When I first got interested in the social sciences and philosophy it was in large part because I had been repeatedly told as a high school conservative that we were engaged in a “war of ideas.” Further, in the long run ideas would triumph. It was important to know our case deeply if we were to triumph against the “liberals and socialists and communists.” That was in the mid 60s.
I dutifully studied von Mises, Hayek, the Austrian school generally, and classical liberal and libertarian writers early and contemporary. In time I developed an interest in exploring the outer edges of classical liberal thought, the issues that were currently arising, such as environmental concerns, or those where the empirical evidence seemed shaky such as the claim democracies would degenerate into totalitarian states if they acquired large social welfare systems. Initially I did so as a loyal libertarian seeking to make contributions to the “war of ideas.”
I was surprised that almost no one seemed interested. (Ludwig Lachmann sent me a letter explaining that I had his sympathies, but I did not yet know what he meant. I learned soon enough.) It turned out that more than a few were hostile to exploring these topics. Later, when my Ph.D. became a book applying Hayek’s ideas to democracies, not one single classical liberal or free market organization or publication reviewed it. Not even one on which I sat on the academic advisory board. Yet this was based on a dissertation from one of the top three ranked graduate schools in my field in the country!
For years I was both perplexed and angered. Didn’t ideas matter? If so, shouldn’t we try and get them right? And didn’t we get them right by a process of research and criticism?
Over the past few months I have begun to shift my understanding of this issue.
The problem lies not in hypocrisy and careerist opportunism as I had long thought, but in how the issue of ideas’ importance is framed. These frames help us make sense of how of how our ideas fit into a larger context. The “War of ideas” is a very flawed frame of what we are engaged in, at least those of us who take ideas seriously.
The War on Drugs
A good analogy to what is wrong is to consider the “War on Drugs.” Those who accepted this frame saw themselves as “warriors” and therefore began using their positions and arguments as weapons in a struggle with the “other side” of “drug abuse.” Ideas about drugs and their effects were important as weapons in a war in a battle for supremacy but not as tools for understanding the world. Efforts to blur distinctions between the extremes of open use and suppression were rejected as disloyal. As a result, drug warriors do not understand the world of drugs use very well, have inadvertently caused many needless deaths, have retarded medical and psychological research, contributed to the rise of new sectors and groups of organized crime, and wasted enormous amounts of money while making America have the not very admirable record of imprisoning more citizens both in numbers and percentages than any other major country on earth. And drugs are still easy to get.
If drugs were considered a problem to be understood instead of an enemy to be conquered, wqe would not have made such a mess of things. When I propose X and you propose Y as alternative means of dealing with a problem, that encourages intelligent examination, not breast beating and moral posturing and lectures that one or the other of us is “weak” or “defeatist.
The terminology of the war of ideas has enabled those using it, be they classical liberals or libertarians or Marxists, or anyone else, to insulate themselves from learning from the “other side” except, perhaps, for tactics to sell their point of view. Ideas become commodities and tool of power, not of understanding. This gets it wrong.
Science
The terminology of war is entirely inappropriate for describing how ideas shape and respond to human experience. Yes, I think ideas are every bit as important as I was taught so many decades ago. But not as weapons of war. They are tools of inquiry and understanding.
Science, as F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi emphasized, is a discovery process. We do not know what the true picture is, and the best we can do in finding it is to subject our hypotheses to being able to be critically examined and tested. A theory that cannot be rebutted is not science. In fact, it is the antithesis of science.
Historically science has advanced in any field through a process of conjectures and refutations and then new conjectures that open up new areas until they in turn encounter results that refute them. The result is never truth, or if it is we have no way of knowing it, but as John Ziman puts it, “reliable knowledge.” This wonderful term reminds us that reliable does not equal certain, and that new knowledge might be even more reliable than what we currently have.
This is not the language of war, it is the language of exploration, often competitive exploration, but still exploration. It is like the market process not like war.
Those of us engaged in the study of emergent phenomena need to be particularly aware of the differences between science as a discovery process and the “war of ideas” because this error has retarded so much scholarship in the past. I hope this journal never rejects a paper due to someone’s judgment that the conclusions are wrong or “defeatist” or help “the other side.”
