Comments on "Letter to the Editor".(Letter to the editor)

Mr. Hugh J. Totten, JD, argues convincingly that The Appraisal Journal should adopt the rigor of scientific journals and not follow the subjectivity of artistic judgment (Spring 2008). He states,

 
   Novel or not, a manuscript must be subjected to testing 
   prior to publication. The risk is far too great that 
   an untested theory will find its way into a publication 
   and will thereafter be presented to the community, and 
   its judicial representative, the jury, as scientific truth. 
   That kind of stuff is frequently called junk science and 
   it has no business seeping into the appraisal profession 
   regardless of how open and receptive the Journal is to 
   new approaches and ideas. 

Quite to the contrary, the scientific method is not the codification of facts. The history of science is one of controversy and change. Theories are approximations of the world that cannot easily be seen, and empirical testing is only as good as the underlying theory. Journals are a forum where theories are developed, advanced, verified, institutionalized, criticized, refuted, and die. Peer-reviewed journals mostly contain small studies and incremental modifications or refinements of orthodox theories. Journals are also full of new hypotheses that cannot be checked and duplicated.

Frequently, a new and untested theory will bloom into an entirely new subfield. On occasion, new theories published in journals will lead to a sweeping paradigm shift. The greatest names in science are the ones who saw the world in a radically different way and challenged orthodoxy. "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants," said Sir Isaac Newton. Einstein's theory of relativity was not universally accepted by his peers, though his ideas were built upon earlier work that challenged the Newtonian theory of gravity.

Newly published textbooks are routinely twenty years out-of-date from contemporary debates. Consequently, ideas you studied twenty years ago may be forty years out of date. If you labored over calculus in college and then stopped, your mathematical sophistication is 300 years out-of-date. Mathematics, the purest form of science, publishes conjectures and hypotheses long before they become proofs or are refuted.

The social sciences fare less favorably than the so-called hard sciences: "I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people," said Sir Isaac Newton after significant financial losses in the popping of the South Sea Company bubble. In economics, many schools of thought have very different theories of value, underlying assumptions, logical suppositions, and models of aggregate human behavior. If academics from the dozen or so different schools were gathered in one conference hall, they would soon resort to fisticuffs.

Statistical studies may appear to be the savior of economics providing a testing element. However, statistics are only as good as the data collector and the modeler's artistic judgment of the data. One extreme outlier can hyper skew a statistical relationship. A computer cannot discern whether this outlier is a typographic, sampling, methodological, definitional, calculation, or modeling error, or the proper part of a data set.