First of all, I’m not certain that I have an answer that’s absolutely right, and I’m working on this as it’s been building as a set of concepts over about 8-10 years, since I started on my journey with libertarianism, objectivism, and praxeology.
Now, as I understand it the term “a priori” means independent of experience. In other words, something we can know to be true regardless of our experience of reality. Before I define the category I’d like to make a firm statement about how I view the relationship between knowledge and reality.
Knowledge is self-contained, in that it’s a structure that we create inside the mind, it is not reality itself. We use it to model reality. When we take a structure of knowledge and apply it to reality it either correlates or it doesn’t, that’s independent of the logical nature of the knowledge itself. For exampe, 1+1 = 2 is true. But that doesn’t mean it applies to reality. When it does apply to something in reality then it’s true THERE in reality.
Another example is Euclidian Geometry. We know that it’s logically self-consistent, and that it’s applicable for some endeavors in reality, but there are places in reality where it doesn’t apply because other non-Euclidian Geometries explain the phenomena better.
So, back to Praxeology. The a priori nature of praxeology is based on the internal consistency of the system and that if the givens hold to be true for a specific phenomena in reality, then the logical conclusions and knowledge derived from praxeology must be true. The reason praxeology (in particular economics) is considered to be a priori knowledge by Mises was that he argued that a man must think of his own behavior in terms of purposeful action. That there is no way to not do so. His point was that man must use cause/effect when acting. He must use logic to form knowledge. He cannot do otherwise, any attempt to argue or discuss these points starts from within this sandbox already.
So, can we know that we are acting man, that we engage in purposeful action, without experience? Well, it’s possible that you may do things which are not intentional and have no end in mind, BUT IF YOU DO, the categories apply.
This is my point about conflict as a category. How I define conflict assumes as a precursor a set of criteria as givens : purposeful action, logic and knowledge, cause/effect, teleology, scarcity, time (as change), etc. I assume the categories of praxeology.
I add a logical construction of a conflict, defined as two incompatible intended realities aimed at by different human actors. It’s not that the ends are necessarily incompatible, it’s that one or more steps in the cause/effect chain necessary to achieve an end cannot both happen at the same time. I am not arguing that this logical construction does or does not occur in reality, or that it applies to any specific phenomena in reality, the a priori nature of the argument is that IF it occurs, then it applies and any logical deductions from this construction ALSO apply to that phenomena in reality. Just like geometry, just like human action.
For example, IF someone engages in indirect exchange, we will see certain catallactic phenomena. That doesn’t mean that indirect exchange happens or doesn’t happen, it means (a priori) that IF it happens, we know logically things about it.
That is what I believe we mean by a priori in this case. Knowing whether or not the category of conflict as I’ve described applies to some phenomena in reality is determined a posteriori. But the category of conflict and the deductions from it are known to be true a priori. Without reference to experience.
The same is true about all of the knowledge contained in Austrian Economics. The reason value is subjective is already deduced a priori from the category of human action. The only question is whether or not human action applies to phenomena in reality. If it does (and it does as determined a posteriori) then the conclusions apply. Meaning, I do engage in purposeful action, therefore I do subjectively value.
So, when I talk about scarcity, I believe that’s built into “incompatibility” portion of my logical category of conflict. That doesn’t mean that it applies to any specific phenomena in reality. Breathing air in circumstances where air is not scarce cannot in an of itself result in this category of conflict, without introducing some condition sought after by one or both parties, which IS scarce. For example, if our heads are close together and we are warming the air around our heads and one of us prefers as an end “cool air” rather than “warm air”.
Now my logical category of conflict doesn’t make scarcity appear in reality. And in fact the simple fact of scarcity doesn’t make a conflict appear either. What causes it is different plans that use means that are scarce. *** something about that last sentence is interesting to me, if we accept conflict as I’ve described it to include different ends desired by the same actor, does choice itself now become a conflict resolution of scarce time? Mises in his work describes time as a scarce resource that all human action must account for in choosing action.
So, this concept of conflict is I believe sufficiently general and requires no concepts not already implied from Praxeology as we already know it (from Mises).
So, I’d like to keep this separate from the term dispute. Which implies an active two party contention over a resource, and this is one step farther along the path. There are as we’ve mentioned previously many single party actions which avoid active contention. I’m not trying to add anything more to the base concept. I’m not trying to jump into the various means by which individuals might solve the incompatibility issue, I simply want to use a term that allows this incompatibility to be pointed to as a category for examination.
I’m hoping that we can recognize that without the existence of such a phenomena, a wide range of human action would not exist. Perhaps including the concept of choice.
For example, even without a second person, an individual may have in his mind two plans which are incompatible. In fact we always assume, rightly or wrongly that in acting man is choosing to pursue one end and necessarily forgoing one or more other ends which are valued less.
I hope this is a good first attempt at moving this part of this conversation forward. My sense is that there’s a real logical expansion that can be performed here, that will help us speak of and analyze the entire sphere of human poltical behavior. I believe that this logical expansion can build from methodological individualism and the categories implied in human action as expressed and defined in Praxeology.
If I’m right, then it’s possible to recover macro politics (governments, class warfare, etc.) and bind it to micro-politics (dispute resolution) into a unified whole as Mises did with his Theory of Money and Credit.