Target:  Graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy and methods of economics and the other social sciences.

Size: Modest, 200 pp or 80,000 words maximum.

Theme/Synopsis: Must avoid dispersing efforts over too many themes.  Starting with four problems:

1. The divorce between economics and sociology, over-specialization and fragmentation generally.

2. The dominance of positivism (scientism) in economics.

3. The problems of historicism and essentialism in sociology and the soft social sciences and humanities.

4. Limited real-world and policy-relevance in much of economics and sociology (like who saw the GFC coming?)

Peter Klein has pointed out that historicism is not really on the radar these days, the issue in the current socical sciences is POMO.

There are two subtexts that need to be woven in without causing distactions.

1. The debacle of philosophy in both the analytical and “Continental” strands after Wittgenstein derailed the analytial strand (which in turn branched into positivism/logical empiricism and language games) and Heidegger did the same for the Continental tradition.

2. The window of opportunity in the 1930s/40s when Talcott Parsons in sociology, von Mises in economics and Popper were all promoting a very similar framework for investigation in the social sciences. Parsons after 1937 went the wrong way and Popper did not maintain a serious interest but there was the possibility of an alliance across the disciplines of sociology, economics and philosopohy of science to resist the disastrous fads and fashions that captured both economics and sociology after WW2.

In short, potential solutions to the problems can be pursued with a revitalized form of Austrian economics or the distinctive contribution that the Austrians contribute to good economics.

The revitalizing principles are a cluster of  philosophical ideas in metaphyiscs and epistemology, with methodological implications.

These ideas support current best practice (indeed all-time best practice), that is to say, the work of “Mr Jourdains” who have been speaking in prose all their lives.

Ane the best statements of these ideas can be found in the work of Barry Smith and Karl Popper.

The title of the whole work is Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1980) and Volume One is Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies.

He realised the need to operate across the full range of components of theoretical development, from what he called the Metaphysical Environment to the Empirical Environment, passing through General presuppositions, Models, Concepts, Definitions, Classifications, Laws, Complex and simple propositions, Correlations, Methodological assumptions to Observations.

One of his first lines of argument aimed to establish that the old form of empiricism or positivism was out of date due to developments in the philosophy of science. Some will appreciate that by 1980 when this work was published, Popperian critical rationalism had rendered positivism “old hat” in 1935 with the publication of Logik der Forschung. Much of this work was done at Berkeleyand Alexander took the opportunity to pass the manuscript to Ian Jarvie who was working there at the same time. It seems that many mistakes remain in the book which Jarvie would have identified in the manuscript.

Alexander started with the history of positivism from the 1930s to the Popperian challenge, followed by others who effectively replaced “the positivist persuasion” with a “postpositivist” philosophy of  science (though many sociological theorists took a long time to appreciate the change). 

On page 19 he wrote: “Karl Popper and his followers rejected ‘verification’ as a theoretical criterion [of what?]  because there would always remain the logical possibility of discovering a falsifying event. Popper then argued, however, that ‘falsification’ could constitute such a criterion…the rejection [of verificationism] was in no sense based on a repudiation of the radical duality between fact and theory…[Popperian] empiricism commits itself to an unproblematic perception of data as capable of being conceptualized in a relatively pure observational language.”

This overlooks Popper’s insistence on the theory-dependence of observations

He went on “Although as one of the earliest and most formidable critics of radical positivism Popper correctly emphasized the significance of more general conceptual frameworks, he erred in assigning the decisive role of falsification to the necessity for every scientific statement to be capable of being tested by experiment”, citing LSD New York 1959 p 41 “It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience”.

In note 73 to that passage Alexander wrote “This ambiguity in Popper’s work is implicitly illustrated by Imre Lakatos’ use of Popper [with subscripts] in referring to three distinctive nonpositivist positions that  have been attributed to Popper by historians and philosophers of science”.

Comment: There is no ambiguity when the distinction between the logic of falsifiability is distinguished from the practical matter of falsification.

Alexander has some good citations in this footnotes here to indicate the way social theorists persisted with positivism as though it was the state of the art for decades after the program was challenged and even when it was replaced in the history and philosophy of science after the 1960s.

