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re the original question on mainstream economics and logical positivism. 
To complement the expert troika's comments 
 
Logical positivism is definitely an inappropriate label for any of the 
dominant methodologies implicit in practices within 'mainstream economics' 
in the neoclassical era. The problem is that many economists have picked 
up and used labels from philosophy on a fairly indiscriminate basis and 
the labels have then been taken by later generations as having substantive 
meaning.  I remember having Martin Shubik talking to my honours class in 
microeconomic theory twenty five years ago, and he called himself a 
'logical positivist'.  I thought he was wrong then (and now).  But MS 
wasn't going to be removed from his acquired label. There was an emotional 
element to such badges - it brought seeming legitimacy and security.  
especially in a cold war context. There was also threatening subject 
matter and intrusions from a nasty and brutish world (as in the Lester 
attack on marginalism). Friedman's 1953 excursion into 'positive 
economics' was a mess (albeit a great success for the discipline's 
continuity); unfortunately, that article was picked up by several 
generations of teachers for their first hasty and embarrassed class, 
before quickly moving onto an exposition of the received wisdom.  
Unfortunately also, now several generations of methodologists have pored 
over the damned thing, giving it a legitimacy it never deserved. Lipsey's 
textbook was similarly inappropriately labelled, misleading yet further 
generations of students. Of course all 'isms' get appropriated and used 
and abused as a living tradition of philosophical discourse and political 
rhetoric (liberalism as Exhibit A). We economists, however, like to think 
that a name is attached to a fixed meaning. In the case of the 
appropriation of positivism within economics, we have stretched meaning 
beyond recognition. As for the mention of the emphasis on deduction (at 
the end of the original question), my estimation is that the answer is in 
the sociological realm - logico- deductive reasoning is crucial to the 
construction and delineation of a separate discipline of 'economics'.  
Without it, we would blend indistinguishably with all those lesser breeds 
- historians, sociologists, etc. and where would our self-esteem and our 
influence be then? 
 
Evan Jones 
Economics, University of Sydney 
 
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