Ultraempiricism?

The year 1938 saw the publication of The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory by Terence Hutchison, and with it the explicit introduction of Popper's methodological criterion of falsifiability into economic debates. That Hutchison should have recognized the significance of Popper's demarcation criterion as early as 1938 is itself remarkable: Popper's Logik der Forschung (1934) was then almost completely unknown, and even so famous a popularization of the philosophical ideas of the Vienna circle as Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) completely missed the significance of Popper's critique of the verifiability principle of meaning. To some extent, even Hutchison failed to realize the novelty of Popper's thinking: although he cited Popper frequently, he laid down the fundamental criterion that economic propositions that aspire to the status of “science” must be capable, at least conceivably, of being put to an interpersonal empirical test without any acknowledgment to Popper (Hutchison, 1938, pp. 10, 19, 26–7, 48, 49, 126, 156). Hutchison's principal target of attack was apriorism in all its varieties, but in assailing the postulates of orthodox economics that were said by Mises and Robbins to be intuitively obvious, he overstated his case and so spoiled what might have been a decisive effort to reorient the methodology of interwar economics.