David F. Ruccio — Liberal Superman theory

Epistemology rather than economics.

Epistemological absolutism holds that there are absolute criteria and methods available for applying them to gain certain knowledge. Epistemological relativism holds that there are neither.

Without getting into the weeds about this, suffice it to say that this epistemological distinction is not particularly relevant to the point that Professor Ruccio makes in the post, which revolves around mistaking ideology for fact. Here he is spot on and can be shown regardless of whether one is an epistemological relativist or absolutist.

This also accounts for the obsession with controlling the narrative in order to shape consensus reality and the role of "experts" in doing it. This is just plain old sophistry, know colloquially as "duping the rubes."

Occasional Links & Commentary
Liberal Superman theory
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Andrew Gelman — Alan Sokal’s comments on “Abandon Statistical Significance”

If you are keeping up with this. Some finer points.

From the epistemological point of view, criticism of statistical significance here is based on questioning a criterion that is stipulated, i.e., defined arbitrarily.

Doing so gives formalization and modeling a greater importance than advancing understanding. That is unscientific.

A pragmatic approach is more appropriate than a strictly formal one, especially as an institutional norm.

Formal rigor is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Don't lose the forest for the trees.

The quest for knowledge is the quest for a consensual world view based on reasoning and evidence. This is based on many inputs and their consilience within the framework. This is an ongoing enterprise and science is not the only contributor to it. But science based on naturalism is a very significant contributor, tethering knowledge to logical pedigree and empirical warrant.

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Alan Sokal’s comments on “Abandon Statistical Significance”
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

Also

true economics
Ambiguity Fun: Perceptions of Rationality?Constantin Gurdgiev | chairman of the Ireland-Russia Business Association, contributor and former editor of Business & Finance Magazine, and lecturer in Finance with Trinity College, Dublin

Kenneth L. Pearce — George Berkeley and the power of words

John Locke's epistemological realism versus George Berkeley's linguistic constructivism. Subsequent findings favor Berkeley's view. Human's participate in the construct of their reality through the way they express themselves about it and their relationship to it.

Short and worth a read.

OUPblog — Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World
George Berkeley and the power of words

Kenneth L. Pearce | Ussher Assistant Professor in Berkeley Studies (Early Modern Philosophy) in Trinity College Dublin

Lars P. Syll — My philosophy of economics

A critique yours truly sometimes encounters is that as long as I cannot come up with some own alternative to the failing mainstream theory, I shouldn’t expect people to pay attention.

This is however to totally and utterly misunderstand the role of philosophy and methodology of economics!

As John Locke wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding….

Science is a competition of ideas in an arena where evidence is the final arbiter.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
My philosophy of economics
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Lord Keynes — The Difference between a priori and a posteriori Probability

Key epistemological distinction.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Difference between a priori and a posteriori Probability
Lord Keynes

Scott Adams — Science Proves Science is an Illusion

This is a pretty fair summary of the position of perennial wisdom, although PW is moe sophisticated. Scott Adams seems to have stumbled upon it. However, it doesn't seem to have realized yet that this implies that "consciousness"is primary rather than "matter," and that it's all done with "smoke and mirrors." The quotes mean that these terms are ambiguous in ordinary language and needs further specification to be meaningful. In a sense, that is what the history of world thought is about. "Philosophy" is too restrictive.

Anyway, Scott's post is a fun read. Make what you want of it.

Scott Adams' Blog
Science Proves Science is an Illusion

Scott Adams

Asad Zaman — Theories of Knowledge

The following is the foundation on which the argument is built. The whole post is worth reading from the point of view of heterodoxy successfully confronting orthodoxy.

All heterodox economists agree on one thing, by definition of heterodoxy: orthodox economics contains (huge) errors. INSTEAD of explaining what these errors are and trying to fix them, I would like to stand back from the fray and try to examine what is going on from a distance. WHAT makes certain theories popular? WHY do most people come to believe in theories? WHAT causes changes in these beliefs? By studying the Methodology of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, I came to the understanding that theories can only be understood within their historical context. This understanding is violently in conflict with the conception of knowledge, based on positivist ideas, that I learned in the universities. Contrary to positivist ideas, to understand the process of emergence of theories, and how these theories change over time, one has to do analysis at three levels simultaneously:

LEVEL 1: The Historical Facts, the Context, The Various Groups engaged in the struggle for power, and their interests and ideological positions.