Studies in Emergent Order 
Pat Gunning
February 8, 2012
It seems rather trivial to base reasoning on the statement that “science is a discovery process.” Of course, science is a discovery process. So is vacation travel. The question is: what are the aims of the discoverers? It is only with respect to an aim that one can judge Gus’s statement about the history of scientific progress. Which science? What is science?
It also seems vacuous to write of a war of ideas without specifying clearly which ideas one has in mind.
More meaningful terminology might be gleaned from Mises. Consider the term:”clash of group interests.” And consider the problem of comparing ideologies that promote different systems of cooperation on the grounds that a particular one (socialism, interventionism, liberalism) is most likely to promote peace and prosperity. Mises wrote a book on each of these systems. And he compared them in his treatise.
My point has nothing to do with Hayek, who I believe had views similar to Mises.
Gus diZerega
February 8, 2012
I am not quite sure what Pat Gunning is getting at. Competition in the market and in science (Hayek equates them at this level and I think he is correct) serve to improve the rate of discoveries that advance market coordination and scientific knowledge respectively. At the systemic level competition is a kind of cooperation. He emphasizes that we do not know what the right answers to issues requiring scientific discovery or market coordination, so we rely on anyone following his or her hunches and insights as the best means for finding out.
Searching for a vacation travel destination is fundamentally different. The person who searches is also the person who decides whether the possible destination is correct or not. There is no impersonal process that determines whether the person doing a search is right or wrong. It is understandable in terms of instrumental organization such as founding and running a business. The searcher might make use of information generated by a spontaneous order such as the market or science, and their ultimate actions might influence the further development of those orders, but they act within those orders and are assisted by them.
It is unimportant which “science” I am referring to. I was referring to all branches of discovery of knowledge that the scientific community itself regards as science. Astronomy yes, astrology, no. In this sense “science” is a legitimate and sufficient term.
If something such as “Christian Science” or “intelligent design” claims to be a science and is not characterized by this process of conjecture and refutation it is not science. If a social science is so structured that some single thinker is regarded as the final arbiter of an issue about social processes or questions, then it is not science either. Consider the role of Marx in the old USSR. At best it is a competing school of thought within social science.
Mises was an insightful economist who developed the most powerful criticism of centralized economic planning, a criticism Hayek built on, but to my knowledge he did not develop a theory of adaptation that included science, economics, and an open ended variety of other phenomena such as this site explores.
I am reminded of a series of arguments that led to my setting Mises aside in favor of Hayek many years ago. His most fervent devotee, Murray Rothbard, long argued that because interpersonal comparisons of utility were “unscientific” in a praxeological framework, no act of government could ever be rigorously said to increase social utility. This was true by definition. No process of discovery was involved. I then realized that the same argument works equally well in reverse. No act of government could ever be said to decrease social utility (that is, improve human swell-being). This meant that a praxeological based system really had nothingl to say about those kinds of questions. As I was interested in such questions, I turned from Mises to Hayek.
Today I would take this point still further. Because the rules of contract involve exchanging property rights whose boundaries have been determined by decisions where people will honestly disagree as to legitimate boundaries, such that some will be discomfited by the outcome of a process they regard as flawed, from a praxeological perspective no system of market exchanges can ever be said to increase or decrease social utility either.
As to “war of ideas” my statement stands for any set of ideas when analyzed from a scientific perspective that seeks to evaluate the adequacy of different ones. In all such cases the terminology of “war” is more hindrance than help.
