Obviously not. It’s up to scientists and economists to figure out what it means in their particular fields. or how about an appeal to authority–is that valid? Maybe. In economics there is a debate about whether it is valid to ask people why they did something. I don’t know the answer, and I’m pretty sure epistemologists don’t either.
Current, That history doesn’t surprise me. Hume is one of my favorite economists, and he was one of the greatest epistemologists of all time. Economists are always wrestling with epistomological issues, why shouldn’t they be interested in epistomology. I am only opposed to dogmatism:
1. The only test of a theory is its predictions.
2. The only test of a theory is its assumptions.
3. Theories must be refutable
etc.
12. August 2009 at 11:16
Scott: “I am only opposed to dogmatism:
1. The only test of a theory is its predictions.
2. The only test of a theory is its assumptions.
3. Theories must be refutable”
I’d agree with that, I think it’s quite reasonable.
13. August 2009 at 08:21
Scott — the most powerful economists have had a background picture of how to do economics / science — derived from the work of identifiable scientist/philosophers, and at various times they have tried to put that picture in words. The explicit word description often didn’t fully capture their deep picture. In all sorts of ways they have enforced that wider picture on the profession, and it has determined the nature of their own scientific efforts. There have been books written on this, e.g. Paul Samuelson and his “Revealed Preference” project.
And not well, economists have enforced their wider picture on the profession — excluding work and economists who don’t work within it. E.g. Hayek was rejected by the U. of Chicago department of economics — Samuelson, Friedman, and others are on record saying that Hayek did not produce “science”, but his work is instead something closer to Scholasticism. And you can document the wider picture of science that Friedman and Samuelson have, not only from their many, many, many explicit statements about it, but also from the form their work took — and from the economic science which they explicitly rejected.
Economists take a philosophical/scientific picture — and they attempt to referee rival understandings of how to provide sound causal explanations using that picture. They usually have very, very bad grounds for adjudicating these rights — bad grounds taken from the philosophical tradition and badly deployed. Philosopher _can_ help point all this out, and they have (see the work of Alexander Rosenberg, Friedrich Hayek, Daniel Hausman, among others.)
I really don’t like the language of “methods” or “methodology” to be blunt.
This language itself is a product of the philosophical tradition, it comes from Mill and it contains stipulations about the relation between logic and science that derives not only from Mill but also from Kant — and I reject it.
The irony here, is that one of the reasons I find Rorty so inadequate is that he hasn’t fully escaped from this picture — and neither have the economists who find vindication in Rorty’s work.
The Journal of Economic Literature has the “methods” and “methodology” division and picture institutionally embedded in its indexing and publication procedures — that is how deep this mistaken philosophical tradition is BUILT INTO mainstream economics and the profession
I have humbly suggested that economists need to look at rival explanatory strategies — and look for which explanations provide robust and realizable causal processes that can actually exist in the real world. I’ve suggested that Hayek has done this an many formal mathematical economists have not, and much of “mainstream” macroeconomics over the last 4 generations has not (i.e. the stuff is not really compatible with the real world causal process of changing relative prices involving variable time using production processes, among other things — Hayek long-time claim.)
Rorty and the economist fans of Rorty don’t go far enough in removing the fallacies for the philosophical tradition from their picture of knowledge, science, philosophy and economics.
Scott writes:
“That is very helpful. But I think it important to distinguish between the low level philosophical speculations of economists, and the methodology of economics. Those are two very different things. It is clear that economists don’t always follow their own professed methodology. But let’s say they do. And let’s say they learned that method from epistemology. I still think there is a big difference between offering methods, and insisting that there is only one method to the truth. It seems to me that Rorty was criticizing the latter””the view that philosophers could referee methodological disputes in the sciences, and tell scientists who was right. Who was using the proper method.
13. August 2009 at 08:22
The book on Samuelson is Stanley Wong, The Foundations of Paul Sameulson’s Revealed Preference Theory.
13. August 2009 at 08:31
The philosophy David Hull brings careful and sophisticated thinking about very, very hard things to Darwinian biology and biological classification. Hard and careful and sophisticated thinking is a good thing in any science. Often people with a philosophical training can do this kind of work better than people trained in say biology — its a division of labor and specialization thing. Think about it as thinking hard and carefully about hard things that need to be carefully sorted out — the “referee” picture often is used as spin to avoid careful and hard thinking. It’s not refereeing, it’s getting things done successfully — and eliminating hidden errors. Careful and hard thinking shouldn’t be disparaged, whether we are talking about consumer theory, or anything else.
13. August 2009 at 08:49
More than anything, Rorty was simply rejecting the stipulation of a small group of mid-20th century logicians about how knowledge and learning works — and thus the form in which science must be put. He extrapolated from that — without much if any examination of how carefully thinking actually worked in the individual sciences, or what various roles various parts of the philosophical tradition play in those various sciences.
And let me emphasize again — ECONOMISTS have been insisting on what was the right “methodology” in economics and they have been enforcing this insistence through the machinery of the profession — and they have taken this deep picture of the right methodology directly from the philosophical tradition and from popular mistaken assumptions about what science is or must be. The economists ARE the philosophers. They are the philosophers telling other economists “who is right” using erroneous pictures of knowledge and science derived directly out of the philosophical tradition.
Here’s what comes first — sound causal explanations — and out of that people attempt to articulate in words the “methods” that reliably will produce these explanations.
But historically that is not how modern mainstream economics has been built. They’ve started with methodological stipulations and false picture of good science, and they’ve attempted to build “science” following those procedures — and they’ve excluded work and people who don’t follow this vision.