LEVEL 2: The THEORIES which are in use by different groups to analyze the historical experience. It is crucial to understand theories as the lens and framework used by different groups to understand history. Theories prescribe actions to be taken, and groups act to shape history in light of understanding furnished by (often false) theories.

LEVEL 3: Rise and fall of theories as a consequence of the shifting sands of political fortunes of different groups, as well as twists and turns of emergent historical events.…
The naive notion about emergence and adoption of theories can be summarized as:

STANDARD (logical positivist) THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: A theory will be discarded once it is shown to be false. A theory will be adopted if it can be proven to be true.

On the basis of this positivist idea, we try to prove that dominant theories are false, and offer alternatives which we try to prove true. We think that if we are successful in this attempt, our theories will be accepted. Of all people, heterodox economists should be the first to understand that this theory of knowledge is wrong. They are witness to the long standing dominance and widespread acceptance of theories which are obviously false, and easily demonstrated to be wrong. Thus we need to move to a more sophisticated theory of knowledge. Foucault builds on Marx, and provides a very useful improvement.

POWER/KNOWLEDGE: Theories which are aligned with interests of power become accepted. Moreover, acceptance of these theories actually creates power — power and knowledge are entangled.

Thus, acceptance of neoclassical economics is very beneficial to the interests of the rich and powerful, and that is why it is the dominant theory. Universities serve to indoctrinate a select class to serve the interests of power. Based on this understanding of knowledge, we would not waste time trying to convince those in power of the truth and validity of our theories. Instead, we would appeal to those groups whose interests would be served by the theories we are offering as alternatives. We would focus on the benefits of believing our theories more than on the proof of their validity. The bottom 90%, those who are deeply in debt, those who are powerless, would be the natural target audience, who would listen to our theories because they are aligned with their interests.

I think Polanyi’s analysis of emergence and transformation of structures of knowledge goes further than this, and is more complex. We must understand human knowledge as a social construct — it comes into being because we agree to accept it, and consensus emerges. The agreement can be forced by powers that be using coercion and persuasion in different combinations. Truth is helpful in persuasion, and so it does matter, but it is not the only factor which is relevant. Many readings on the relation between power and knowledge are given on my webpage linked.…

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Theories of Knowledge
Asad Zaman | Vice Chancellor, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and former Director General, International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University Islamabad

Russ — Religion is All Good and Well….

This is a nice short post on abstraction and reification of ideas. Most of what we deal with today in the "Antropocene epoch" is human artifacts, some of which actually exist along with natural objects as modifications of natural objects. But many and many of the most significant are mental constructs. These mental constructs then take on a reality of their own through the social construction of reality.

While you are reading this, keep Citizen's United in mind and remember than the people who gave it to use are dressed in robes and sit in high seats.

Voltaire
Religion is All Good and Well….

Russ

Brad DeLong — Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!? Daniel Little: The Case for Realism in the Social Realm

Brad gets critical about critical realism. Regardless of who is correct (how can we know?), it is good to see economists dealing with fundamental ontological and epistemological questions.

Grasping Reality
Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!? Daniel Little: The Case for Realism in the Social RealmBrad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Lars P. Syll — On the value of theoretical models in economics

Constructing simple macroeconomic models somehow seen as “successively approximating” macroeconomic reality, is a rather unimpressive attempt at legitimizing using fictitious idealizations for reasons more to do with model tractability than with a genuine interest of understanding and explaining features of real economies. Many of the model assumptions standardly made by neoclassical macroeconomics – simplicity being one of them – are restrictive rather than harmless and could a fortiori anyway not in any sensible meaning be considered approximations at all. 

If economists aren’t able to show that the mechanisms or causes that they isolate and handle in their “simple” models are stable in the sense that they do not change when exported to their “target systems”, they do only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and are a fortiori of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real economic systems. 