The Liberty Scientist
February 9, 2012
Science may indeed be a discovery process, but when it comes to the network of scientists doing what most people consider to be “science,” I prefer to make a distinction between the act of science and the by-product of science. The act is really no different from what we do daily, whether in the form of a testable hypothesis (when am I most likely to get involved in a traffic jam on this road?) or the various social senses and expectations we get in our daily interactions, what Mises called thymology. The by-product of what is traditionally known as “science” is different. It comes in the form of communications of studies…published papers, abstracts submitted to conferences, informal correspondence, etc. I see this network of scientists doing science as a historical documentation of the cooperative process of knowledge. The distinction is important rhetorically because seeing science as a discovery process does not have the same argumentative effect of seeing markets as a process. The “science as a discovery process” does not at all remove the sense that science can be centrally planned. Yes, academic papers are not a product in the sense that they are physical and scarce (they can be copied), but the production of this final product does in fact require scarce resources. Maybe I’m just too into packaging arguments to fit my ideology, but I have no desire to make subtle statist implications, which is what Hayek frequently did when it came to science (the last chapter of TCOL). I can hear it now…”even that Hayek guy thinks science should be funded by the government”…I’d like to avoid that.
Gus diZerega
February 9, 2012
Liberty scientist:
“IS” not “may.” The distinction is important.
I will address your point by stepping back a step and discussing entrepreneurship in both the market and science.
I have written here in articles as well as at times on this blog that as science and the market are spontaneous orders, each has action equivalent to generic entrepreneursip, and that there are two kinds of entrepreneurship in both, shading from one pure case to another along a continuum. “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurship comes up with new products that wipe out old ones, as computers did to slide rules and calculators. “Austrian” or “Kirznerian” entrepreneurship then finds new markets for computers or builds new computers bringing entrepreneurial profits down and contributing to greater coordination just as Schumpeterian entrepreneurship disequilibrates because it is entirely unexpected and upsets existing plans. And of course in reality most entrepreneurship has elements of both.
THE SAME THING exists in science. Thomas Kuhn quite independently named them “revolutionary” and “normal” science. Revolutionary science created entirely new ways to conceive of physical phenomena, as Einstein did in Physics. Normal science enlarges the application of the new insight. Together they contribute to the coordination of scientific knowledge across boundaries. Crucially, normal science is as important for science as a whole as Austrian entrepreneurship is to the market process. And again, as in the market, much scientific knowledge is a bit of both. The discovery of the mid-Atlantic ridge and continental drift was revolutionary science within geology but did not introduce anything new into chemistry or physics.
BOTH the market and science have elements of cooperation and competition at the individual level and of cooperation at the systemic level, which is why I have gone to such length in writings here and elsewhere to distinguish between systemic features of spontaneous orders and individual motives which may or may not be in harmony with these systemic features.
As systems science is internally cooperative and the market is internally cooperative, but whet they intersect the picture is more complex because they respond to different feed back.
As I read you, you give lip service to the fact that both markets and science are networks, but do not try and examine what kind of networks they are. My focus is on the networks, not the individual scientific or market entrepreneur
The market and science cannot be reduced to one another at a concrete level even if at a very abstract level they are both spontaneous orders. This is a slightly more concrete form of my saying that markets, science, and ecosystems are emergent orders – but not all emergent orders are spontaneous orders. Ecosystems are not spontaneous orders and we get confused if we see the similarities but not the differences. Getting the right level of abstraction when making cross system comparisons is vital if anything but noise is to emerge.
When you write that this analysis is open to government financing of science you are right. It is also open to corporate financing of science and philanthropic financing of science and any other way you can think of. At the level of spontaneous orders analysis I would ask what are the tensions and advantages of different kinds of financing, given that both political and market biases are different from scientific ones. For example, in general scientists want their work to be as available as possible (hence this open source journal) whereas in general businessmen want control over providing their product so as to keep it scarce enough to make as large a profit as they can. The motives of the market are the opposite of the motives of science in this case. For example, Jeff Friedman at “Critical Review” asked me to sign away almost all ownership of papers I had published there so a corporation could make them available for a price. I said “no,” I did not make money writing them, did not write them to make money, wanted them as available as possible, and had no interest in a corporation making money off them by keeping them artificially scarce. I had therm up for free on a web site and they will be up again for free soon, as I am redoing the site.