The problem has been the economists — philosophers have not been dictating to economists, economists have been bringing their philosophical and methodological picture derived from the philosophical tradition to economics, and they economists themselves have imposed this picture on the profession.
The problem isn’t people from philosophy departments, and never has been.
Scott writes:
“It seems to me that Rorty was criticizing the latter””the view that philosophers could referee methodological disputes in the sciences, and tell scientists who was right. Who was using the proper method.”
13. August 2009 at 09:09
Thinking carefully about “causation” and its relation to “correlation” is hard. Really hard. Some folks have devoted most of their life to it. Some people haven’t. Some people have very sophisticated tools for talking and thinking about the problems involved. Some people don’t. A division and specialization of labor develops …
Philosophers like David Hull or Elliott Sober or Alexander Rosenberg can take up a very, very complex science like Darwinian bilogy and they CAN do a better job thinking about some of the hardest things in this science than have the biologists themselves — who ofter are preoccupied with field and lab research and publication, and don’t spend any time thinking carefully about the hardest conceptual problems in their science. It’s a fact of life.
It is NOT up to any particular person to figure this stuff out — and professionally the incentive structure is to punt on the hard stuff, and do the empirical research and statistical work and math models instead. That is what the journals are about, that’s what the dissertations are about, etc.
And not well — in economics we have NOT been able to rely upon economists to do this right. Economists don’t write articles “Taking the CON out of econometrics” for no reason, nor did it happen by accident that economists have invariably misused “significance testing”, etc., etc., etc.
Scott writes:
“For instance,consider “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” Does that mean that arguments that rely on correlation are not valid? Obviously not. It’s up to scientists and economists to figure out what it means in their particular fields.”
13. August 2009 at 09:12
Who thinks more carefully about this stuff, and who has written most sensibly on it? Often philosophers of economics or economists with substantial philosophical training — and this begins in economics as far back as the literature on consumer theory and survey taking. See for example Bruce Caldwell’s book on the history of 20th century economic “methodology”.
Scott writes:
“or how about an appeal to authority-is that valid? Maybe. In economics there is a debate about whether it is valid to ask people why they did something. I don’t know the answer, and I’m pretty sure epistemologists don’t either.”
13. August 2009 at 09:35
I reject the philosophical tradition more fully than Rorty, but what you seem to have picked up most completely from Rorty is a parody of what careful thinking about science and knowledge and learning “has to be” — Rorty has taught you that it either “has to be “the mistaken tradition that e.g. Carnap and Descartes and Plato said it had to be, or we have to reject the whole idea of careful and sophisticated thinking about such things and turn to a “it works for me” post-modern relativism, perhaps adjudicated by a professional guild.
Rorty is wrong.
Look, for example, at the work of Thomas Kuhn or Friedrich Hayek or Gerald Edelman or William Bartley of Ludwig Wittgenstein or Larry Wright. The is a lot of careful thinking we can do about knowledge, learning, explanation, science — and about the explanatory strategies used in the individual sciences, e.g. in Darwinian Biology by Mayr, Hull, Sober, Rosenberg and others; and about how the various sciences fit together.
The option is not authoritative dictates from failed Cartesian Epistemology vs. “pragmatism” (whatever that is).
The cartoon of the epistemologist as “outside referee” doesn’t reflect much that has anything to do with what takes place today or has taken place across the history of the development of the various sciences. The epistemology has been done within the individual sciences and as the science develops — Descartes you will recall was a physicist and math guy developing the dominant program in physics, and folks only pushed part of that out of “science” and relabeled in “philosophy” and not “science” retrospectively generations later.
Economics is more unique in being so dominated by the philosophical tradition as it developed in areas outside of its own science, but not completely unique.
Scott writes:
“or how about an appeal to authority-is that valid? Maybe. In economics there is a debate about whether it is valid to ask people why they did something. I don’t know the answer, and I’m pretty sure epistemologists don’t either.”
13. August 2009 at 09:53
The “covering law” model of explanation — the core thing which Rorty is reacting against — was invented by an economist, John Stuart Mill. The economic tradition then bled into the philosophical tradition in Continental Europe. The core rules of the “epistemological referee” that Rorty rejects came from an economist ..
14. August 2009 at 05:23
greg, You said,
“And not well, economists have enforced their wider picture on the profession “” excluding work and economists who don’t work within it. E.g. Hayek was rejected by the U. of Chicago department of economics “” Samuelson, Friedman, and others are on record saying that Hayek did not produce “science”, but his work is instead something closer to Scholasticism. And you can document the wider picture of science that Friedman and Samuelson have, not only from their many, many, many explicit statements about it, but also from the form their work took “” and from the economic science which they explicitly rejected.
Economists take a philosophical/scientific picture “” and they attempt to referee rival understandings of how to provide sound causal explanations using that picture. They usually have very, very bad grounds for adjudicating these rights “” bad grounds taken from the philosophical tradition and badly deployed. Philosopher _can_ help point all this out, and they have (see the work of Alexander Rosenberg, Friedrich Hayek, Daniel Hausman, among others.)”
I actually agree with this. When I said philosophers shouldn’t interfere, I was thinking that they shouldn’t say “You must do things this way.” or “Don’t use this methodology.” If economists are saying those same things, and trying to play the role of referee, they might be making a mistake. I say “might” because obviously I don’t know all the specifics of each case.
