Property Rights in Christian Social Teaching

Abstract

The “Philosophical Foundations of Economic Science” have afforded occasion of sporadic inquiry for most of this century.1 Since the appearance in 1953 of Friedman’s famous essay on “The Methodology of Positive Economics”2 scholarly interest has increased greatly3 and has advanced considerably in sophistication by the attempt to apply Lakatos’s generalization of the Kuhn-Popper-Feyerabend debate4 to the methodological problems of our discipline.5 It is now become commonplace, within the “mainstream” tradition at any rate, to appraise putative contributions to economic knowledge in terms of “progressive” or “degenerating” “Scientific Research Programmes”6 and, presumably, to accept the epistemological consequences of that view. Knowledge of the economy, like knowledge of other parts of the physical universe, is socially created within a community of experts bound together by common allegiance to a set of criteria for distinguishing truth from falsehood. Though these criteria are historically conditioned, and may well be ideologically tainted, commitment to the — generalized — falsification principle keeps the fresh air of critical scrutiny circulating in the community, so preserving it from permanent lapse into dogmatism and error.