RE: Re: RE: Premises, Circularities etc was Re: His torical Materialism

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Ian Murray wrote:
>>> As Blaug and others have pointed out, the LTV [sic] has circularities of
it's own.<<<

I wrote:>>what circularities are those? and why is circularity bad, unless
there is nothing to the theory but circularities? Physics and geometry, for
example, both involve circularities (e.g. force is defined by mass times
acceleration, but mass is defined by force/acceleration and acceleration is
defined by force/mass).<<

Justin says:>This is a fundamental confusion. Firstly, you talk only about
physics and not geometry. Geometry proceeds from independent axioms and
postulates and does not involve circularities.<

no, the definition of major concepts such as a "point" and a "line" are
quite circular. If you drop circularities from geometry, you also drop
circles and other geometric forms.

>Moreover, the fact that you can rewrite equations like F=ma with different
variables on the left side of the equality does not make physics circular.<

I didn't say that "physics was circular." Rather, I said that physics
"involve[s] circularity." That's the difference between the proposition that
P = C and that P includes C as a sub-set.

> In fact, the variables are implicitly defined in the context of the entire
system of equation in which they appear.<

that's exactly what I said. Obviously, you have a different definition of
"circularity" than I do?

>Are you following Blaug to accept Popperian falsification, a criterion that
makes _all_ social science (or almost all) worthless?<

>In defense of Popper, it does not. I am not a Popperian.<

good for you, but I was asking Ian. I'm not a Popperian popover either, but
I think it's a useful thing for social scientists to try to make falsifiable
predictions. In other words, it's good to take intellectual risks. It's also
good to know when one's system is such that different parts are implicitly
defined in the context of the entire theoretical system, so that one knows
the limits of one's thinking.

>And Popper was (despite the way he is usually taught) an early discoverer
of what is called the Quine-Duhem thesis, that you can hold any proposition
true by making appropriate adjustments elsewhere.<

good for him.

>The unobjecionable point he had tomake about falsificationsim is that a
hypothesis sin;t [ain't?] worth much if you threat [treat?] it as true come
what may, amking it absolutely immune to testing. If all of social science
is like that, then it is worthless.<

All social science that I know of involves _ceteris paribus_ clauses and the
like, which doesn't make the theory worthless (in my eyes), but does make it
non-falsifiable. (The reason why _my_ theory didn't work was because all
else wasn't equal!)

BTW, the Popperian falsification criterion is itself immune to
falsification.

> But that's not what I think of as good social science.<

good.

>I do rather suspect that some of the  defenses of value theory one display
lately have smacked of this vice, though.<

which ones?

JDevine