You said:
The philosophy David Hull brings careful and sophisticated thinking about very, very hard things to Darwinian biology and biological classification. Hard and careful and sophisticated thinking is a good thing in any science. Often people with a philosophical training can do this kind of work better than people trained in say biology “” its a division of labor and specialization thing. Think about it as thinking hard and carefully about hard things that need to be carefully sorted out “” the “referee” picture often is used as spin to avoid careful and hard thinking. It’s not refereeing, it’s getting things done successfully “” and eliminating hidden errors. Careful and hard thinking shouldn’t be disparaged, whether we are talking about consumer theory, or anything else.”
Again, I agree. But you describe a philosopher who actually learned about the field of biology. Who got his hands dirty, and then made contributions. Not some philosopher sitting in an armchair just thinking about the one way to truth, and then going out and making pronouncements to other fields.
You said;
“More than anything, Rorty was simply rejecting the stipulation of a small group of mid-20th century logicians about how knowledge and learning works “” and thus the form in which science must be put. He extrapolated from that “” without much if any examination of how carefully thinking actually worked in the individual sciences, or what various roles various parts of the philosophical tradition play in those various sciences.”
Even if you are completely right, I would not have changed one word that I wrote about Rorty, as I never claimed he was an expert on methodological discussions in various fields (outside epistemology itself.)
You said;
“And let me emphasize again “” ECONOMISTS have been insisting on what was the right “methodology” in economics and they have been enforcing this insistence through the machinery of the profession “” and they have taken this deep picture of the right methodology directly from the philosophical tradition and from popular mistaken assumptions about what science is or must be.”
I think it is more likely that economics followed its own internal logic, and then looked to philosophy for some support for what they had already decided for other reasons. Economics is a field driven by data. I seem to recall you arguing that Hayek didn’t even know NGDP had plunged sharply in the early 1930s. Perhaps that is one reason why economics became more mathematical. People who didn’t understand what was going on looked pretty silly. And the only way to understand what was going on was to look at numbers.
You said;
“The problem isn’t people from philosophy departments, and never has been.”
I certainly agree with this. Economists have developed their own methods, and philosophers shouldn’t be blamed.
You said:
“And not well “” in economics we have NOT been able to rely upon economists to do this right. Economists don’t write articles “Taking the CON out of econometrics” for no reason, nor did it happen by accident that economists have invariably misused “significance testing”, etc., etc., etc.”
I agree, there is a lot of corruption in economics, and the other sciences as well. The need to publish causes data mining.
You said;
“I reject the philosophical tradition more fully than Rorty, but what you seem to have picked up most completely from Rorty is a parody of what careful thinking about science and knowledge and learning “has to be” “” Rorty has taught you that it either “has to be “the mistaken tradition that e.g. Carnap and Descartes and Plato said it had to be, or we have to reject the whole idea of careful and sophisticated thinking about such things and turn to a “it works for me” post-modern relativism, perhaps adjudicated by a professional guild.”
This seems like a parody of Rorty. He never argued against “careful and sophisticated thinking.” He engaged in it himself. If that thinking is helpful, then he is all for it. And the guild comment reflects Rorty’s description of how things do work, not how they should work. He went against his own guild of epistemologists, after all.
14. August 2009 at 16:00
I’m going to do a little Greg “Lite” because I don’t think you too are understanding each other well….
Scott: “Even if you are completely right, I would not have changed one word that I wrote about Rorty, as I never claimed he was an expert on methodological discussions in various fields (outside epistemology itself.)”
I don’t think you understand what Greg is saying here. He is saying that a person must be involved in science to a reasonable extent to play a role in the development of the philosophy of science.
I think he is saying that in the case of economics most of that philosophy came from inside economics without much other input. But that the same thinkers influenced philosophers too.
I think that epistemologists have had something of a role here since as we said earlier economics has always been quite close to epistemology.
I think that Greg’s criticism of philosophers is quite reasonable though. Mises wrote three books on philosophy of science, “Epistemological problems of Economics”, “Theory and History” and “The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science”. I have not read a review by an epistemologist of any of them. I read about some bloke who lent them to some philosophy students and got them to read them and they didn’t think much of them.
In the 40s and 50s Mises was not an obscure figure in economics. He wrote commentary for the New York Times.
Few though thought it fit to review what he wrote. Which goes back to what Greg was saying earlier. In practice epistemologists aren’t that interested in what scientists think.
I don’t understand how Rorty fits in to the last comment Greg makes :
But I do understand what he means about your comments. You treat the alternatives as being either:
1) Some form of simple pragmatism.
2) Some form of unjustifiable realism.
This isn’t the whole selection. Realism can be very pragmatic, and vice versa.
Consider this part from Mises “Theory and History”:
“It is contradictory to expect that logic could be of any service in demonstrating the correctness or validity of the fundamental logical principles. All that can be said about them is that to deny their correctness or validity appears to the human mind nonsensical and that thinking, guided by them, has led to modes of successful acting.”
So, logic is not derived from observation. But, we see that it is useful in describing observation, so it is pragmatically wise to see it as correct. Attacking logic is attacking all that has been achieved with it. I think Popper makes this point too, but not so briefly.
There are many other important distinctions too apart from how pragmatic a type of epistemology is.
15. August 2009 at 15:52
The actual history of economics tells a different story. (See Mirowski, for example.) Data matters in the history of economic thought also.
Scott writes:
“I think it is more likely that economics followed its own internal logic, and then looked to philosophy for some support for what they had already decided for other reasons. Economics is a field driven by data.”
People slandered Hayek and continue to do so — they’ve been dishonest and nasty for a purpose. Hayek wrote almost nothing on the U.S. Depression, and very, very little on the British situation. Hayek was busy reconstructing economics.
“Data” speaks through theory.
What is more, it takes enormous effort to socially construct economic “data”. Who even had good data before Friedman and Schwartz?
