Re: Is Keynes a Positivist

["John Gelles" <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

            "If science is to be at all possible, it must take
            the form of elaborating regularities of the type
            'whenever event x then event y'"

                --  Stephen Parsons, quoting Lawson, in
                     his book Economics and Reality, today


            Positivism, even logical positivist philosophy,
            does not exclude history or sequences of events
            not replicable for scientific experiment.

            Naturally, connections sought between events
            that cannot be isolated for modeling in a
            scientific way, must be identified as possibilities
            -- not computable probabilities.

            We must not be sore just because most of life
            remains a mystery.  Living with mystery and
            its possibilities, whilst converting to probability
            some data that is amenable to rigorous examination,
            is what we humans do.  And many us say we are
            positivists while we do it.

                    John Gelles
                    http://www.1944.org
                    http://www.rain.org/~jjgelles/1944.html