Specific cases do not disprove theories
In my debates with statists (a number of which are available on my web site objectivethought.com), I find that an argument regularly invoked against the correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, or between libertarianism and peace, or other such relations, is the specific case. By invoking the case of this or that country which saw prosperity despite collectivization, or war despite freedom, he thinks that the libertarian case is thereby routed.
Whether the facts presented by the statist are right or wrong is not the point. What the statist is trying to do is reduce the debate to nitpicking, case after case from both sides. By doing this he has swiftly nullified the advantage you had in the systematic knowledge of libertarianism.
Picking on cases to disprove general facts and theories is a fallacy of method. To understand it, we must use the language of science. I will use the example of gravity to explain what these three simple terms mean :
FACT - A fact designates an ontological fact of reality.
The fact of gravity is that objects fall toward sources of gravity at a constant acceleration.
LAW - A law is the codification of a fact in scientific language.
If an object A has a mass Ma and an object B has a mass Mb, then the force F on object A is directed toward object B and has a magnitude of F = G*Ma*Mb / r2 (note that this is a Newtonian approximation, but good enough for most purposes).
THEORY - A "theory", in common language, designates a scientific hypothesis. In science, a theory is an systemic explanation of a fact.
The theory of gravity resides in Einstein's notion of a curved spacetime. It can be described simply as : "freely falling objects follow the shortest paths in curved spacetime".
The goal of science is to discover the nature of the systems regulating the universe, generally speaking. Laws and theories are the codification of this knowledge. A law describes, and a theory explains a law on the basis of a more fundamental level.
To continue on our scientific analogy, we already have various laws and theories, including the law of gravity and the theory of gravity. These laws and theories are, in many cases, based on centuries of experiments and deductions. The law of gravity has been tested against the observed movements of the stars, the motion of falling objects on Earth, and so on, for a long time.
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