He identified “this internal ambiguity” [in Popper?] as a defect in the revised form of “Popperian empiricism” that prompted attacks against empiricism which began to gain support in the 1960s…This third, postempiricist or postpositivist position became influential only in the recent period; yet its intellectual foundations were established much earlier and it is in these earlier works that the fundamental alternatives to the postulates of the positivist persuasion are most clearly articulated”. (p 20).

He turned to Polanyi for the early foundations, especially Personal Knowledge 1958, also influential works by Koyre, a favourable reference to Collingwood from the  1940s and then he moved on to more contemporary elaborations by the Kuhn and Holton.

That history ignores Mises and the Austrians, does not do full justice to Popper (1935) and appears to neglect The Poverty of Historicism (1944/5 and 1957) and The Open Society (1945).

He concludes the chapter with a section on The Postpositivist Persuasion: Rehabilitation of the Theoretical.

“(a) All scientific data are theoretically informed. This alternative to the positivist conception of the fact/theory distinction as concrete has been most sharply articulated by the neo-Popperian Lakatos.” (p 30)

That was actually one of the points emphasised by Popper in his introductory course on scientific method at the LSE which he delivered for over a decade through the 1950s (check dates).

“Theoretical formulation does not proceed, as Popper’s empiricism would have it, according to the law of ‘the fiercest struggle for survival’, (LSD p 42) basing generalizations only on positions which have not yet been empirically falsified and subjecting such formulations in a completely open-minded and purely skeptical manner to critical empirical attack.” In a note he records “this faith in the disinterested rationality of the scientist is itself, of course, a certain type of nonempirical assumption. As Habermas wrote in reference to Popper, “a critique of knowledge that claims to be free of presuppositions…must already know more than it can know according to its own stated premises”. (Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971 p 120.

He cited a passage to show that Popper knew how adverse data can he handled without ditching the theory, “It is always possible to find some way of avoiding falsification…”

Indeed Popper wrote (possibly unhelpfully) that a degree of dogmatism may be desirable to develop a theory through a period of difficulties in case it  “delivers the goods” eventually. Bartley suggested that a better formulation would simply recognise that adverse observations render a theory problematic and further work is required to find whether the fault lies with the theory under investigation, or the data, or some other theory that is involved. Duhem made that point over a hundred years ago and Popper became aware of Duhem’s contribution when Joe Agassi drew his attention to it.

“Fundamental shifts in scientific belief occur only when empirical changes are matched by the availability of alternative theoretical commitments”. P 32

See the relevant piece of LSD which states that a hypothesis will not be given up due to adverse evidence unless there is a better option available.

What difference could it have made to his lifelong career if he had got a better grip on Popper, and also expanded his interest to the Austrian economists?

This is an essay on the way his program developed – the interesting thing is the way he ended up with a “deep cultural program” which draws on just about every school of social thought with the exception of CR and the Austrians!

2. Failure to draw the distinction between falsifiability (a matter of logic and the form of statements) and falsification (a practical matter).

3. Scientists don’t practice falsification.

4 Falsificationism is refuted by the history of science.

5 Popper was subjected to effective criticism by Lakatos/Kuhn/Feyerabend.

6. The failure of Popper’s theory of verisimilitude casts doubt on his whole program.

7. There is no getting away from induction/justificcationism.

8. From Habermas: Popperism is a form of positivism, it is analytical and provides no dialectic or effective theory of criticism.

9. From Habermas: The dualism of things and values, is/ought or propositions and proposals, provides no leverage for criticism of the status quo.

After a lengthy account of the progress of positivism in the philosophy of science from theVienna Circleof logical positivists to logical empiricism Giddens moved to the “postpositivistic” attack on the “orthodox model”. He named several authors involved in this attack (Toulmin, Feyerabend, Hesse, Kuhn) and then noted that Popper had preceded them. Some of the positivists confused the issues by insisting that Popper was really one of them, due to the interest in science that they shared, so his differences were internal to the movement. Consequently Giddens found  “The points at issue are not easy to disentangle…one should mention…his complete rejection of induction and his concomitant rejection of “sensory certainty”…his substitution of falsification for verification…his defence of tradition which, in conjunction with the critical spirit, is integral to science; and is replacement of the logical positivist ambition of putting an end to metaphysics by revealing it is nonsense  with the aim of securing criteria of demarcation between science and pseudoscience”.

