The Online Library of Liberty

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• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Ellen Frankel Paul, Laissez Faire In Nineteenth-century Britain: Fact Or Myth?
• I: Legal Philosophy
• The Minos: What Is Law?
• Obedience to Law
• Moral and Legal Justification
• Early First Amendment Theory
• The First Amendment & Freedom of Expression
• The First Amendment and Religion
• The First Amendment Vs. the Cpi
• The Economics of Strict Liability
• The Rule of Law In American Politics
• II: Political Analysis
• Society, State, and Right In Proudhon
• Human Rights and Political Change
• Carter's Human Rights Policy
• Locke's Tolerance: Prudence Or Right?
• Political Intolerance
• Hayek: Reason, Relativism, and Liberty
• Hayek On Coercion and Freedom
• “advanced Liberalism” As Managed Capitalism
• Common Good & Public Interest
• Uncrowding the “commons”
• Milgram: Obedience, Authority, & Legitimacy
• Syndicalism & “the Servile State”
• The Parisian League
• Conservatism In Spain
• Soviet Intellectual Orthodoxy
• The Clergy & the American Revolution
• Russian & American Defenses of Servitude
• Croce's Hegemony: How to Win Minds
• III: War and the State
• Just War and Rights
• Just Wars Vs. No Wars
• Walzer & Just War
• Wartime Propaganda Tactics
• Iran, Oil, and the Cold War
• The State and Oil Policy
• San Francisco & the Military Complex
• Protectionist Assaults On Developing Countries
• Government Military Behavior
• IV: Political Economy and Theory
• Three Kinds of “capitalism”
• Adam Smith: Economic Utilitarian
• Roepke: Laissez Faire and Social Order
• Government-induced Boom & Bust
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Methodology
• Professor Friedman's Instrumentalism
• Milton Friedman's Critics
• Entrepreneurship and Justice
• Externalities & Government Intervention

Professor Friedman's Instrumentalism

Bruce J. Caldwell

• University of North Carolina at Greensboro

“A Critique of Friedman's Instrumentalism.” Southern Economic Journal 47(October 1980):366–374.

Lawrence Boland has recently identified Milton Friedman's “positive economics” methodology as a variant of instrumentalism and has asserted that instrumentalism has never been either criticized or refuted. Prof. Boland implies a vindication of Friedman's position.

Prof. Friedman was actually unaware that his position was instrumentalist but accepts Boland's characterization. Unfortunately, Boland's characterization of instrumentalism is incomplete—isolating only the methodological implications while ignoring the ontological questions. Thus, Friedman should actually be viewed as a “methodological instrumentalist.” The core of Friedman's methodological instrumentalism are the beliefs that: (1) the goal of science is to discover hypotheses that predict well, and (2) the “realism” of assumptions does not matter.

In contrast to Boland's assertion concerning the criticism of instrumentalism, post-1940s philosophers of science unanimously reject the notion that the only goal of science is prediction; they favor the the alternative claim that the goal of science is explanation. If explanation is taken as the goal of science, then methodological instrumentalism fails for it is concerned with predictive adequacy, not explanation.

“Perhaps the most damaging claim against Friedman's own particular brand of instrumentalism is not that it is incorrect, or even implausible, but that it must be viewed, in the light of the more recent work, as anachronistic.”