You apparently put your politics ahead of your science because you admit you judge an analysis in terms of does it contribute to winning the “war of ideas” between “the market” and “socialism” whereas to be blunt, I think that way of phrasing the issue today obscures far more than it clarifies. Just like talk about a “war on drugs.” To say a Hayekian analysis leads to central planning and therefore is wrong is akin to saying legalizing marijuana leads to a nation of heroin addicts and is therefore wrong. In both cases the merits of an argument are subordinated to imagined negative results. As I ended my last reply, Misesian praxeology has nothing at all to say in any rigorous sense as to whether either governments or markets improve or injure “social utility.” To say otherwise means making interpersonal comparisons of utility.
As to how “statist” this kind of reasoning might be, I suggest reading my book. If it is right that ids not putting the question coherently. If I am right, but puttiong imagined political correctness ahead of scientific investigation, the case for freedom is actually injured.
Pat Gunning
February 9, 2012
Gus, I still think you are using the word “science” too loosely. You cited Hayek as maintaining that science is a discovery process. I assume that you meant that doing science consists of discovering. So does vacation travel. What is missing is a definition of science that differentiates it from action that is guided by mere curiosity.
It DOES matter which science, or knowledge, you have in mind. You began your post by writing about you interest in classical liberal thought. If, by “doing science,” one has in mind trying to produce knowledge about the consequences of human action under alternative systems (socialism, interventionism, capitalism), I can think of no reason to think that competition among scholars seeking credentials at a university or think tank would lead to the advancement of such a science. The most likely outcome, it seems to me, is scientism and Popperian historicism. So where does the competition in producing the ideas required to compare these system occur? Does it come from people who are guided by mere curiosity? And why would one expect such competition to lead to progress in this “science?”
Since the emergence of cooperative systems that have private property rights and relatively free enterprise, the emergent order in the case of material science comes, it seems to me, from two fundamental sources: (1) competition among entrepreneurs in profit seeking under capitalism and (2) competition among individuals and groups for existing material wealth under conditions in which property and human rights are problematic. The emergent order, whatever it is, in the sciences of human action and interaction has a very different source.
Parenthetically, if you judge Mises on the basis of remarks or interpretations by Rothbard, you are making a big mistake. Rothbard had a completely different agenda.
Gus diZerega
February 9, 2012
Pat-
Hopefully my response to “Liberty Scientist” addressed many of your points. It is pretty obvious I am not talking about anything analogous to choosing a vacation spot. This distinction is very basic Hayekian social science. If you think it is error I invite you to submit an article making that argument to this journal.
As a rule I do not use the terms liberalism, socialism and interventionism as I think you do. In today’s context I think they obscure more than they clarify. Too much falls between the cracks. For example, many who call themselves socialists describe Spain’s Mondragon Cooperatives as socialist. It also formally fits a libertarian ideal. But not one libertarian has written on it. Socialists do. So if we judge by who pays attention, Mondragon is socialist even though I doubt any libertarian can find anything wrong about it (other than that it is not in keeping with the unexamined faith that entrepreneurs are different from workers.) At the same time it has been years since I met an advocate of central state directed (or any other directed) economic planning.
Political words are plastic Madison redefined “republic” to mean what we now call representative democracy. Right wingers are trying to redefine it so that it doesn’t. And when such words are used in scholarship attention must be paid to both their historical meanings and their current meanings in order to be able to communicate across time.
I could go on and on about this issue, but not here. But I do not see historicism or Popperite anything as being all that important today. Insights from Popper have been adopted but few agree with his entire analysis to my knowledge. You seem to be fighting intellectual battles with terms that held considerable meaning decades ago but not much today.
Your description of science has little meaning for me and I think little claim to historical verification. You might want to call that historicism, I call it trying to make our theories address reality as best we are able.
I won’t get into whether Rothbard “got” Mises right because the issue really no longer interests me. If a good Rothbardian or Misesian response is made to my arguments that understands Hayekian rooted theory such as I have been developing, I will be glad to rethink these issues, Until then, I’ll let others concern themselves with it. (Years ago I read Human Action, Theory and History, Socialism, Man Economy and State, and many other books by both. I knew Murray personally and brought Mises to the University of Kansas to speak. So I am very well acquainted with them.) If you wish I encourage you to address some of these issues in a paper submitted to this journal, but be sure to keep it focused on emergent processes or making a case that they do not exist, because that is our focus
Pat Gunning
February 9, 2012
“It is pretty obvious I am not talking about anything analogous to choosing a vacation spot. ”
If you say so… But I’m afraid that I do not know what you mean by science. I have no way to make sense of your statements containing the root word “science” unless you define science and tell what it means to do science. If you think otherwise, there’s not much prospect for communication.