As to the similarities which he perceived, “Popper shares the conviction that scientific knowledge, imperfect though it may be, is the most certain and reliable knowledge to which human beings can aspire…and, like the logical positivists, his characterization of science is a procedural one: science is separated from other forms of tradition insofar as its theories and findings are capable of being exposed to empirical testing and therefore to potential falsification”.

In fact the similarities are not quite what Giddens takes them to be. Popper was never concerned with certainty, or its surrogate, probability.

Moving on to the critique of Popper.

“Popper’s philosophy possesses the boldness of formulation that he requires of science itself: the appeal of his substitution of falsification for verification derives in large part from the simple and incisive way in which it disposes at a stroke of the traditional dilemma of induction. But the simplicity of the notion is belied by difficulties which it conceals”.

The first difficulty that he sees is the problem of verisimilitude rather than truth as the aim of science, unless we assume that we can proceed by successively refuting a finite series of theories in order to come closer to the truth. “Second, the very idea of falsification, which looks so precise and clear presented as a logical solution to difficulties of induction, becomes quite murky when applied to the analysis of actual scientific activities of testing and comparison of theories”

This is an example of SE (Standard Error) number x, the failure to take account of the distinction that Popper repeatedly drew between falsifiability (which depends on the logical form of a statement) and falsification which is the practical activity of testing. Popper pointed out that a scientist who is confronted with an apparent refutation of his theory can discount the evidence and adopt any number of defensive moves, some of which may be legitimate, provided that they lead to an advance in the discussion (perhaps shifting the focus to some problematic aspect of the experimental design or exploring the possibility of mulfunction of the equipment) and are not simply used to fend off any possibility of serious criticism. This is not “murky” it is just the way things are. Popper devised a number of conventions to maintain the standard of criticism in the game of science (otherwise you have left the game): Giddens suggests “this is not very convincing, and one could claim here that Popper is hoist with his own petard: namely to propose that any instance which does not accord with the thesis should be disregarded as “unscientific procedure”.”

The significance of the picturesque turn of phrase “hoist with his own petard” eludes me. Popper’s proposals about testing theories are not theses which may be true or false, they are proposals to maintain high standards of testing in scientific practice. Giddens should either dispute the need to maintain such standards, or if he accepts that high standards are desirable then he needs to identify problems with Popper’s proposals, and maybe even suggest better ones.

Instead of doing that, Giddens calls “foul” on Popper’s proposal and states that “One of the consequences of Kuhn’s work is to affirm that this will not do, and the same holds for that of Feyerabend and Lakatos”.

What will not do? Attempts to maintain high standards of criticism? Of course high standards of criticism are not always met. Extensive historical research is not required to establish this but how does it represent a criticism of Popperian critical rationalism?

Moving on to The Critique of Positivism in Frankfurt Philosophy

He explains that positivism in these circles has a broad and diffuse meaning. . The background to this is theFrankfurtproject to “critique the tendency of development of Western culture since the Enlightenment” which has in the view of theFrankfurtschool, brought about “the domination of modern culture by technical rationality” which represents a new form of domination which the project aims to unmask. According to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972), the result is that:

“Subject and object are both rendered ineffectual. The abstract self, which justifies record-making and systematisation, has nothing set over against it but the abstract material which possesses no other quality than to be a substrate of such possession. The equation of spirit and world arises eventually, but only with a mutual restriction of both sides. The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus conceals the sanction of the world as its own yardstick. What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given. What is abandoned is the whole claim and approach of knowledge: to comprehend the given as such; not merely to determine the abstract spatio-temporal relations of the facts which allow them just to be grasped, but on the contrary to conceive them as the superficies, as mediated conceptual moments which come to fulfillment only in the development of their social, historical, and human significance.”

