ECON 208 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Equation, Exogeny, Preposition And Postposition

• School: McGill University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 208
• Professor: Paul Dickinson

Document Summary

Normative statements depend on value judgments and cannot be valuated solely by a recourse to facts. In contorts, positive statements do not involve value judgments. They are matters of fact, and so disagreement about them are appropriately dealt with by an appeal to evidence. Distinguishing what is actually true from what we would like to be true requires distinguishing between positive and normative statements. Positive statements need not to be true. A theory"s assumptions concern motives, directions of causation, and the conditions under which the theory is meant to apply. (p. 36) All theory is an abstraction of reality. If it were not, it would merely duplicate the world in all its complexity and would add little to our understanding of it. A theory"s predictions are the preposition that can be deduced from it. A theory is tested by confronting its predictions with evidences.