Scott writes:
I seem to recall you arguing that Hayek didn’t even know NGDP had plunged sharply in the early 1930s. Perhaps that is one reason why economics became more mathematical. People who didn’t understand what was going on looked pretty silly. And the only way to understand what was going on was to look at numbers.
15. August 2009 at 18:05
In your discussion of “inflation” as an index, I thought you just explained how such stuff is at once both deeply theory-laden and socially constructed — not even a part of reality. And now knowing “NGDP” figures for the early 1930s in the United States is supposed to be something as easy known as the number of pennies in a cup, done instantaneously and in real time, by people across an ocean mostly interested in their own country? My understanding is that the U.S. government is _still_ revising “facts” like these.
Scott writes:
“Economics is a field driven by data. I seem to recall you arguing that Hayek didn’t even know NGDP had plunged sharply in the early 1930s. Perhaps that is one reason why economics became more mathematical. People who didn’t understand what was going on looked pretty silly. And the only way to understand what was going on was to look at numbers.”
Note well. I didn’t say Hayek didn’t know that NGDP was down significanty in the U.S.
I said Hayek career doing statistical analysis and construction of national data sets was over by 1931 (Hayek was founder and director of the Austrian Institute which put together national economic data — one of the first in Europe), and his policy interest was focused on Britain and not on America.
I said that no one new the exact figures — the institutions for constructing this data were weak and primitive, and people really didn’t get a good understanding of the data and what happen until Friedman and Schwartz.
15. August 2009 at 20:01
Again, I think what Greg says here is correct.
I have a book called “The Use and Abuse of Statistics” by W.J. Reichmann. It was published in 1961, I found my copy in a county council flower bed in Sheffield in 1999. This book mentions the points that Scott mentions about the statistical price inflation rates; how they are arbitary indexes. (Which Mises pointed out long before, as did a few other economists)
It mentions how the constituent parts of the index were derived from research into household spending in 1953. However the index based on those 1953 figures was only started in 1956 and in 1960 the basket still hadn’t been updated from its 1953 values. This is in Britain which had similarly rigourous economic figures as the US.
More importantly, before 1960 the retail price index figure didn’t always come out for the year it was announced. The calculations were so complex for computers of the time that it was sometimes a whole year late, or more.
It is no surprise that economists during the Great Depression knew so little.
In my view Hayek’s particular problem was that he was thinking in the terms of Mises book “The Theory of Money and Credit”. In that book Mises points out that if the customers of a bank-of-issue are storing their banknotes in their mattresses then that bank-of-issue will not see redemptions. Since it won’t see redemptions it can print money quite freely, it can in modern parlance “quantatively ease”. (It can print until the threat of industrial users of gold redeeming banknotes for their supplies rears it’s head, something Wicksell pointed out).
As I understand things though, this wasn’t the case in many countries during the Great Depression. Banks of issue weren’t free to issue or they were tied to state policies. (Perhaps this is incorrect, I’d like to see what your forthcoming book says about it).
17. August 2009 at 00:39
Current, You said;
“I don’t think you understand what Greg is saying here. He is saying that a person must be involved in science to a reasonable extent to play a role in the development of the philosophy of science.”
But I thought that was what Rorty was saying. I thought Rorty criticized epistemologists who came from the outside and tried to impose rules on fields that they knew little about.
Your point about logic seems reasonable. But I doubt Rorty ever attacked logic as not useful, perhaps he said it isn’t objectively true, but how important is that point if Rorty supported logic for other reasons.
I’m jet lagged so I hope my replies aren’t off topic.
Greg, You said;
“In your discussion of “inflation” as an index, I thought you just explained how such stuff is at once both deeply theory-laden and socially constructed “” not even a part of reality. And now knowing “NGDP” figures for the early 1930s in the United States is supposed to be something as easy known as the number of pennies in a cup, done instantaneously and in real time, by people across an ocean mostly interested in their own country? My understanding is that the U.S. government is _still_ revising “facts” like these.”
I see your point, but I think my point still has some validity. Those economists who followed data closely saw lots of indications that both output and prices were falling sharply, even in the UK. If it was a close call I’d have more sympathy for your point here, but the declines in both variables were large and rather obvious to people looking at data in the news. So I can see how Hayek might be viewed as being out of touch. That’s not reflection on his theoretical brilliance, but if he was making policy suggestions at the time, I think it is relevant.
I think Friedman and Schwartz added new information on the monetary aggregates, but Hayek’s views weren’t based on M1 or M2.
Current, The newspapers of the 1930s (and I read every single NYT, and a bunch of others from The Economist, WSJ, etc.) were full of data. True, they didn’t have NGDP, although even for that variable you saw occasional estimates of “dollar national income” falling in half in the US. But all the big countries had monthly data on wholesale prices, and many including the US and UK had retail price indicesd monthly. And there were lots of real output indicators like industrial production that were widely available and were plunging very fast. So the broad outlines of the Great Depression were available at the time, just not very precise GDP numbers.
Believe me, people knew we were in a big Depression, the papers were full of stories of mass unemployment, falling trade, falling corporate profits, falling steel production. There was almost no good news.
The economies were more based on “things” back then, like tons of steel, so in some sense it was easier to get “objective” data for a good chunk of the economy.
17. August 2009 at 05:56
The point though is that epistemologists have not being that involved in science (at least not as far as I know). Their impositions are not useful because they haven’t been that involved. Not because they couldn’t be useful. There’s the book “Fashionable Nonsense” by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. They criticize post-modernism which is something I understand many philosophers disagree with too. They criticize it in a rather dodgy way though.