This is the type of verbiage which prompted the ambition of the original logical positivists  to outlaw metaphysics as strictly meaningless and Giddens points out thatFrankfurtcritical theory is a defensive reaction to the positivists. Popper always insisted that the verifiability criterion would not work, being both too and too narrow (it excludes laws of nature expressed as universal generalizations along the lines “all swans are white”) and the more appropriate response is to maintain standards of simplicity and clarity in exposition and criticism, analogous to standards of testing where evidence is being used critically.

Giddens then described the so-called “positivism debate” starting with Popper’s presentation of “twenty-seven theses” on the logic of the social sciences at the meeting of the German Sociological Association atTubingenin 1961. Adorno followed with his paper, which Popper expected to be a rejoinder to his theses, however Adorno did not engage with the theses but claimed that Popper’s critical rationalism was too limited, being essentially positivistic and analytical instead of dialectic,

“In contrast, dialectical theory of society must indicate the gaping discrepancy between practical questions and the accomplishment of technical tasks—not to mention the realization of a meaning which, far beyond the domination of nature achieved by manipulation of a reified relation, no matter how skilful that may be—would relate to the structure of a social life-context as a whole and would, in fact, demand its emancipation.” ⁷²

So dialectical or critical theory must transcend the boundaries of critical rationalism as expressed by Popper. Furthermore, the separation of fact and value (which Popper defended in Chapter 5 of OSE as the dualism of propositions and proposals) is claimed by Habermas to condemn practical questions to irrationality, or to the “closed world” of mythology and the meaningless nonsense which positivism was determined to cast out.

That is a travesty of Popper’s views in several different ways, most strikingly because the point of Popper’s dualism of “is” and “ought”  was to overcome any tendency to accept what exists at the time (in the social world) as the way things ought to be (so don’t try to change anything). He wanted to maintain a domain of values and aspirations for social improvement, a world of values that transcend the way things are at the present time, and provide criteria for improvement. Strangely, Giddens and the Habermas and his colleagues appear to be ignorant of the arguments in TheOSE, otherwise they would not press such an absurd line of argument against him, fully as absurd as the charge of positivism.

And now it is all happening, after a decade in cold storage the project will be funded by three-year grant of $600,000.

In the late 1990s Professor Boyd travelled to 16 countries to investigate archives and locations and interview over 90 Popper associates from politicians (like Helmut Schmidt) to philosophers (like Isaiah Berlin).

“I find Popper’s thought marvellously exciting and fertile, and the best defence I know against what John Searle calls ‘the attacks on . . . objectivity, rationality, truth and intelligence in contemporary intellectual life’.”

Professor Boyd has previously penned biographies on the great Russian novelist Nabokov, which were credited with contributing to the Nabokov revival. Boyd seeks to ensure the Popper biography has a similar impact.

More on Boyd.

Thanks to Dave Lull for the links!

I am thinking about a piece with the working title “Third time lucky?” to suggest that the first  opportunity for a turning point was just after WW2 if only Talcott Parsons, Ludwig von Mises and their followers could have formed a united front to push the views that they shared (or the views that Parsons held in 1937 anyway).

The “second time” was when Lavoie and his colleagues  were on the case, if only they had taken not been diverted by Gadamer and Bernstein but promoted the  common approach of the early Parsons plus von Mises and Popper, beefed  up with input from the Critical Rationalists in the Popper school like Agassi, Albert, Boland, Birner and Jarvie, plus Popper’s later work on objective knowledge and metaphysical research programs.

The third time will be when some influential players in the game realise how CR can synergise with Austrian economics (or classical economics with a robust Austrian component), the way it looked in the early 1930s before Keynes and then the the rise of positivism and formalism.

The Boettke and Prychitko paper.

Abstract. Mises and Hayek in the 1920s and 1940s thought of their work as within the orthodoxy of economic science. But after WWII it became increasingly obvious
that the contributions of Mises and Hayek were out of step with the way the economics profession was evolving. But starting in 1974, due to the organizational
efforts of Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, and bolstered by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science to FA Hayek, a resurgence of interest in Austrian
economics by young scholars was initiated. Starting in 1984, but significantly in 1985, the work of the new generation of Austrian economics started to have an impact in the mainstream outlets in terms of journals and university presses. We argue that this is a defining year in the modern history of the Austrian school and that it reflected both the quality of work being done by the new generation as well as a methodological crisis within the mainstream of economic scholarship. Don Lavoie’s work in comparative economics, as well as his work in methodology, reflected this shift within the economic conversation.

