If I recall correctly, the Austrian School of Economics has a tradition of rejecting the scientific method and instead using something they call praxeology, which is most definitely not a scientific methodology.
Praxeology as defined by wikipedia, "is the deductive study of human action". Deduction is deeply rooted philosophy, mathematics and logic. A very valid way of scientific reasoning.
It is a different way of doing science, than the "scientific method", which uses observation and quantitative methods.
The Austrian school derives consequences from human action, allowing to describe what can happen in an economy, qualitatively. But their method doesn't allow to make quantitative statements, which makes it "useless" to politicians wanting to change the economy.
I found this quote from von Mises when trying to work out what on Earth praxeology is:
"They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts."
Sounds more like ideology than a science to me....
No - science and engineering use mathematics to model the real world and generally do a mighty fine job of it.
Arguing that your subject, which most definitely is attempting to model part of the real world is actually a part of the a mathematical world and therefore not subject to the same rules as sciences seems a bit dubious to me.
It uses a priori truths and deduction from it to arrive at new results.
Additionally several branches of philosophy and logic use a priori facts to derive results from it.
Praxeology is one of different ways of scientific reasoning. Just because you cannot get quantitative results from it, doesn't mean its unscientific. It cannot get you very far in predicting concrete human action, because in its view, humans act based on a subjective value "function" that has a discrete scale (you can only say: A is better than B, not by how much). and since every human is unique with their own values, which are simply not objectively comparable, there is just no way to make predictions or qualitative assumptions from this approach to science.
Since you mentioned that "praxeology" yesterday I've spent a fair amount of time trying to work out what on earth it actually is.... I'm still dumbfounded.
Edit: A lot of the stuff around praxeology sounded rather like Marxism in that its proponents argue that it can't be refuted. Turns out that Hayek actually reached a similar conclusion and favoured a Popperian view that "any system which claimed that it was irrefutable was by definition not scientific".
