"Firmly held beliefs" has another label — dogma. The dogmatic approach is opposite of the scientific one.
Of course, this doesn't mean that fringe views are to be considered on a par with consensus ones. at the same time, the consensus view represents heavy investment that may attempt to neutralize challenges by categorizing them as fringe. However, scientific method provides criteria for addressing such controversies. On the other hand, see the works of Paul Feyerabend, especially Against Method.
Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) argued that no description of scientific method could possibly be broad enough to include all the approaches and methods used by scientists, and that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science. He argued that "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes".[48]
Feyerabend said that science started as a liberating movement, but that over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid and had some oppressive features. and thus had become increasingly an ideology. Because of this, he said it was impossible to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology. He saw the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society as authoritarian and ungrounded.[48] Promulgation of this epistemological anarchism earned Feyerabend the title of "the worst enemy of science" from his detractors.[49] — Wikipedia-Philosophy of Science-Contermporary approaches
Incidentally, the quotation, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" has been attributed to Keynes so often it is now a commonplace. There is no solid documentation of this, however.
2 comments:
Hunting down the economics body snatchers
Comment on Jason Smith on ‘Solow has science backward’
The story: In economics, a group of people discovers that scientists have been replaced one by one, with political clones devoid of Feynman Integrity. These economists must escape or suffer the same fate. But who can he trusted and who has already been snatched?#1
There are TWO economixes: political economics and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes;#2 in theoretical economics the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.
Theoretical economics (= science) has been body snatched by political economists (= agenda pushers). For the general public, science clones are virtually indistinguishable from scientists: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”#3
There is, though, a reliable method to identify economics body snatchers on the Internet: refute their arguments logically or empirically and see what happens.
A scientist is committed to the scientific method: “Research is in fact a continuous discussion of the consistency of theories: formal consistency insofar as the discussion relates to the logical cohesion of what is asserted in joint theories; material consistency insofar as the agreement of observations with theories is concerned.” (Klant)
See part 2
Somehow, Part 2 got lost. For the full text see
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/09/hunting-down-economics-body-snatchers.html
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