Pete Boettke noted a “mind-blowing” surge of activity associated with Austrian economics in 1985. This was a lagged effect of the revival triggered by the South Royalton conference in 1974 and related things like Hayek taking a share of the Nobel Prize.  He cited Lawrence White’s book on free banking, O’Driscoll and Rizzo on the economics of time and ignorance, and Lavoie, with two books on central planning and his working paper on the “interpretive turn”.

“Optimism abounded for those of us contemplating a career in Austrian economics at the time. But there was a reality check, and that was the stranglehold over economics that formalism and positivism held.”

In the debate on economic calculation under socialism that von Mises and Hayek pursued through the ’20s into the ’30s the appeared that the Austrian case did not get traction in the community of economists due to “an unholy alliance of scientism and statism”.

They wrote that Lavoie wanted to get to the heart of the problem of methods in the human sciences because methodology determines the questions that people ask and the kind of answers that are considered to be good. They noted a rising tide of dissent from formalism and positivism during the early ’80s. McCloskey wrote a path-breaking article and book on the rhetoric of economics “a modern statement of the challenge to the scientistic pretensions of economics”. This followed the 1960s/70s debate in the philosophy of science when the old orthodoxy came under threat from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feberabend, plus Caldwell’s Beyond Positivism and Daniel Hausman’s  collection of papers on the philosophy of economics. One other factor in the mix was the way that socialism was “visibly crumbling from within” during this period, just before the Fall of the Wall. All of these developments sparked the hope that the “stalled revolution of thought from 1948 (Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order) and 1949 (Mises’ Human Action) could perhaps finally be realized in 1985″. They chould have also mentioned Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution in Science (1952) for another critique of scientism.

The rationale behind Lavoie’s interpretive turn

Lavoie wanted to bring together three lines of thought (1) the growth of knowledge literature in the philosophy of science, (2) continental phenomenology and hermeneutics, and (3) Austrian praxeology. His home base was the Austrian framework of methodological individualism, subjectivism, methodological dualism and market process analysis.

But why hermeneutics! The authors explain that Lavoie had three reasons. First, we are committed to interpretation (hermeneutics) by virtue of working in a particular tradition – we understand where we are by understanding where we  have come from. Second, the Austrian tradtion, coming through Dilthey and Weber, is committed to a different approach from the natural sciences. Thirdly, Lavoie believed that hermeneutics (some times called POMO) was gaining ground in all the sciences.

Lavoie was very impressed by Richard Bernstein who saw the possibility of reconciling the three lines of thought noted above, and saw a way to develop the Austrian program on a more modern philosophical footing, taking into account advances in the philosophy of science that challenged positivism and logical empiricism in the mainstream of analytical philosophy.

Lavoie and his colleagues and students at the Center for the Study of Market Process talked about this project almost non-stop for 4 years – at lunch, often at dinner, in his office, in seminars, and in his classes. Even, we might add, at parties late into the night, or in visits to his home.

Lavoie was obsessed with the idea of an economics located between formalism and institutionalism (in the language of Richard Bernstein in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism). He believed that the latest developments in the philosophy of science were moving in that direction and could be taken no board, with hermeneutics, to support Austrian economics.

The academic landscape after 1985

Lavoie and his circle, especially Peter Boettke and David Prychitko, felt that in 1985 Lavoie and the modern Austrians had won the day. Socialism (real existing socialism) was crumbling, the elite thinkers in the philosophy of science  were turning away from formalism and positivism, Keynesianism was being overtaken by the new classical revolution, McCloskey in the profession had “unmasked the positivist face of economics”, Hayek, Buchanan and Coase scored  Nobel prizes.

But this turned out to be a false dawn. The situation was captured in an episode at a 1992 seminar when two authors making a case for the role of “apprciation theory” alongside “formal theory” were challenged by a “an open-minded and brilliant theorist”. They were making the case that the role and function of a firm could be better captured through understanding such things as tacit knowledge, routines and corporate culture, than through a formal mathematical model. The theorist flatly disagreed; formalism by definition is more intellectually satisfying because it ensures rigorous argument.

