Timeline for Is economics a science?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 7, 2022 at 12:35 | comment | added | CriglCragl | There will be, eg evidence for conformal cyclic cosmology is now being evaluated. Popper's picture is that it's about falsifiability of models, & good economics meets that. Consider, knowing a great deal about human metabolism doesn't allow you to predict what a given person will do next. Economics has a valid picture of certain levels of behaviour, but higher level turbulent or emergent properties may always be impossible to predict. But being unable to predict turbulent flow doesn't make our models of fluid flow wrong. | |
| Jan 7, 2022 at 7:06 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | @CriglCragl it's not science, because there are an infinite number of models which will predict any particular event. That is the technical meaning of "useless prediction". Saying that a model is compatible with a past event thus carries no information. For instance, there is no way for us to tell if the Big Bang had an origin singularity or came from a previous bounce. | |
| Jan 6, 2022 at 22:49 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @Lawnmower: My point stands. Explaining these one-off events absolutely is science. First contact with aliens will be another one-off event, for science to consider. | |
| Jan 6, 2022 at 20:38 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | @CriglCragl predicting an event after the fact is the most useless kind of prediction. It's like me inventing a language model that "predicts" the comment you just made. Is that "science"? | |
| Jan 6, 2022 at 10:43 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @Lawnmower: The Big Bang cannot yet be 'predicted' from first principles, but it will be. Abiogenesis is quite possibly a single event. | |
| Dec 18, 2019 at 4:16 | comment | added | aquirdturtle | @LawnmowerMan I mean, I guess you're hanging your hat on the word "just" here for some reason? I don't understand why you think this matters. Basically every theory predicts a great many specific things, so I'm not sure what you're going for here. Quantum Mechanics predicts that quantum tunneling will happen in certain circumstances. The big bang theory predicts the early state of the universe and inflation theory (unproven so far) predicts inflation, and modern cosmology predicts the heat death of the universe. These are all very specific things which provably either happen or don't happen. | |
| Dec 1, 2019 at 2:38 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | I will concede your point if you can name a single widely accepted scientific theory which predicts just a single event. | |
| Dec 1, 2019 at 1:28 | comment | added | aquirdturtle |
My hypothesis was that a single event would occur, and it did. There's nothing in the definition of "hypothesis" that limits it to making "always" or "never" statements. Your statement Science cannot prove that a hypothesis is true, only that it is manifestly false. is just wrong, unless you contort the definition of hypothesis beyond normal usage. You are simply thinking of a different word or concept than "hypothesis".
|
|
| Nov 29, 2019 at 20:46 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | A "specific event" would be: "I predict that a 123 GeV Higgs boson will be detected at 82.18,322.43 in the Atlas detector on the third run of May 14,2021." This is not a "theory", it's a horse race. The Higgs boson is part of a theory/principle which predicts many events with particular constraints. If you had hypothesized: "Every time I sit still in my apartment, I will remain in my apartment", then you are predicting an unbounded set of events which form a principle and define a constraint. But opening your eyes after one such incident does not prove your hypothesis true. | |
| Nov 29, 2019 at 18:55 | comment | added | aquirdturtle |
I still completely disagree. Science usually doesn't make claims about specific events, because that's not typically useful for understanding. I am a working experimental physicist and this just seems absurd to me. For example: Predicting the existence of the higgs boson, predicting the trajectory of a ballistic projectile, predicting products of chemical reactions, predicting rates of chemical reactions, predicting the lifetime of a star, and on and on. All of these things can be framed as a hypothesis which, as much as anything at all is knowable, can be proven to be true.
|
|
| Nov 29, 2019 at 5:14 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | @aquirdturtle Science usually doesn't make claims about specific events, because that's not typically useful for understanding. Rather, it makes claims about principles, because that can be generalized to future events. I usually add that the claim needs to be objective and repeatable. The problem with a point prediction is that getting it right is indistinguishable from luck/random chance. It's pretty useless to say: "I claim this penny will land on heads." I think if Popper had been alive during the rise of Bayesian ML, he might have incorporated some Bayesian ideas into his principle. | |
| Nov 29, 2019 at 0:44 | comment | added | aquirdturtle |
Science cannot prove that a hypothesis is true, only that it is manifestly false - I beg to differ. I think that you are thinking of it being impossible to prove a negative. I close my eyes and hypothesize that I am still sitting in my apartment. I open my eyes to measure my surroundings and... true.
|
|
| Nov 28, 2019 at 22:28 | comment | added | J.G. | Alternatives to Popper include Kuhn (falsification leads to irrational revolutions), Lakatos (research needn't provide immediate falsifiable predictions) and Feyerabend (science has no specific method). But these ideas are consistent with sciences needing to generate falsifiable hypotheses, even if we think the analysis of them in science is more complex than Popper thought (or more honestly, than a straw man of him thought). And scientists have been more accepting of his ideas, for what it's worth. | |
| Nov 28, 2019 at 21:21 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man | I'm not an expert in the philosophy of science, so perhaps you should add your own answer that makes this case. | |
| Nov 28, 2019 at 21:07 | comment | added | llama | My point is that the Popperian stance is a fairly minority one within the philosophy of science these days (and always has been), and I think the answer would benefit from noting this | |
| Nov 28, 2019 at 20:12 | comment | added | Lawnmower Man |
Quoting your source: However, in what seems to be his last statement of his position, Popper declared that falsifiability is a both necessary and a sufficient criterion. “A sentence (or a theory) is empirical-scientific if and only if it is falsifiable.”
|
|
| Nov 28, 2019 at 17:31 | comment | added | llama | Falsifiability isn't really the prime or sole standard for demarcating science from pseudoscience, see plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#KarPop | |
| Nov 28, 2019 at 5:05 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 28, 2019 at 5:13 | |||||
| Nov 28, 2019 at 5:01 | history | answered | Lawnmower Man | CC BY-SA 4.0 |