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Certainly Economics has not lived up to the promise of Logical 
Positivism as seen by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s.  But, 
Logical Positivism, itself, has not lived up to that promise.  Even a 
close to casual reading of Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory, or even 
Evolutionary Economics, leaves one with the impression that the world of 
direct experience cannot be captured and predicted, except in a very 
limited range of space and time. The work in the history and philosophy of 
science by Kuhn and Feyerabend, in particular, and the revolution in 
Historiography occasioned by the writings of Foucault and Derrida, and, 
indeed, the persistence of the specification problem in empirical work - 
all of these lead me to conclude that the aspirations of the logical 
positivists were premature.  
 
It is not that Economics has not lived up to Positivism.  It is 
that no discipline has.  Pure positivism remains an aspiration 
everywhere.  That most laudable search for an objective social science is 
still unfulfilled. 
 
Robin Neill 
 
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