domingo, enero 15, 2006

If there is no objectivity, there is no science?

This is the feeling that I get from reading Weber and Hayek.

In "The facts of Social Sciences" Hayek says that the concept that we define in social science are abstraction from all the physical properties of the objects. Moreover, the concepts are teleologicals.
Weber on the other hand, says that there is a set of values that frame any interpretation that we make from reality.

Both claims seems to be against the objectivity in social science. So, if there is no objectivity, there is no science?

I think that this question is a sofism that could catch us in a trap. In social science the objectivity is not the same than in natural science.

My intuition lead my thougts toward the question: Is this kind of objectivity, the one mentioned by Weber and Hayek, the unique one?

Let me put it in this way. Someone with a scientific education in economics will do better economic than someone without education in the topic? If the answer is yes, I am tempted to say that there is some accumulated knowledge, that we can produce in economics, in such a systematic way that we can latter on give to students.

This does not guarantee that is the best knowledge, the objective and absolute one, however its allows us to say that there is a certain structure of reference that we are able to make up.

This is not an answer to my original question, however it is an interesting place to keep searching.

viernes, enero 13, 2006

The Nature and Philosophy of Science

This link, The Nature and Philosophy of Science, offer a synthesis of the problems related to Philosoph of Science. You can go in there from Baconian Inductivism through Newtonian hpothetico-deductivism and Popperian Falsasionism until the Duhem-Quine problem.

The paper also develop the intuition about why do we need Shaping Principles to observe data. We need criterium to select theories and that is the role of the Shaping Principles. Indeed the problems with how we interpret data are multiple and the paper present some of them.

Although the paper focus on natural science, there is an interesting link between the "Shaping Principles" and the "value-judgemnt" by Weber. Both play the same role: they help to select a theory.

Althought many times the author gives his opinion, without helping to improve the presentation, I still think that this is a good introductory paper, and I strongly recommend it!