No demonstrations of personal proficiency in successful scientific speculation are demanded of the cultural right’s nattering nabobs. It is wholly sufficient that economists they find convincing have yet to portray the causality of our science in a determinant system. One cannot argue with a bullhorn; a sneer is not open to refutation; and that is all that matters.

Erstwhile philosophy professor (since turned Neoconservative ankle-biter) George Will is given to quoting no less an authority than himself in mere insistence that economics cannot be a science ¹ — which will of course remain tautologically true until those agreeing to call one another ‘economists’ accept the scientific principle of contradiction by counterexample.

Having also pronounced science to be how we decide what is true,² Professor Will denies any possibility for economics’ accessing ‘truth’ as he would have the term defined. Here we have a perfect specimen of Scholastic thought, with both the unexamined premise and the pre-ordained conclusion supplied by the good professor. Nothing is easier than logical consistency if one's argument proceeds in a vanishing small circuit around one's presumed authority over the matter at issue.

A more gracious man of public letters might content himself with having pronounced upon the limit of economic science as he is able to understand it. Professor Will, however, joins Marx in a shared rejection of the economy as behaving in any sort of systematic manner such as that presupposed by Smith or Hume. It is difficult to imagine a scientist of even Newtonian accomplishments being so full of himself as to risk attribution for such a sweeping generality.

The somewhat less philosophical Rush Limbaugh is content to endlessly ridicule mathematics as it is taught, and is even more insistent in that the whole of uniquely Western science is now without application:

Science is independent of opinion. Science is what it is. True scientific discovery, inconvertible [sic] fact — however you want to define science — is immune to whatever human beings think it is or think of it.³

Here we have direct encounters with the mindset that must be overcome before SFEcon can enter the considerations of conservative people:

Economic adjustment, being inward to our humanity as opposed to ‘out there’ in nature, cannot be approached in the same familiar manner by which Western science approaches what is; and ...

Conservatives’ scientific rationalism, being more rational than that of others, is thereby already co-extensive with what is.

Our earlier essays on the possibilities for a science of economics have placed SFEcon in opposition to this species of thought. Nothing in Western science can be incon[tro?]vertible. Nothing is more characteristic of Western science than its acceptance of controversy as a means of continuously refining its world view.

While the indicia certainly are that there is one and only one reality out there, characteristically Western science most emphatically does not proclaim identity with what is. What is, is. It is not Science [that] is independent of opinion, but exterior reality that is independent of opinion. Western science recognizes itself quite literally as an arguable opinion as to what model of reality is likely to be most effective in dealing with a specific issue.

What might be more usefully said of the West’s unique approach to civility is that it has given rise to several modes of thought, most especially its scientific method, by which a great many people might voluntarily arrive at one and the same estimation of what is. Science in the Western tradition is an effective aid to governance by consensus precisely because it accepts reality as something that can be approached through verbal and mathematical metaphors, but never beheld as a whole.

Productive science accepts that our senses are limited; that different people will perceive the same data differently; and that scientific experiment (experience sought for) operates chiefly by negation — that is by eliminating unproductive hypotheses as to what is, so as to reveal hypotheses that might be useful. Science, in this Western sense, is co-definitional with its acceptance of falsification by counterexample.

Western science thereby achieves its distinction as a method rather than as a canon of truth. The method rejects any final settlement of scientific questions. Canons inevitably congeal into official facts requiring defense by force. ‘Science’, in the sense evolved through truly Western culture, quite purposefully refuses to decide anything; but, rather, occupies itself in discovering useful regularities. Dictators decide what is true. Science, being inherently hostile to tyranny, is instinctively subverted by the pseudo tyrant.