I (and many others before me) are not claiming to “know” that a theory is bad. We are claiming that a theory which purports to describe some social phenomenon cannot rest on unrealistic or unfalsifiable assumptions about the entities (economic actors) in the domain of study. Milton Friedman and his acolytes claim that it can. This is an argument about the appropriate means of doing economics and about the nature of economic modeling.

[First-year graduate students] who like what they’re offered or who are ambitious enough to suppress their own thinking continue. Those who don’t and aren’t usually leave the field.

is pretty clearly a false dichotomy

Isn’t it just American pragmatism? (Iirc an Emerson-approved doctrine.)

Analogies with rotten eggs aren’t a good to think about how to go about intervening in intellectual controversies. ‘Knowing’ that a theory is bad doesn’t give you the resources to undermine its authority in the eyes of others (trolling academic blogs aside). There are several means of doing the latter and not all of them require knowledge of the theory (eg. contributing to a competing theory). But criticism is one such means and it does. To criticse foundations might not require knowledge of the rest of the structure but it requires knowledge of the foundations.

“True, but academic disciplines are not eggs. If you want to credibly criticise some technique or body of theory you need to show you are adequately conversant with it first. “

Credible to whom? I suspect you imagine that neo-classical economists are amenable to reason, are willing to countenance alternative views, and even to change their minds on occasion. Recent events provide no evidence of this.

Part of the problem here is that many of the strongest criticisms of neoclassical economics involve meta-level criticims of the discipline and its approach, not the mere contents of the theory. Milton Friedman, in a famous article in 1953, argued that the only valid test of an economic model was its predictive powers, and, in particular, a criticism that a theory’s assumptions were not realistic was not a valid criticism. In my view, this statement is manifest nonsense for any research endeavour which claims to EXPLAIN social phenomena, since a black-box model explains nothing. Even a black-box model with perfect 100% predictive accuracy explains nothing. Such models really have no part (in my view) of any discipline calling itself a social science.

But this response to Friedman is a criticism of his (and neo-classical economics’) whole way of doing business, starting with their assumption that economic actors are “rational” (in the very narrow and tendentious sense of rationality they use). Such a criticism of the neo-classical paradigm is valid whether or not I have first shown that I am conversant with the techniques used under the paradigm.

Did the Dark Powers of Analyticisism finally manage to kill John Emerson while he was half way through writing that sentence?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/30/keynes-return-master-robert-skidelsky

I don’t know whether this is true in economics, but it’s not true of any philosophy department I’m familiar with.

They should not be treated as neutral raw material to be banged into shape. The apparent assumption is that when they show up at grad school with no knowledge of anything, and that for that reason they should take no part in the direction of their education, but just follow orders.

I’m not familiar with every Anglophone philosophy department that there is, and mostly know about American rather than British school, but from what I can tell, most departments are pretty null, and teach methods which seem to preclude the possibility of productive thought about politics. Several trips to the library to look at journals, including those declared by Leiter to be most influential, haven’t given me any reason to change my mind.

Politically the problem with analytic philosophy isn’t rightism, or the political opinions of the philosophers themselves, but the disabling effects of analytic methods and the crowding-out of other kinds of philosophy.

The political sin of analytic phil

beginning grad students should not be required to master a paradigm or refute it before choosing to study something else

I wonder how you think they should be educated.

I don’t share the belief that you have to some extent successfully popularised here among people who haven’t studied philosophy that the situation in philosophy is comparable to that in economics. You sometimes seem to just assume that aspects of mainstream philosophy which you personally dislike must be serving some sort of large-scale politically repressive function. And you seem determined to ignore departments and individuals whose approach you might find more congenial.

The tragedy of this is that there is, within the bloated corpus of economics, a perfectly nice slimmed-down little science struggling to get out…..What economics needs to lose is a lot of metaphysical baggage, plus a lot of needy f-type personalities.

I would support a salvage operation on neoclassical economics, but to the neoclassical economists themselves, the necessary salvage operation would look like the sack of Rome.