by Mill provides a good illustration of the tension between fallibilism and anti-foundationalism. Mill’s first principles are supposed to be empirical and not necessary truths, but for economics to be an empirical subject at all, they have to be beyond genuine doubt, since they provide the only empirical element in an otherwise deductive system. The certainty that Mill claims for the results of scientific economics are purchased with deep uncertainty about the significance of those results – in particular, how important economic outcomes are relative to countervailing noneconomic outcomes. And the modern economist or philosopher surely would regard Mill’s economics as empirical only in a Pickwickian sense, as Mill does not leave open the possibility that anything could count
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Mill provides a good illustration of the tension between fallibilism and anti-foundationalism. Mill’s first principles are supposed to be empirical and not necessary truths, but for economics to be an empirical subject at all, they have to be beyond genuine doubt, since they provide the only empirical element in an otherwise deductive system. The certainty that Mill claims for the results of scientific economics are purchased with deep uncertainty about the significance of those results – in particular, how important economic outcomes are relative to countervailing noneconomic outcomes. And the modern economist or philosopher surely would regard Mill’s economics as empirical only in a Pickwickian sense, as Mill does not leave open the possibility that anything could count as evidence against its first principles.
Since modern mainstream economists do not even bother to argue for their foundational assumptions being neither necessary nor “beyond genuine doubt,” mainstream economics is arguably even more Pickwickian than John Stuart Mill’s methodological ruminations …