Gus diZerega
February 9, 2012
One last time and then I will have lost all interest in the discussion. Science is a social endeavor in a way searching for a vacation spot is not. There are lots and lots of books on this, from Michael Polanyi to John Ziman to David Hull. And others. I have published papers in THIS journal that discuss it. If you are unwilling to read what I have already published here, why on earth should I waste my time with you now?
Pat Gunning
February 9, 2012
Sorry, Gus, for boring you. And thanks for giving it one more go. You would be wrong to assume that I have not read most of the materials to which you refer, although I will admit having only read a sample of your writings.
Surely, one who aims to produce a theory of the emergence or evolution of some activity must define the activity independently of the motives that individuals may have for doing it and, therefore, independently of the motives they may have for cooperating with others in doing it, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
This applies to “doing science.” Once the activity is defined, the theory then attempts to explain why people engage in it by referring to their motives and the circumstances under which they convert these motives into concrete actions that have consequences. Perhaps “doing science” becomes a social endeavor. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is a discovery process in a nontrivial sense. Perhaps not. There is no way to make a judgment one way or the other about its emergence or evolution without a distinct and independent definition of “science.”
I did not say that searching for a vacation spot is like doing science. You have misunderstood. I said that vacation travel (i.e., traveling while on vacation) is a discovery process. I challenged you to show how the vacation travel discovery process is different from the discovery process associated with doing science. My ultimate goal was to find out how you were using the word “science.” If you cannot tell me in a few words, I don’t anticipate finding the answer by searching through your papers for specific references.
Gus diZerega
February 9, 2012
OK Pat, I have a better sense of what you want and I’ll try again. First, two sentences…
A scientist attempts to discover how the material world works. Science is the community of scientists who are trying to discover how the world works, or in a different context the currently reliable knowledge thereby generated.
Now what they mean.
A individual scientist shares some things in common with me deciding where to take a vacation. Various hunches are checked against available facts and a decision is made. I am going to Big Sur after the President’s Day weekend. I could go to Yosemite or somewhere else. New discoveries could cause me to change my plans. In both science and vacation planning evidence counts, but what counts as evidence differs radically.
My criteria for going to Big Sur are entirely personal. If a friend were going with me I would take her desires into consideration as well and perhaps we would go somewhere else. Even then I would not be looking for impersonal criteria to make my decision. A different friend might lead to a different decision, like spending time at Tassajara Hot Springs. If on my next vacation I go to Canyonlands, that decision will have no impact on whether my Big Sur choice late this month is wise or not. I am the sole determiner of whether it was and other vacations at different times are irrelevant. I am not seeking universal knowledge about taking a vacation.
If I am doing science I am trying to find knowledge that is impersonal. I want to discover something about how our common world works. Unlike vacation planning, whether it is welcome or unwelcome is not a criterion for whether it is valid or invalid. As a person doing science I cannot entirely eliminate my personal values from my investigation, nor can anyone else. Michael Polanyi is right. So over time as a community science developed methods that minimize the impact of personal values and desires. Measurement, prediction, repeatability, and less important but still important, logical consistency all count in science. That relativity and quantum mechanics are both regarded as good science even though no one is able to fit them together to the satisfaction of the larger community of physicists is proof to my mind that empirical criteria outranks logic. Scientists following a relatively small number of rules have developed an edifice of knowledge about the material world that is without equal in human history.
