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    It is not the case that Philosophical standards of empirical success are not meaningful criteria for evaluating economics.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Disciplines can be evaluated by standards they fail to articulate themselves, as Kuhn showed with incommensurable paradigms requiring external meta-criteria.
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    • 2.Economics makes empirical claims about the world, and any discipline making such claims is subject to general norms of empirical inquiry like testability and predictive accuracy.
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    • 3.Friedman's own methodology in 'Essays in Positive Economics' invokes predictive success as a criterion, demonstrating economists already implicitly accept philosophical standards of empirical evaluation.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The demarcation criterion for science cannot be set by each discipline autonomously, or pseudosciences would simply self-certify by adopting permissive internal standards.
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    • 2.Philosophers of science like Lakatos have developed criteria for progressive versus degenerative research programs that have been substantively applied to economic theory by economists themselves.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The only relevant criteria for assessing a discipline are those accepted by its practitioners.
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    • 2.Philosophical standards of empirical success are external to the community of economists.
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