I wasn’t saying here that Rorty wouldn’t accept the point. My point is that the realist/pragmatist split isn’t really that clear. Some “realist” philosophers support points that you may consider “pragmatist”.
Regarding retail prices and other statistics. This is interesting. Perhaps my book on statistics is wrong.
Certainly everyone knew there was a big depression on. But there’s a bit more to it than that. The thing I’ve seen people attack Hayek for is his comment in the preface of “Monetary Theory of the Trade Cycle” where he opposes “forced credit expansion”. Notice the word “forced”. Hayek didn’t consider it “forced” when banks created more money in chequing accounts due to demand. He considered it forced when government told them to do that or printed money.
17. August 2009 at 23:00
Hayek didn’t offer policy advice for America.
He only once offered his view on Britain — and I’ve explained the 1925 British context and his large overlap of agreement with Keynes on the economics and the politics.
And in light of better information and Hayek change his view of both the significant political and economic landscape of those years — and he change NOT his economic theory but his understanding of the policy which best fit his changed understanding of the facts on the ground.
To attack Hayek on the grounds of what he wrote about the American depression is absurd. Hayek didn’t study or write about it.
The question is why people have such a felt need to attack Hayek on fraudulent grounds.
And certainly Hayek’s views of any historical episode DO depend in part on changes
in the money supply.
19. August 2009 at 03:12
Current, A lot of post-modernism probably is nonsense.
I have no idea what “forced credit expansion” is. Doies that mean bankers point guns at peoples’ heads, and force them to borrow money?
Greg, It would be interesting to study how all sorts of famous economists like Friedman and Krugman reached the conclusion that Austrian economists opposed expansionary policies druing the Great Depression, when in fact Hayek said nothing on the US and only discussed the UK situation in 1925.
BTW, do you find it odd that a world famous macroeconomist would have nothing to say on the Great Depression, while it was, like, ACTUALLY OCCURRING. I have to admit that I find Hayek’s attitude bewildering. I read a recent piece (I think it was in the JMCB) defending Hayek’s views on the Depression. And all I could think was “with friends like these . . . “
19. August 2009 at 10:35
Hayek commented briefly on _the British situation in the early 1930s_ in the context of the 1925 return to the gold standard an par.
You keep characterizing this falsely. Weird.
Krugman knows almost no history of economic thought – or any literature written in prose from the prior to his own time. He’s flatly admitted this.
Friedman has no no background in intellectual history or the history of economic ideas either.
19. August 2009 at 10:41
Have you seen how much work Hayek theoretical produced in the 1930s?
Have you ever heard of Hitler or the rise of “hot” socialist theory?
Hayek had a lot on his plate. Domestic British counter cycle policy was far down
on his agenda
19. August 2009 at 10:46
Historians of econ thought don’t even think Friedman got the history of the U. Of Chigago “oral” tradition in monetary theory right.
Read Garrison on Krugman if you hold the mistaken belief that Krugman knows what he’s talking about when he writes about Hayek.
19. August 2009 at 10:48
Economists make up a false history to serve their own rhetorical purposes.
There are dozens of “Hayek myths” out there. I’ve written about this. Bruce Caldwell
call debunking these “shooting fish in a barrel”.
19. August 2009 at 11:03
For Hayek what was important were the causes of the bust of 1929 – which Hayek identified as early as Feb. of 1929. Hayek cared about theory, not so much about explaining the course of contemporary economic history or conducting day to day British policy. Hayek’s taste was for science, not so much journalism or public controversy (for Hayek _TRtoS_ was a public duty, his war work).
Hayek had to work day and night to produce the work he churned out in the 1930s — leaving little time for worrying about anti-cycle particulars of a country he was not a
citizen of.
19. August 2009 at 16:34
Scott: “A lot of post-modernism probably is nonsense.”
Yes. My point is that though philosphers would generally agree with that they have not being so vocal in saying so.
There is a website called http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com which is a comment quite well known in the UK, it made it into an Oasis lyric. Have you heard Margaret Midgley’s comments on Richard Dawkin’s work? They would be quite easily tackled by anyone who knew anything about philosophy at the time. I could tackle them now even though I’m neither a philosopher or an evolutionary biologist, I was young at the time the controversies occurred. But, what happened was that Richard Dawkins and his allies had to learn philosophy themselves so they could tackle them.
Scott: “I have no idea what “forced credit expansion” is. Doies that mean bankers point guns at peoples’ heads, and force them to borrow money?”
What Hayek meant was states leaning on central banks to expand the money supply. He was opposing leaning on central banks in order to get them to print more than they would otherwise. And opposing central banks leaning on private banks in order to get them to lend more.
I agree with what Greg has said, though I wish he’d write it in one post.
19. August 2009 at 17:56
@ssumner
you would probably enjoy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-War-Stephen-Mechanics/dp/0316016411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250736709&sr=8-1
in it the author runs through among other things many of the classic thought experiments of einstein and many of the principles of physical law in a very readable way. he usually goes about it by invoking an invariant taken from a point of view: a person in an elevator can’t tell — there is no physical way to tell — whether they are accelerating or whether they weigh more, for example — and then drawing out all the consequences of these experiments.
24. August 2009 at 00:33
Greg, You said;
“Hayek commented briefly on _the British situation in the early 1930s_ in the context of the 1925 return to the gold standard an par.
You keep characterizing this falsely. Weird.”
I am just responding to what you said. I know nothing about this other than what I’ve been told by you, and what I read in a recent JMCB piece.
You said;
“Have you ever heard of Hitler or the rise of “hot” socialist theory?