Crucially, the judge as to whether my discoveries count as scientific is not mine to make. They are the judgment of the community of relevant scientists: people who have mastered the intricacies of what is already known about my topic. This does not guarantee correct evaluations of a theory any more than the market order guarantees that the “best” products will be successful. There are plenty of “horror stories” in science, such as the reception of Wegner’s theory of continental drift during his lifetime. There are likely “horror stories” today we do not recognize. But like the market in coordinating production, no one has found a better way for scientific discoveries to be made than through the independent judgment of the scientific community. Politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, the media and public opinion are irrelevant.
In my view science does not lead us to Truth, it leads us to reliable knowledge. Its methods discover what can be universally counted on by everyone, and it has proven better and more reliable than any other methods. Every bit of its current knowledge is potentially replaceable by more reliable knowledge in the future. The growth of knowledge does not simply build on an earlier foundation, but might demolish the work of centuries and replace it with something more reliable, as Einstein did with Newtonian mechanics. I emphasize that this is knowledge about the material world, that world we all share.
There is a key confusion in our common terminology about science just as there is with the term “economy.” A business has an economy, and it had better be well planned or the company will likely fail. The market economy should not be planned. The first is an instrumental organization, the second is a spontaneous order. Hayek pointed out this confusion in terminology and the same exact confusion exists in talking about science. I think our miscommunication might be at least partly rooted in it.
A scientist or a scientific research team had better plan their research. As with the business they need to be flexible, but a well-planned program of research is essential to their being taken seriously. But science as a whole is never planned. The first is an organization, like a business, the second is a spontaneous order, like an economy. I was talking about the latter.
Another way to make the point: Leonardo DaVinci did science. He studied the material world and how it worked. But he was not a part of a scientific community. There was not much at the time and he kept most of his research secret. He did not contribute significantly to the growth of science even though some scientists say had he published he would have. It is the community that matters in science because it enables people far less brilliant than a Da Vinci to contribute to an edifice of knowledge that has so dwarfed individual capacities as to make the image of the “Renaissance man” seem quaint. Polyps building a coral reef or termites making a mound might be a better if less exalted image of our relation to science.
I would venture to say that any subject can become a science so long as it leads to reliable knowledge that can be demonstrated by the methods the scientific community has evolved. This requires also that it be subject to empirical challenges because it deals with the material world. Those systems of knowledge that are immune to empirical challenge, such that no measurement, experiment, or prediction could possibly contravene them, have at best shaky status as science. They might be true, but they are not science.
Pat Gunning
February 10, 2012
Thanks, Gus. You just don’t seem to understand the difference between searching for a vacation spot (planning a vacation) and going on a vacation with the idea of discovering things. I am writing about the latter and about curiosity. I am assuming that a travel vacation, no matter where it is, is driven by curiosity and the expectation of discovering places, people, and things that are different from what one already knows. I take it that at least some material scientists are also driven to do science by curiosity, just as the vacation traveler is driven to travel by her curiosity..
On the other hand, you DO understand the distinction between personal and impersonal (what you really mean is interpersonal) knowledge. In my vacation travel, I do not care whether my discoveries produce interpersonal knowledge. Material science, by definition, concerns interpersonal knowledge.I hope that this clarifies my question of how doing science differs from vacation travel. I expected that you would answer it, but it seems that you did not.
Your most recent message confirms what I assumed in my first message and tried to verify. It is that you are concerned only with what you would presumably call the science of the material world. You are not concerned with what I would call the science of human action. One question is whether anything you say applies to the science of human action. But I assume that you would deny that such a “science” is really “science.” So I will not pursue the matter further. Instead, I’ll make some comments on the science of the material world that elaborates on what I wrote in an earlier comment.
I ask: what kind of material scientific progress is likely to be made? For example, is the advance of science more likely to be in the direction of developing more powerful explosives; is it likely to be in the direction of improving transportation and communication; is it likely to be in the direction of identifying new planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc.; is it likely to be in the direction of improving health care and prolonging life? In answering this question, I am less inclined to emphasize the so-called community of relevant scientists than you are. Rather I would emphasize first the “community” of consumers of the products produced by entrepreneurs whose actions provide financial incentives for the scientists to direct their attention to helping to produce consumer goods that are profitable to supply. The entrepreneurs are often influenced by an intervening government. Examples are patent laws and the various government agencies that divert resources from the private sector into the study of what politicians and bureaucrats define as science. But while the influence of governments ebb and flow in various directions, the major long term driving force is not the interventions but the demands for want satisfaction by consumers.
