I recently got a hold of the syllabus for a seminar I am taking this semester on international conflict. The professor is making us do an empirical quantitative analysis in our research paper for the course in order to prove or disprove our theoretical contention. First of all, you can’t prove a theory or hypothesis in the so-called empirical sciences. Any political scientist should know better. All you can do is disprove or refute theories and hypotheses, mainly hypotheses, and due to pesky little problems like underdetermination (a really huge problem in the social sciences) one is hard pressed to do even that.

As I have written in an unpublished working paper entitled “Toward an Austro-Athenian Philosophy of Science,” the types of phenomena that the natural sciences and the social sciences seek to study are fundamentally different.

Natural phenomena are causally determined. Raw “facts” are known or knowable, but we cannot know anything directly of the explanatory laws or causal factors. The facts of the natural sciences can be isolated and controlled. Therefore it is necessary and possible to formulate hypotheses and test them via experimentation. In contrast to the natural sciences, the reverse is the case in the social sciences. Man is a volitional being and is not causally determined (in the mechanistic sense). Action is purposive (teleological), i.e., it is consciously directed towards goals. Even if the immediately prior statements about human beings are rejected, it still holds that social phenomena are far more complex than the phenomena studied by the natural sciences and especially physics.

It is impossible to test theories of social phenomena. All social phenomena have a multitude of causes and are densely interrelated. And we simply cannot perform controlled experiments to isolate causal factors. The objects of our study (other human beings) can become aware of our observations and our theories and change their behavior accordingly. Moreover, there are the ethical considerations of experimenting on human beings. More importantly, however, the ultimate assumptions that form the basis of explanatory laws of human action are and can be directly known by the human mind.

The proper method of the social sciences is praxeology, the general science of human action. It is a system of synthetic a priori propositions. Testing of these propositions is not only undesireable and impossible for the reasons given above; it is unnecessary, because, though the discovery of synthetic a priori propositions is a difficult theoretical task, once they are successfully discovered they are self-evident and apodictically true, and all empirical science must necessarily be founded on and guided by them. (See here for more information.)

So…unless I can convince my professor that the most one can do with an empirical quantitative analysis in international conflict is to illustrate one’s theory, then I will have to write some crap paper to get a good grade in the class, some part or all of which I will have to throw out afterwards.

Gee…now there’s a surprise. ::heavy sarcasm::

A couple of days ago it was announced in the news that the search for WMDs in Iraq was officially ended. Indeed, that the search folded early in December. The search, unsurprisingly, came up empty. The violence in Iraq is cited as one reason for the failed search; ironically, this implies that Bush’s bankrupt nation-building program had a hand in ending the search for the much vaunted WMDs. However, the lack of information, i.e., lack of evidence, should not be discounted. As Chris Dominguez remarks on the LRC blog: “Isn’t this like saying, ‘D.A. withdraws case for lack of evidence; accused will remain imprisoned nonetheless–indefinitely.’ Sentence first! Verdict unnecessary.”

Wendy McElroy’s latest article on the marriage of statism and feminism is hard-hitting and well worth the read. She writes that “Domestic Violence Law Fuels Big Government,” and ignores other victims of domestic violence, namely men.

The discussion, in which I am taking part, on the status of the “marriage” between libertarianism and feminism continues with great vigor. See the original post, with commentary, essay authored by Roderick Long and Charles Johnson that sparked this post is finally online here. Long posts the link here on L&P and his post sparked more commentary. See for yourself! Can the marriage between libertarianism and feminism be saved?

I finally put the finishing touches on the syllabus for my first college-level course. And the first day of class is only Tuesday, January 18th! The course is POLI 2060; that’s Introduction to Political Theory.

The only hard requirements I had to follow in designing my course is that I had to cover Aristotle’s Ethics and the Federalist Papers. Other thinkers I will be covering include the standard ones: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. But I’m giving this course a bit of a contemporary international politics spin by emphasizing the relation of man, the State, and war, especially in the latter third of the course. There I cover statist and anarchist socialism (Marx and Bakunin), individualist anarchism (Henry David Thoreau), classical liberalism (Frederic Bastiat and Randolph Bourne), and radical libertarianism (Gerard Radnitzky and Murray N. Rothbard). I finish up with a brief article on “Tolkien vs. Power.”

Check out the syllabus (in pdf format) on my website. Or view it directly.

Has someone at NASA read Robert Heinlein? Jerome Pearson of NASA is a proponent of “space elevators,” an idea first popularized (to my knowledge) by the great libertarian science fiction writer. Read more about Pearson’s and NASA’s ideas here. If “space elevators” are ever to become a reality, however, I think it will be done by private entrepreneurs rather than the monumentally inefficient and incompetent NASA bureaucracy.

Over the past week or so I’ve been involved in several discussions on L&P. Robert Campbell raised questions about Roderick Long‘s and Charles Johnson‘s calls for libertarian feminists to pay more attention to the radical feminists. Bill Marina has raised questions about the appropriateness of Antiwar.com having William Lind, an expert on 4th Generation Warfare and a US military advisor, as a regular columnist; see here, here, here, and here. Personally, I find Lind’s research to be both interesting and useful for libertarians and freedom fighters. However, I have some qualms about the uses to which the US government/military will put his work.