Hayek had a lot on his plate. Domestic British counter cycle policy was far down
on his agenda”
Hitler had little chance of rising to power without the Great Depression. He was very obscure in 1929. So I would think anyone interested in the rise of Hitler would be concerned with the Great Depression.
The bottom line is that the Great Depression was by far the most important macroeconomic event of the 20th century. If the Austrians had something useful to say about it while it was actually going on, I’d love to hear what it is. So far I have heard mostly denials that Austrians believed this or that. What did they believe should be done about the Great Depression? And which Austrians should one read if Hayek had little to say?
You said,
“For Hayek what was important were the causes of the bust of 1929 – which Hayek identified as early as Feb. of 1929.”
Well I certainly hope Hayek didn’t think the “bust of 1929” caused the Great Depression. The forces that caused the Great Depression (deflationary monetary policies) also caused the stock market crash of late 1929.
You said;
“Hayek had to work day and night to produce the work he churned out in the 1930s “” leaving little time for worrying about anti-cycle particulars of a country he was not a
citizen of.”
What did he think of the anti-cycle particulars of the country he was a citizen of? And why wouldn’t a macroeconomist be interested in by far the biggest worldwide economic disaster of the last 100 years? Macroeconomics is about current public policy issues, or it is about nothing.
Current, There is a huge difference between increasing the money supply and increasing credit. The Fed recently doubled the money supply, but credit is falling. The central bank can’t force credit to rise.
Thanks for the tip q.
24. August 2009 at 01:51
This discussion about Hayek strikes me as being unproductive. Scott, why do you think that it matters so much what Hayek said about policy in the 1930s? If you want to understand Hayek’s view on macroeconomic issues why not read his books? In fact interpreting his comments at the time is very difficult for two reasons. Firstly because they pertain to the institutional situation of that times. Secondly, because they come from the theoretical framework of that time and Hayek’s version of it in-particular.
I don’t understand this comment at all, surely, macroeconomics is firstly a science. It is about understanding how the macroeconomy works. Certainly such study suggests policies.
Who cares if an macroeconomist makes no comments about the great depression during it? That certainly doesn’t diminish them in my eyes at all. Economists have practically no say over public policy. Remember we live in democracies. That means that the masses elect a political class, the masses rule. Economists have little influence over either. What influence economists do have is long term. It consists in educating those who can be educated in the best ways of understanding the social world. Perhaps in the long term that will affect decisions makers.
I know. We’ve discussed that a lot recently. You’ve completely persuaded me that this point is much more general than I’d realised before.
Surely it is possible for the central bank to induce more credit to be granted than would have been otherwise? They can push the rate of interest below the natural rate.
27. August 2009 at 00:25
Scott, I can’t make sense of your remarks on Hayek, they are so disconnected from any understanding of his work or the history of economic thought of that period.
Do you know who Lionel Robbins or Gottfried Haberler are?
27. August 2009 at 02:48
Current; You said;
“This discussion about Hayek strikes me as being unproductive. Scott, why do you think that it matters so much what Hayek said about policy in the 1930s? If you want to understand Hayek’s view on macroeconomic issues why not read his books?”
When I read a macroeconomist’s theories it all seems to me to be a bunch of meaningless words, until and unless they apply it to specific historical episodes with which I am familiar. For instance, I find the General Theory almost unreadable. Only when Keynes gave an example of a liquidity trap–the failed Fed OMOs of the spring of 1932–did the General Theory spring to life. At that moment I knew exactly what Keynes was talking about, and I also knew he was wrong. Until then I simply wondered why Keynes did not recommend OMOs pursued a l’outrance. That’s why I care so much what Hayek has to say about historical episodes, it is the only way to make heads or tails of his views. It is a way of translating his views from his private language into my private language. We all mean very different things by terms such as equilibrium, monetary policy, credit, money supply, inflation, etc.
I think economists are hugely influential in the area of monetary policy. That is why I am so frustrated. Macroeconomists caused the crash of 2008.
Greg, I have heard of them. I haven’t read them for a long time.
27. August 2009 at 07:44
Robbins & Haberler applied some aspects of Hayek’s money/credit/production micro/macro to the onset of the Depression in “real time”.
But they didn’t get that Hayek was a stable MV guy and agreed that well designed and non-stupid fiscal and monetary policy could play a role in counteracting the “secondary deflation” .
I get the importance of historical example. I don’t get the ides that Hayek’s theoretical work can’t be understood without being mixed with 1930s economic history.
This just seems like math economist laziness.
27. August 2009 at 08:51
Scott,
I see what you mean about Keynes, I agree that the General Theory is very confusing. I’ve only read parts of it, and I found it that way even though I’d already learnt about Keynesian economics beforehand.
I see what you mean about terminology. The terminology of eighty years ago was different from today. Some of this was because of fashion, some because of improvements in knowledge since then and some because of the specific institutional circumstances of the time. However, I don’t think it’s that difficult to understand this older terminology. “The General Theory” isn’t typical of economics books.
I don’t think that interpreting the policy comments of past economists is any easier than reading their books. In this discussion there are ~26000 words (I saved it to a text file and checked). In “Prices and Production” there are ~47000 words.
The comments that economists made in the past were also mostly relevant to the political and institutional situations of that time. These have changed since, in some cases a comment may not even be relevant at all today. Amongst your background on Krugman is the idea that he thinks that central banks are more conservative than governments. Will that be clear to those reading Krugman’s comments in fifty years time? Similarly, you have written about how Keynes’ work takes place in the institutional setting of the gold standard, and how the implications of this have been widely missed. Surely if you examine economic ideas by looking at the policy prescriptions of those who held them you will likely fall into the same trap?