That Newton’s theory in most regards is simpler than Einstein’s is of no avail. Today Einstein has replaced Newton. The ultimate arbiter of the scientific value of models cannot be simplicity. 

As scientists we have to get our priorities right. Ontological under-labouring has to precede epistemology. 

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
On the value of theoretical models in economics
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Lord Keynes — Are all Facts Theory-Laden?

Yes, facts are theory-laden. Ludwig Wittgenstein elucidated how this so through his investigation of logic, both scientific language in the Tractatus and ordinary language in the Investigations. Sociologists and anthropologists have also shown how reality is socially constructed.

Kant had suggested and cognitive science further suggests that humans project what they sense in addition to receiving it as data through the subliminal process of data organization of which the subject is unaware. This often accounts for why there are often disputes of fact even among experts. Individuals and groups organize the world differently, based on subjectivity and the process of social construction, including the logic of the language they employ in mentation and communication.

Lord Keynes presents a particular view of this in opposition to Mises apriorism. I am in general agreement with this criticism in that this is the dominant paradigm in the scientific community at present and it is based on the way the majority of people construct reality. 

But I am more agnostic from the philosophical point of view. 

The worldview that LK outlines is a relative worldview that characterizes a way of seeing the world at a particular historical moment for a particular vantage which falls under the general category of "realism" in philosophy. The way it is stated is known as "naïve realism" in that it assumes that "what you see is what you get" without epistemological explanation. 

There is a considerable controversy over epistemological explanation and simply asserting realism is considered to be an expression of the "commonsense" viewpoint that is socially dominant at this historical moment in this geographical location. The point of rigorous inquiry is that common sense has often proved wrong. It is a reason that science was developed along with the issues associated with supposedly self-evident principles of philosophy.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
Are all Facts Theory-Laden?
Lord Keynes

Diane Coyle — Unknown knowns about financial markets

One of the interesting essay’s in Rebecca Solnit’s Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, which I read recently, riffs on Donald Rumsfeld’s famous known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, adding a fourth category (which she attributes to Slavoj Zizek) of unknown knowns. In her essay, the context is the scale of the US economy and policy devoted to military resources. In the financial markets, it is the existence of bubbles or stresses that exist in the data – in the world – but are not seen.

Of course, MMT'ers know quite a bit about unknown knowns in the financial sector, government, and academic economics and have offered historical proof of it.

The Enlightened Economist
Unknown knowns about financial marketsDiane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

James Franklin — The mathematical world

Some philosophers think mathematics exists in a mysterious other realm. They’re wrong. Look around: you can see it

Aeon Magazine

The mathematical world
James Franklin | Professor of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics is out this month.

Here is the publisher's blurb:

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge.

See our debate over Aristotelian realism in the comments. 

Aristotelian realism is now being put forward in a number of fields, I think erroneously in that it has little to do with Aristotle's sophisticated explanation of intellectual intuition for his time that modern thought has rejected. I see the contemporary version of "Aristotelian realism" as being simply a reassertion of naive realism that ignores the epistemological issues that have raged since ancient times and have yet to be resolved in a way that is either logically compelling through philosophical reasoning, or on the basis of basis of scientific evidence.

Why is this important for economics? Because it is the basis for the assertion of "laws" that are supposedly logically necessary (a priori) and self-evident as principles underlying the structure of reality, hence, universal, absolute, and ahistorical. It is essentialist and structuralist thinking in contrast to contextual and constructivist. Critics also view it as dogmatic rather than scientific.

Daniel Little — Is ontology an apriori field of knowledge?

The question I am raising here is one of philosophical methodology: what kind of epistemic basis is available for formulating and defending a theory of ontology? How can we claim to know various truths about the nature of reality?

There seem to be three possibilities.