Lavoie was operating with the following three assumptions. (1) the philosophy of science has discredited scientism, (2) the failure of Keynesianism calls for a re-appraisal of Austrian economics, (3) continental philosophy supports Misesian praxeology, which lead to the conclusion that the Austrian methods represent a viable alternative and should be seriously considered (or reconsidered) by all economists. That did not happen because by and large economists utterly rejected (1) and (3) and were not all convinced about (2).

“In the years since 1985, economists have become less, not more, attentive to developments in philosophy…They model and measure”. The drivers are professional advancement by finding and keeping a job in a top-tier program.

Conclusion

Despite the hopes of Lavoie and his colleagues, very little has changed. They did not generate the kind of fundamental discussion about methods that they wanted , and very few economists were receptive to the methodological message, not even among Austrian economists. The range of methodological interests is too narrow. McCloskey spoke in terms of expanding the intellectual range of discussion from MN to the whole alphabet, A to Z! “This A-Z discourse in economics is what Don Lavoie agitated for throughout his career. We are still fighting for that reality to this day”.

A leading scientist in Australia has written a book that gives a good handle on the science, the history and the pressures acting on scientists that have led to what he calls The Climate Caper. That is the name of his book, which I have summarised on line.

It provides some more dots to add to the pattern sketched by a previous book that could have been called The Anti-Nuclear Power Caper.

This is a summary of the policies of the New Communist Party in Australia.

The empiricist intuition is that as we approach the things of which we have “direct experience,” our beliefs become more certain, obvious, and less prone to error. It is ironic, then, that at the very end of this chain are qualia, perhaps the only things we could be said to “experience directly,” and they are among the least understood phenomena of all.

Attitudes may not even be particularly important so far as the institutions of science are concerned. Every theory deserves a thorough and motivated defence, and it is often the dogmatists who provide it. Even when individual rationality fails, it can emerge again, given appropriate institutions, on the group level. Critical rationalism has always been about the rationality of social institutions as much as the rationality of individuals.

Critical rationalism is more concerned with objective dogmas. An objective dogma is an idea or argumentative strategy which does nothing but deflect criticism. One may have a critical attitude or stance and yet still play host to an objective dogma: its dogmatism does not depend on any subjective attitude, but rather the logical structure of the dogma itself.

A subjective dogmatist may be relatively benign. If an experiment appears to contradict his dogma, then he may studiously inspect instruments for defects, run the experiment again to reproduce results, or survey possible modifications of the dogma. The subjective dogmatist may fulfill a useful service by exploring possible counter-criticisms; he is certain that someday the apparent refutation will be explained away and, of course, he might be right.

An objective dogma, however, is like a spam filter that casts its net too broadly: it removes inbound criticism before it can properly reach the recipient’s attention. Objective dogmas are usually disguised as pragmatic heuristics, self-effacing scepticism, or even logical fallacies; they immunise their hosts from particular kinds of feedback, while often appearing to be the epitome of self-criticism or logical reasoning.

One objective dogma is the so-called fallacy of the stolen concept. Recognition of the purported fallacy is normally attributed to Ayn Rand, though I suspect others have used similar arguments before her. In his essay, “The Stolen Concept,” objectivist Nathaniel Branden explains the  fallacy by using Proudhon’s famous declaration, “All property is theft.”

“Theft” is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of “rightfully owned property”—and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as “theft.” Thus, the statement “All property is theft” has an internal contradiction: to use the concept “theft” while denying the validity of the concept of “property,” is to use “theft” as a concept to which one has no logical right—that is, as a stolen concept.

Branden then applies this same argumentative strategy to reject claims that “logical axioms are arbitrary,” “logical axioms are hypothetical,” “all that exists is change and motion,” “man perceives only an illusion or mere appearances,”  and “man cannot achieve knowledge.” Finally, he concludes with “one of the most grotesque instances of the stolen concept fallacy,” that is, the claim that commitment to reason is an “act of faith” itself.

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. Faith is the acceptance of ideas or allegations without sensory evidence or rational demonstration. “Faith in reason” is a contradiction in terms. “Faith” is a concept that possesses meaning only in contradistinction to reason. The concept of “faith” cannot antecede reason, it cannot provide the grounds for the acceptance of reason—it is the revolt against reason.