BTW, Have you read econlog recently? They’re talking about you all over the place.
27. August 2009 at 09:20
Scott, I also don’t get that you don’t understand that modern socially constructed macro data wasn’t on the shelf in real time in the 1930s.
And I don’t get that you don’t understand that Hayek did his empirical
work in the 1920s and turned to deeper scientific matters in the 1930s.
27. August 2009 at 11:28
Scott, you keep pretending you didn’t read what you’ve already commented on. You’ve already acknowledged yourself that the depth and length and severity of the”Great Depression” was causally overdetermined — do we need to go over this ground again? I didn’t think so.
The artificial boom and inevitable bust of the late 1920s didn’t have to be conjoined with Smoot-Hawley and a “Real Bills” policy response from the Fed. or the bank regulatory regime of the U.S. or Hoover & Roosevelt’s idiot policy responses. What don’t you get about this?
In the late 1920s in the first instance you have the Fed pushing money and credit into the financial sector and into housing in an environment were significant productivity increases should have been benignly dropping the “price level” as greater output at lower cost dramatically reduced prices. We know why the Fed did this — in part to help with the serious problems created by Britain’s idiotic attempt to go back on the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war par.
What don’t you get about that history?
Pathological deflation wasn’t simply a “policy” it was a consequence of a “secondary deflationary process” put in operation by an attempt to de-leverage in the face of a pulling back by the Fed from its stock market bubble inducing policies — the Fed then made things worse by not adequately acting to stablize MV. And all of this happened in the context of a pathological banking regulatory scheme (what do I need to add to this part of the story?).
I don’t understand how “deflationary policy” alone can do the magic you demand of it — or how you can contend that the deflationary story can be anything causally different from the causal story of a halting of an “asset bubble” inducing accelerating expansion of money and credit beyond the benignly lowered price level appropriate to a factoring in of significant productivity gains.
Scott writes:
“I certainly hope Hayek didn’t think the “bust of 1929″³ caused the Great Depression. The forces that caused the Great Depression (deflationary monetary policies) also caused the stock market crash of late 1929.”
Scott writes:
“What did they believe should be done about the Great Depression? And which Austrians should one read if Hayek had little to say?
You said,
“For Hayek what was important were the causes of the bust of 1929 – which Hayek identified as early as Feb. of 1929.”
Well
27. August 2009 at 11:31
Read Steven Horwitz _Microfoundations and Macroeconomics_ for the basics.
“What did they believe should be done about the Great Depression? And which Austrians should one read if Hayek had little to say?
27. August 2009 at 11:39
Scott, I don’t get your idea that people living through history are suppose to better understand the facts and explain what is happening than economic history specialists years later attempting to reconstruct and explain events in the light of much better information and much fuller knowledge of the causal interplay and historical outcome of what at the time were often only dimly seen factors and forces.
27. August 2009 at 14:05
Read also economic historian Robert Higgs, _Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy_.
Scott writes:
“What did they believe should be done about the Great Depression? And which Austrians should one read if Hayek had little to say?
27. August 2009 at 14:09
Sorry for the frustration evident in the above remarks.
We make one, two, even three steps forward, and then it seems we’re suddenly back where we started …
27. August 2009 at 19:11
Think about how many year it took Friedman — with help — to write his Monetary History. There are massive opportunity costs here.
Hayek wouldn’t be the second most cited economist in the lectures of the Nobel winners if he’d spent his time doing historical work.
A division of labor works even in economic science.
29. August 2009 at 20:28
Greg, I haven’t read much Hayek, but can you imagine someone reading the General Theory and trying to understand it without knowing the context? They would wonder what in the world Keynes was talking about. A modern graduate student would wonder—“if the problem is lack of AD, they why not simply target inflation at 5% a year?” The GT has no answer to the question, so the student might throw down the book in disgust, wondering why Keynes wasted 400 words when there was a one sentence solution to the problem he addressed. I’m sorry that I don’t know enough about Hayek to offer an equivilent example, but perhaps the Keynes example can allow you to see what I am getting at.
BTW, if one did understand the context of the GT, one would understand why Keynes never proposed that solution. He lived in a world where a managed fiat regime with floating exchange rates was viewed as an abomination.
More to come . . .
30. August 2009 at 15:23
Current; You said;
“I see what you mean about terminology. The terminology of eighty years ago was different from today.”
Even worse, no two economists use exactly the same meaning for all terms. Terms like ‘money’ and ‘inflation’ vary in meaning from one economist to the next. Lots of my commenters say the 1920s (a period of deflation) was a highly inflationary period. How can I know what they mean unless I study the history of the 1920s?
Yes, I agree that institutional setups are very important to understanding their theories. But at the time most economists think of the intitutional set-up as “normal” and often aren’t even aware how it infuences how they think. Just as fish don’t think about the fact they they are “wet” Keynes never thought about that fact that his world didn’t feature long term inflation expectations. He could hardly imagine a controlled fiat regime. I suspect the same was true of the interwar Austrians, but that is based on highly superficial knowledge, and I’d have to do a lot more research to establish that fact. But the notion that a recession is in some sense caused by the errors in the preceding boom is a very gold standard way of looking at things.
Greg, You said;
“Scott, I also don’t get that you don’t understand that modern socially constructed macro data wasn’t on the shelf in real time in the 1930s.”
Maybe because I have studied the period closely, and I know that the data they needed was available in real time. There were all sorts of monthly price indicices and output indices abvailable. Arguably the data was far better than we have today because it was less contaminated by nonsense like “imputed rents.” Thus when we went into deep slumps the interwar economists immediately saw the price and output indices falling sharply.