• Apriori philosophical argument: derive conclusions about the necessary structure of the world from apriori philosophical principles. This is traditional metaphysics, and few philosophers would advocate for it today. (foundationalist theory) 

• Transcendental philosophical argument: arrive at conclusions about what the world must consist of, in order to make sense of our cognitive abilities. This is Kantian metaphysics, which attempts to do without foundational assumptions and to derive conclusions from the prerequisites of epistemic achievements we are known to have. (internalist theory)

• Generalized empirical theorizing: all substantive representations of the world are hypothetical, justified by the contribution they make to our ability to formulate good, empirically supported scientific theories. This is the approach taken by naturalistic philosophers, who maintain that there are no apriori truths and the only vehicle we have for discovering the nature of the world is through scientific imagination and observation. (coherence theory)

Ontology appears to be about the world; but equally it might be considered to be about a set of particularly fundamental concepts and conceptual structures. The question, "What does the world consist of?" can also be presented as the question, "What concepts serve best to represent the hypothetical structure of the world underlying observations?" Concepts are the intellectual tools or schemes through which we analyze the world; and if they refer to unobservable entities, they are unavoidably hypothetical constructs.

As "knowing beings", it has been necessary for human beings to use their imaginations to come up with concepts in terms of which to analyze the world. Some conceptual systems are defective because they lead to expectations about the world that are not born out; other systems are more complex than necessary; yet others postulate entities or processes that we may have reason to want to avoid: magical forces, divine intervention, action-at-a-distance. And when we arrive at a conceptual scheme that appears to serve well as a durable basis for a range of scientific theories, we may want to conclude that the world actually has the properties attributed to it by the scheme....  [emphasis added] 

The philosophical debate is not over such approaches but also the final sentence quoted above. When if ever is it justified to conclude that reality has the characteristics attributed to it in a conceptual model? This involves criteria and unless criteria can be adduced that transcend conceptual modeling, how could such criteria be used to decide questions involving more than one model? In essence this is asking whether there are absolute criteria that are universally compelling? But then would not some other criteria be needed to justify the supposedly absolute criteria? Logically, this leads to either an infinite regress, a vicious circle, or postulating.

If the postulation is not to be arbitrary, however, it must be justified. The rationale is a philosophical position. The foundations of knowledge in general are not only at stake but that in various disciplines. Thus, there is a philosophy of each discipline that examines the foundations.

Economics is no exception, although most conventional economists dismiss both philosophy of economics and the study of methodology as already "decided" by the mainstream, since they take their conceptual framework as most suited to economic realities and their preferred methods as best adapted to the subject matter. Here the criterion is agreement, especially among the dominant members of the field.

Those not agreeing are deemed heterodox. And within heterodoxy, there are different foundational assumptions and methodological approaches.

Understanding Society
Is ontology an apriori field of knowledge?
Daniel Little | chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

This may appear a bit wonkish if philosophy has not been your thing. But it's worthwhile working through this stuff if you want to understand the foundational nature of the much of the debate on key issues in other fields, including politics and policy. It's also fundamental to understanding framing.

David Fields — A Short Note on Social Theory and Enquiry

Brief summary of the epistemological conditions that influence methodological options is the social sciences. Fields know how to pack a paragraph. Very nice.

Short translation: Everyone has a POV and that POV introduces epistemological presuppositions as methodological assumptions into all theoretical enquiry. Methodological assumptions function as norms in selecting and organizing data, for example, through prioritizing.

Naked Keynesianism
A Short Note on Social Theory and Enquiry
David Fields

MIT Technology Review — Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists’ Disagreement About the Nature of Reality

A survey of leading thinkers shows that they are as far as ever from agreeing on the nature of reality

MIT Technology Review | The Physics arXiv Blog
Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists’ Disagreement About the Nature of Reality

Here is the study.

Cathy O'Neil — Mathematicians know how to admit they’re wrong

Most people never even say something that’s provably wrong in the first place. And that makes it harder to prove they’re wrong, of course, but it doesn’t mean they’re always right. Since they’ve not let themselves get pinned down on a provably wrong thing, they tend to stick with their wrong ideas for way too long.

I’m a huge fan of skepticism, and I think it’s generally undervalued. People who run companies, or universities, or government agencies, typically say they like healthy skepticism but actually want people to drink the kool aid. People who are skeptical are misinterpreted as being negative, but there’s a huge difference: negative means you’re not trying to solve the problem, skeptical means you care enough about the problem to want to solve it for real.

Read it at Mathbabe
Mathematicians know how to admit they’re wrong
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe

(h/t paul in the comments)