Second I would emphasize the commander-in-chief whose aim is either to conquer her enemies and confiscate their goods or to defend herself against enemies.
I would admit the possibility that a community of relevant scientists can produce knowledge about the material world that is independent of the market and government. But I doubt that this a conscientious “social scientist” or historian would regard the community-of-scientist explanation of progress in material science as the most prominent.
If I am correct, then the implication is that Michael Polanyi, as you represent his ideas (it has been a while since I read his work), is not right but wrong. Personal values in the form of consumer values and the values of government officials have a major influence on the DIRECTION that the community of scientists follow. On the other hand, for the community of scientists that adopt the values of their sponsors, Polanyi is correct. For each to achieve his goal, she better be able to demonstrate to the others in her little community that her hypothesis about the material effects of some action is correct.
This brings me to the question of whether an advance requires following some agreed-upon or mutually accepted set of rules to demonstrate an advance, which you suggest exists among the community of scientists. It seems to me that the rules themselves are subject to change by the inventive material scientist who is able to persuade his fellow community members that they have adopted the wrong rules. When you use the term “reliable knowledge,” I take it that you are not referring to the rules but to what the viewpoints of the community of scientists, who may have been subject to the persuasion of some inventive and persuasive scientist, Because they may be persuaded, the kind of knowledge that they regard as reliable is subject to change.
Lastly, I turn to to the idea that material science is a “spontaneous order.” If by this you only mean that no single individual planned what you now decide to call material science, the proposition must be a truism. It is also a truism if you mean that the result of the actions of the independent material scientists is different from what each of them individually planned that it would be. No single individual is in a position to know what the other material scientists are doing and, therefore, what his contribution is to the outcome, as it is described by the social scientist or historian, These truism are derivations from the so-called Hayek “knowledge problem.”
I want to point out, however, that you end your message with your belief that “any subject can become a science so long as it leads to reliable knowledge that can be demonstrated by the methods the scientific community has evolved.” I take it that the “methods of the scientific community” refers to your earlier reference to the rules developed by the community of scientists. Yet, as I have argued, these rules are subject to change by an inventive and persuasive scientist.
It follows that a rule that requires empirical verification may also change. I would agree that an empirical challenge may help the community to make progress. But I would strongly disagree that non-empirical challenges cannot also help to the community of material scientists to make progress.
So my question about your view of material science is this. How can you defend your view that the history of science demonstrates that ONLY empirical challenges are required in order to make progress in material science? Or, how can you defend the converse view that the making of non-empirical challenges cannot contribute to the advancement of material science? Or have I misunderstood you?
Gus diZerega
February 10, 2012
Pat-
I cut my eye teeth on free market economics by reading Mises. I read everything he ever wrote on praxeology that had been translated into English. I read and studied Human Action – all of it. For a while I thought he had the answers to many issues in social science, then over time I became bothered by the fact that his system closed questions without reference to what actually happened rather than opening them up to continued study. But I remained captivated by praxeology.
Two things finally turned me decisively to a Hayekian approach. First was the insight that praxeology had nothing to say scientifically as to whether some set of social arrangements was superior to others by any criteria that involved human well-being. I saw this first with regards to whether government helped or hurt and then, many years later, I realized it had the same problem as to whether markets helped or hurt, because its radical subjectivism prevented any “scientific” comparison of “interpersonal utility.” Everyday we make such comparisons, as any parent knows, and they are not arbitrary. Praxeology did not study the questions that interested me. You maybe, but not me.
Second, I realized that the clear distinction between ends and means that was so basic to praxeology as I learned it was in fact not true for much of human life. Praxeology is action, but it is not most HUMAN action. For example, I walk to teach a class instead of driving because I enjoy the walk, but I would not walk if I did not have to teach a class. Was my walk an ends or a means? The correct answer is “yes.”
