ABSTRACT
In March 1985 Donald McCloskey and I were invited to Laval University in Quebec to deliver papers on methodology. When we got there we discovered that the hosts had billed our papers as a debate. Since McCloskey and I agreed on many points, the idea of a debate was amazing. In particular, we totally agreed that usual methodology is authoritarian and thus a waste of time. Prior to arriving in Quebec I gave considerable thought to what I would present to a group consisting of faculty and graduate students in Laval’s Administrative Science program. In advance I knew that French-speaking scholars who study methodology usually do so in the European tradition. That is, they usually start from a Cartesian perspective where any thinker can be located as holding a ‘position’. As noted before, where one is located in economic methodology has been determined by whether or not one agrees with Friedman’s ‘as if’ instrumentalism. Since my perspective on methodology starts with a rejection of any position concerning the correct or best ‘scientific method’ and instead I consistently promote methodology as a program of systematic criticism (the program demonstrated repeatedly by Popper and Agassi), I thought I would take the opportunity to explain why my research on methodology is unlike that of any other methodologist in economics. My presentation at Laval is one of the few times I have talked about methodology in the traditional sense. This seemed necessary because in my periodic dealings with traditional methodologists at various conferences, I felt that we were always arguing at cross-purposes since almost everyone I argued with expected me to be taking a ‘position’ on
traditional issues in methodology, issues which, as I explained in detail in my 1982 book, I dismiss as artifacts of inductivism. My primary objective was to explain why I do not take a position on the traditional issues.1
