Wetenschapsleer (Economic methodology)
Introduction.
Economic methodology investigates the nature of economics as a science. It examines the
basis and grounds for the explanations economists give to answer why questions about the
economy. Furthermore, economic methodology makes use of both descriptive and
prescriptive approaches.
- Descriptive: aims to describe the different types of economic research practices and their
results. Descriptive methodology is often denoted as positive methodology, which concerns
the question of how science is actually practiced (how it is). (Positus ! ponere = put, place).
- Prescriptive: distinguishes between good and bad explanations in economics and considers
how good explanations should be formulated. An example of a good explanation is one that
has survived severe testing. Prescriptive methodology in philosophy of science is denoted as
normative methodology, and concerns the question of how science ought to be practiced.
H1. The received view of science.
What came to be known as the received view, also the standard view, derives from the logical
positivists program in philosophy science, developed in the 20th century. Logical positivists
actively sought to combine aspects of logicism and positivism.
- Logicism: that all scientific language, including mathematics, is an extension of logic.
Aantekeningen: “de wetenschappelijke taal is de meest voor de hand liggende taal. De logica
is de eerste formele abstracte taal omdat dit de taal is die het meest transparant, eenduidig en
helder is. Het heeft een duidelijke structuur.”
- Positivism: empiricism, in which the senses are the only source of knowledge (knowledge
arises out of sense experience).
The main aim of the logical positivists program was to demarcate scientific knowledge, to
distinguish science from non-science/pseudo-science, and to remove any kind of metaphysical
or imagined content from scientific knowledge. Demarcation is a normative methodology.
Their demarcation rule was to accept only analytic and synthetic a posteriori propositions or
statements as scientific knowledge.
- Analytic: propositions that are tautological – they are true by definition. E.g.: ‘all bachelors
are unmarried males’ & ‘1+1=2.’
- Synthetic: all other, non-analytical propositions, which must be testable. There is another
source to find out whether propositions are true or not. If these propositions are shown to be
true by empirical research, they are called synthetic a posteriori propositions. E.g.: ‘the color
of the coffee I am drinking is light brown’ & ‘my lecturer wears glasses.’
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) introduced a third category of propositions whose truth is not
shown by empirical research and which are not true by definition:
-Synthetic a priori: propositions including Newton’s laws and that the geometry of our space
is Euclidean. Kant regarded these propositions as being universally true and which will never
change. They are true on the basis of laws.
Kant’s propositions were challenged by developments in mathematics and physics and as a
result, the logical positivists denied the existence of synthetic a priori propositions in science
and asserted that all propositions that are not true by definition should be subjected to
investigation by empirical research. Aantekeningen: “na WOI; wetenschap moet gebaseerd
zijn op waarheden en het moet helder en duidelijk zijn.”
For the logical positivists, empiricism consisted of two related assumptions:
1. All evidence bearing on synthetic statements derives from sense perception, in contrast to
analytic statements, which are true by definition.
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, 2. Propositions are meaningful only if it is possible to tell by means of sense perception
whether something belongs to their extensions; predicates must be empirically verifiable.
The logical positivists drew a clear distinction between syntactics and semantics:
- Syntactics: deal with the formal relations between signs or expressions in abstraction from
their signification and interpretation. E.g.: well-formed statements, proof or consistency.
- Semantics: deals with the signification and interpretation of the signs or expressions. E.g.:
truth and meaning (met betrekking tot de betekenis van woorden of deze bepalend).
They also made a distinction between what they termed the context of discovery and the
context of justification. According to the logical positivist the context of discovery (the way
in which a theory is discovered) is of no concern to philosophers of science and the context of
justification surely is.
Scientific theories were accordingly seen as systematic collections of concepts, principles,
and explanations that organize our empirical knowledge of the world. The main problem for
philosophy of science is to explain the relation between theory and evidence. According to the
logical positivists understanding of theory, also referred to as the syntactic view, the proper
characterization of a scientific theory consists of an axiomatization in first-order formal
language. This is a syntactic reduction of a theory to a set of axioms (x,y,z or A,B,C). The
axioms are formulations of logical laws that specify relationships between theoretical terms.
When theoretical terms are completely defined in observational terms, they are said to be
operationalized. According to the received view, for a proposition to be meaningful it is
necessary that all the theoretical terms are operationalized. E.g.: the measurement of
unemployment.
An explanation is an answer to a why question. A scientific explanation
should show some event or regularity to be an example of a fundamental
law. Carl Hempel developed this view systematically into what is called
the deductive-nomological (DN) model of explanation. In a DN
explanation, a statement of what is to be explained (the explanandum) is
deduced from a set of true statements that includes at least one law
(nomos). The fundamental problem with this model of explanation is that it requires the
generalization in the explanas to be laws. But how can we be certain that this is the case?
Laws are empirical regularities (‘the sun rises every day’) that have to be universal and that
have no restrictions or exceptions. They are essential for scientific explanation and scientific
prediction. Without laws, we can only describe.
Symmetry thesis: explanation and prediction are two sides of the same coin, which can be
equally demonstrated with the DN model. Explanation involves filling in what is missing
above the inference line. Prediction involves filling in what is missing below the inference
line.
Problem of induction: observations can only justify singular statements and never general
statements (“all swans are white”). It implies that there are no universal, including laws,
which can be based on sense data. This in turn implies that laws should be removed from
science, which would mean that science is reduced to the provision of descriptions only. This
created a dilemma for the logical positivists, to which they offered two different responses:
1. Instrumentalism. The view that laws are useful instruments whose value is measured not
by whether they are true or false, but by how effectively they explain and predict phenomena.
Thus, laws should be evaluated in terms of their usefulness to explain things.
2. Confirmationism. The view that laws do not express certain knowledge about the world,
but instead express probabilistic knowledge. The more they are confirmed, the higher their
probability. Nothing is certain, but we can confirm things based on patterns.
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