"Positivist" is a dirty word I hear around this site a lot, an insult of the highest order. Yet when I read around, it seems to me to be the idea that predictive theories should be supported by observations.
Do Austrians really not care whether their theories make accurate predictions? Or is there a deeper meaning to that word that I'm missing?
What is wrong with positivism is that it is a performative contradiction. It is a predictive statement that statements cannot be predictive.
Didn't Ayer recant logical positivism by the end of his career? e.g.
"When the King is far the people are happy." Chinese proverb
For Alexander Zinoviev and the free market there is a shared delight:
"Where there are problems there is life."
"Positivism" is more than an approval of science and the scientific method. The positivists of the early twentieth century claimed that *only* science and empirical observation can give us knowledge. So when someone criticizes Austrian economics because it doesn't use the scientific method (like other schools of economics supposedly do), they are giving a positivist critique of austrian economics.
Positivism is bunk because you can't prove positivism with science
I think the best way to put it: science is a taste, not a truth. What constitutes "proof" is ultimately subjective. People with attitude problems set impossible to fulfill criteria for what constitutes proof of ASE, then spin around 180 degrees and hold that their own brand of economics is correct until proven wrong, which is also impossible by the different criteria that they set for that. That kind of double-think is alarmingly common in general.
Positivism is not necessarily a horrible thing. There is some positivism in the Austrian method with the belief that there are universal laws that span human history and are not subject to change. So we take a bit from the positives, a bit from the historists and combine that with praxeology and you get what we practice. I think the problem with positivism is when people try to bleed it into the social sciences to a large degree. Then you get full blown 'scientism'
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
abskebabs: Didn't Ayer recant logical positivism by the end of his career? e.g.
I remember reading this elsewhere as well, that more or less, that Ayer's process, not his conclusions, was important. If I could find the source currently, I could be a lot less vauge about it :\
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Solid_Choke:How do you answer the charge that Logical Positivism is self-refuting? Are the tenets of Logical Positivism subject to the verification criteria? If they are, how in principle could they be verified? If they can't, doesn't that mean that Logical Positivism is cognitively meaningless or else is metaphysics (equally bad to people like Ayer).
Thats absolutely correct. The Logical Postivism (at least, of the Vienna Circle) was nothing more than metaphysics disguised as "antimetaphysics" (as they called themselves at the time).
The Positivist theory of meaning, simply put, said that knowledge about the world (truth) can only be obtained through experience, synthetic a priori truth is meaningless tautology. Which, of course, is a synthetic a priori proposition.