You said;
“The artificial boom and inevitable bust of the late 1920s didn’t have to be conjoined with Smoot-Hawley and a “Real Bills” policy response from the Fed. or the bank regulatory regime of the U.S. or Hoover & Roosevelt’s idiot policy responses. What don’t you get about this?”
I don’t think the boom was artificial. Stocks were high in mid-1929 for very good reasons–the macro economy was in healthier shape than it has ever been before or since. The Great Depression was caused by mistakes that happened after mid-1929. I agree that the other factors you mentioned made things worse.
You said;
“Pathological deflation wasn’t simply a “policy” it was a consequence of a “secondary deflationary process” put in operation by an attempt to de-leverage in the face of a pulling back by the Fed from its stock market bubble inducing policies “” the Fed then made things worse by not adequately acting to stablize MV.”
The initial deflation in the first year of the Depression was an explicit policy—the Fed dramatically increased its gold reserve ratio in violation of the “rules of the game.” They should have responded to the gold inflow by increasing the monetary base, instead it was reduced about 5% between October 1929 and October 1930.
More later . . .
30. August 2009 at 15:43
Greg, You said;
“Scott, I don’t get your idea that people living through history are suppose to better understand the facts and explain what is happening than economic history specialists years later attempting to reconstruct and explain events in the light of much better information and much fuller knowledge of the causal interplay and historical outcome of what at the time were often only dimly seen factors and forces.”
That is not quite my point. I like to see how they put they theory into action, it helps me to understand the theory better. I recognize that mistakes will be made because later observers have a clearer picture. Thanks for the Steven Horwitz and Higgs references, although I was most interested in knowing what other contemporaneous Austrian observers of the Depression thought about what was going on at the time.
You said;
“Think about how many year it took Friedman “” with help “” to write his Monetary History. There are massive opportunity costs here.
Hayek wouldn’t be the second most cited economist in the lectures of the Nobel winners if he’d spent his time doing historical work.
A division of labor works even in economic science.”
Yes, but don’t macroeconomics need to have strong views about how their theories relate to current events. I don’t think it was necessary to study the Great Depression in depth, it seems to me that if one simple read the news they would have seen nominal GDP plunging all over the world–why won’t a macroeconomist offer an opinion on that?
I guess we are going around in circles here, and I understand that you think my demand is unfair. But I just want to emphasize that I am not arguing Hayek or any other Austrian needed to become some sort of data nerd, I am asking for casual commentary on current events.
I started this blog before I had even taken a casual look at much of the data. When I finally got around to doing so, it took me only a few minutes to confirm what I suspected. Yes, Hayek didn’t have the internet, but papers like the NYT and The Economist had lots of graphs showing quite clearly the stylized facts of the Great Depression.
31. August 2009 at 09:58
See the work of Robbins and Haberler. Note well that each had a different version of capital based macro — and that Haberler seemed to think that what Hayek agreed could be helpful counter-secondary deflation actions _within Hayek’s famework_, Haberler sometimes seemed to be able to imagine only as outside of it or as in opposition to it, which was an obvious mistake.
Scott writes:
“I am asking for casual commentary on current events.”
31. August 2009 at 10:05
I’m guessing that Hayek would have found the data emphasized then more useful than some of the Keynesian constructs being put together since the 1950s and 60s.
But I’ve always been under the impression that Friedman and Schwartz brought something new to the table .. am I mistaken?
Perhaps my conception of things has been distorted by all of the praise for “what Friedman proved”.
Scott wrote:
“I know that the data they needed was available in real time. There were all sorts of monthly price indicices and output indices abvailable. Arguably the data was far better than we have today “
31. August 2009 at 10:07
Lionel Robbins, _The Great Depression_ 1934, read it in PDF here:
http://www.mises.org/books/depression-robbins.pdf
2. September 2009 at 15:34
Greg, Sorry, but I can’t open your Robbins link on my computer in China. Let’s revisit this in late September, as I would be very interested in what Robbins has to say.
Friedman and Schwartz redefined money as the broader aggregates (previously it have been defined as the monetary base.) This linguistic slight of hand led to radically different conclusions about the stance of monetary policy, and hence the validity of the quantity theory. In my view Friedman’s greatest contributions were not his monetarism, but rather his criticism of Keynesian views. (Such as their assumption that low interest rates meant easy money. Or their view that the economiy did not self-correct once expectations adjusted.)
27. November 2016 at 12:56
The astronomy example puzzles me; how closely our model reflects objective reality is somewhat orthogonal to whether “objective reality” exists in the first place. Elsewhere, the author asks if a model that is right 99.8% of the time is “false” while one that is right 99.99% of the time is “true” (or something to that effect). Truth is quantitative/probabilistic, not binary; some models are more “true” than others, but their level of “truthiness” is still an objective fact.
If this well known piece by Asimov has not been referenced yet, I’d be surprised, but here he sums it up quite well:
“When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
30. November 2016 at 17:30
David Deutsch: An honor to have you post here, sir. I loved (and studied) both The Fabric of Reality, and also The Beginning of Infinity. (My favorite part: your argument that US winner-take-all politics allow citizens to learn about policy consequences over time, in a way that the ostensibly “more fair” proportional parliamentary elections do not.)
As to your comment here, I don’t think there’s any conflict. Sumner’s OP merely claimed that all scientific knowledge is approximate, none of it is “really true”. As you say, that’s a different topic than whether there “really is” an objective universe out there. And yes, the Asimov observation is great.
5. December 2016 at 19:18
David Deutsch: In case you’re reading these comments, Sumner has posted a followup for you.