This last argument is of particular interest to critical rationalism; one of its central theses is that reason itself cannot be rationally justified. If “faith” is defined as commitment without rational justification, then, according to critical rationalists, commitment to reason itself would then be an “act of faith.” Are objectivists correct? Are critical rationalists guilty of the stolen concept fallacy?

At this juncture, it might appropriate to review the basic argument against justificationism. Let A and B represent propositions, and suppose that A justifies B.

(1) A ⊢ B

From (1) and the law of identity we get

(2) A ⊢ A, B

From the law of identity and principle that additional premises cannot subtract possible conclusions, it follows that

(3) A, B ⊢ A

Since the relation of deducibility is transitive, it follows from (2) and (3) that

(4) A ⇔ A, B

Finally, from (1) and (4) we conclude

(5) (A ⊢ B) ⇔ (A, B ⊢ B)

That is, (1) is logically equivalent to an obviously question begging form of argument. Since (1) exemplifies nothing less than all valid arguments from the non-empty set, it follows that all arguments either have this question begging form or are invalid. Since B can neither be justified by itself nor by an invalid argument, it follows that no possible conclusion is justifiable.

If “knowledge” is defined as justified belief, then knowledge is impossible to achieve. If “faith in reason” is defined as commitment to reason without justification, then commitment to reason must be an “act of faith.” The argumentative strategy here is reductio ad absurdum: “a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence” (from Wikipedia).

However, Branden would reject this conclusion as “a grotesque instance of the stolen concept fallacy,” because it assumes the concept of justification and that something can be justified, while concluding that nothing is justifiable and the concept of justification is incoherent. To paraphrase Branden,

to use the concept “justified belief” while denying the validity of the concept of “justification,” is to use “justified belief” as a concept to which one has no logical right—that is, as a stolen concept.

Therefore, this argument by reductio ad absurdum, in light of the stolen concept fallacy, is inadmissible.

Returning to Branden’s exemplar of the stolen concept fallacy, Proudhon’s declaration “All property is theft,” one might ask what Proudhon meant.

Proudhon believed that the common conception of property conflated two distinct components which, once identified, demonstrated the difference between property used to further tyranny and property used to protect liberty. (From Wikipedia)

As with critical rationalism’s case against justification, Proudhon’s conclusion is the result of argument by reductio ad absurdum. His claim, whether right or wrong, was that the traditional concept of property was incoherent. However, Branden’s argumentative strategy leads him to reject Proudhon’s conclusion without ever addressing his argument.

Branden does not address a single criticism in his essay, because his defensive strategy can deflect any and all inbound criticism in the form of reductio ab absurdum. He is immunised from criticism by both an objective and objectivist dogma: the so-called fallacy of the stolen concept. In his conclusion, Branden is triumphant despite not addressing a single argument against his position.

One will search in vain for a single instance of an attack on reason, on the senses, on the ontological status of the laws of logic, on the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind, that does not rest on the fallacy of the stolen concept … This fallacy must be recognized and repudiated by all thinkers, if truth and reality are their goal.

Indeed, if one accepts Branden’s defensive strategy, then nobody will be able to demonstrate to him that his views are inconsistent, because any such critic can immediately be dismissed for committing the “fallacy” of the stolen concept. Employing this dogmatic argument does not mean Branden did not have a critical attitude; it is precisely because objective dogmas transcend subjective considerations that a mere critical attitude is not enough.

An interesting consequence of all this, that may initially seem confounding, is that one is not a critical rationalist just because one says so. I may regularly say “I am a critical rationalist,” but I may not be. What objective dogmas pervade my thoughts? Perhaps, despite my critical attitude, I am unresponsive to criticism, and incapable of being self-critical. Like Branden, I may use arguments that seem to me like the epitome of self-criticism and logical reasoning, but are, in fact, nothing but objective dogmas that deflect and immunise against criticism. I don’t think so, but it is the way of objective dogmas that their hosts are normally unaware of them.

Good to have the disgusting exchange between Strauss and Vogelin on line.