Discussion on the criterion of veritas in the social sciences

The paper traces the long history of debates on the reliability of knowledge in the social sciences. The discussion was most intense among philosophers (materialists, various strands of positivism, and proponents of linguistic philosophy), yet its outcomes also shaped the work of economists, sociologists, and political scientists. Logical positivism, which dominated in the 1920s and 1930s, conflicted with the agenda of the “econometric revolution”. Popper’s critique of induction as a basis for reliable knowledge resonates with Friedman’s instrumentalism and his acceptance of unrealistic assumptions. The ideas of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend were reflected in the growing fragmentation of economics and the coexistence of multiple, often competing research programmes. Because economists cannot directly “relive” political and economic history, attention increasingly shifted to rhetoric, as McCloskey argued. Earlier, Wittgenstein had stressed the relative autonomy of language, while Austin and Searle developed speech act theory. Performativity—understood as a constitutive element of utterances—has become central to contemporary analyses of the attention economy. The tensions between scholastic traditions and emerging discursive shifts accompanying new research programmes can be usefully described through Fuller’s concept of post-truth. As a result, many contemporary economists pay little attention to methodological debates, relying on “econometric faith” and constructing “plausible worlds”.