For me Hayek’s approach enlarged vistas of exploration. It taught me a new way of thinking that could be applied to a wide variety of phenomena in open-ended ways, with interesting surprises potentially arising. For example, my argument (and not only mine), that democracies do not fight wars with other democracies, suddenly becomes more than just a statistical correlation but evidence of something important distinguishing democracies from undemocratic governments. (The most recent of my discussions of that issue is in The Independent Review for Fall, 2011.)
My work applies to the science of HUMAN action, otherwise I would not do it. Human beings are material beings, whatever else they may be. If reliable knowledge in the scientific sense can be found about humans, then their study can be scientific. I think it obviously can. The study of human beings gets complicated because our actions are influenced even sometimes caused by the meaning we see around us. That is one reason I believe science is limited in what it can uncover through its methods, but being limited is not being useless. This is even more true when we are studying impersonal systems such as markets or science because they operate with far less complexity than do the individuals whose actions generate the system. If you disagree write a critique. I have put plenty out in public that someone can challenge if they wish to.
Minor points –
1. Love is interpersonal, it is not impersonal. So is friendship and a great deal else that has little to no relationship to science. Science is interpersonal of course, but it also seeks to be impersonal. My distinction stands. I do not think you understand it. Read Michael Polanyi for starters.
2. I am glad you are against war. It has a lot to do with being a decent person. In my view it also has nothing to do with science. As a matter of fact many great advances in applied scientific knowledge have been made during war time or initially for the defense industry, for example in medicine (many wars), canning food (Napoleon), developing production lines (Civil War rifle production), the internet (DARPA), and mass transportation (lots and lots of cases from railroads to aviation). Pure research has also benefited from defense spending. Whether you value such research and its applications is really irrelevant to whether or not it is science.
3. Since I said that the community of scientists developed scientific rules over time I thought it was obvious to an attentive reader that they evolved and were subject to change. I really do not understand why you go on about the matter as if you are making a new point. You aren’t.
4. It is a bit insulting to say I do not understand what it is to explore a place to see what I might discover that is new. I just drove to the Yukon and back in September, going several hundred miles on unpaved road into the tundra above the Arctic Circle without a detailed itinerary and relying on what I discovered and who I met along the way to guide me. I never saw that issue in your question nor do I see now how it is relevant to the discussion. I was not doing science in any sense.
Now I will let this matter rest. It is easy to make charges and ask questions and it takes time to try and respond thoroughly, time I now choose to spend doing other things. You can have the last word if you wish.
Pat Gunning
February 10, 2012
Thanks for the last word, Gus. Actually I have three. First try reading Schutz instead of Polanyi in order to grapple with the alleged distinction between impersonal and interpersonal.
Second, your statement that rules develop over time was coupled with a claim about empirical verification. You wrote:
“Those systems of knowledge that are immune to empirical challenge, such that no measurement, experiment, or prediction could possibly contravene them, have at best shaky status as science. They might be true, but they are not science.”
When I wrote about challenges to rules in material science, I was referring to challenges that may not be empirical at all. That is why I “go on about the matter as if you are making a new point.” The point may not be new, but it certainly was not acknowledged by you. Either you did not think of it or you misstated your position.
Third, at the risk of being called out for insulting you, I will opine that you have a penchant for misinterpretation. I did not say that you do not understand what is to explore a place. Why would I say that. Every normal human being understands what that means.
I said that you failed to realize that I was writing in my first message about what people do while they are on a travel vacation AFTER THEY HAVE ARRIVED AT THEIR DESTINATION. In spite of my two efforts to correct your misinterpretation, you apparently still don’t realize that comparing “doing science” with “vacation traveling” is a way to introduce a comparison between the motives of “scientists” and the motives of vacation travelers who are exploring a place.
(Nor did I say or imply that I am against war, whatever you mean by that.)
P.S. There is no need to publish this. I am perfectly content to have a dialog. But I do not have your email address. Or not to discuss the issues at all. Like a vacation traveler, my initial comment was part of an exploration. But I have plenty to do back home also.
Gus diZerega
February 12, 2012
This discussion with Pat has now moved offline.