Economic Science and the Austrian Method_3

Hans-Hennann Hoppetheory of relativity before he had actually developed it. Aperson cannot know today what he will know about sugarone year from no~ And he cannot know all the goods thatwill be competing against sugar for his money in a year. Hecan make a guess, of course. But since it must be admittedthat future states of knowledge cannot be predicted on thebasis of constantly operating causes, a person cannot pretendto make a prediction of the same epistemological typeas, for instance, one regarding the future behavior of themoon, the weather, or the tides. Those are predictions thatcould legitimately make use of the assumption of time-invariantlyoperating causes. But a prediction about futuresugar demand would be an entirely different thing.Provided social and economic history can only come upwith reconstructive explanations and never with explanationsthat have any systematic predictive relevance, another extremelyimportant insight regarding the logic of empiricalsocial research follows. And this amounts to another decisivecriticism ofempiricism, at least regarding its claim of beingan appropriate methodology for social science research.Recall what I said earlier about why it is that empiricismso strongly emphasizes the predictive function of explanatorytheories. For every phenomenon to be explained thereare a multitude ofpreceding events and a multitude offunctionalrelationships with such preceding events by which thephenomenon in question could possibly be explained. Butwhich ofthese rival explanations is correct and which ones arenot? The empiricist answer was: Try to predict, and yoursuccess or failure in predicting future events will tell youwhich explanation is or is not correct. Evidentl~ this advicewon't do if there are no time-invariantly operating causeswith respect to actions. What then? Empiricism, ofcourse,cannot have an answer to this question.The Ludwig von Mises Institute • 39