Friedman Blinded Me With Science

Scientists aspire to develop theories that observations can potentially demonstrate to be wrong. Here I examine whether this aspiration can possibly be achieved when economics is practiced in keeping with one of two views on methodology, the deductive-nomological or the instrumental view. I get the argument below from Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (Yale University Press, 1994).

Consider the covering law model, also known as the deductive-nomological view of scientific methodology. In this view, scientists formulate universal laws, in some sense. In an application of a scientific law, the hypotheses or antecedents are asserted to be true. That is, the statement of scientific law is conjoined with initial conditions. One then checks that the consequent holds. If observation is inconsistent with the consequent and one is sure that the initial conditions are true, the law is refuted.

Milton Friedman advocates instrumentalism, in which the assumptions of a scientific theory are false. (Actually, his famous essay, "The Methodology of Positive Economics", is so incoherent, Friedman can be interpreted as advocating almost any methodology you care to name. But let's stick with a widely argued view.) In Friedman's view the antecedents are always false in a significant theory:

"Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions" -- Milton Friedman

Thus, if one holds that economic theories state covering laws and that economists are and should be instrumentalists, economic theories cannot be refuted by observation. The logical implications of false antecedents need not be true.

Can economics be a science if it is practiced in keeping with Friedman's strictures?