Machlup on methodological pluralism

By -
"Good 'scientific method' must not proscribe any technique of inquiry deemed useful by an honest and experienced scholar. The aggressiveness and restrictiveness of the various methodological beliefs which social scientists have developed -- in subconscious attempts to compensate for their feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the alleged 'true scientist' -- are deplorable. Attempts to establish a monopoly from one method, to use moral suasion and public defamation to exclude others, produce harmful restraints of research and analysis, seriously retarding their progress." -- Methodology of economics and other social sciences, p. 172

Comments

  1. Wabulon8:14 PM

    Thank you, L. Ron Hubbard, it sounds like you, you always sound like you, and you always strongly identify as a scientist or possibly (in early days) as an engineer. But "pluralism"? That doesn't sound like you at all. Could someone dare impersonate you? Hubbard forbid!

    Affinity, Reality, and Communication,

    Wabulo

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike B.1:27 AM

    Haha this Wabulon character cracks me up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike B.1:27 AM

    Haha this Wabulon character cracks me up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:31 AM

      Mike B. He has been cracking many of us up for decades.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more