hayekianxyz:
On #1, is that the only way to decide between them? I thought another way was to examine whether the theory in question was internally consistent??
On #2, can you refer us to the essay(s) in question that treat this topic? Or is this your own conclusion?
“Strict (exact) laws of phenomena can never be the result of the realistic school of thought in theoretical research even if this were the most perfect conceivable and its fundamental observation the most comprehensive and most critical.”
(Menger, Investigation Into the Method of the Social Sciences, Book 1, Chapter 4.)
That’s exactly it, if you have two internally consistent theories with different and contradictory conclusions then how does one decide between them without looking at the assumptions, axioms etc*?* It’s one thing to say that Austrian economics begins with realistic conclusions, it’s quite another to keep insisting that a priorism is unique to Austrian economics.
As regards reading material, I wouldn’t say there’s been any particular piece that has led to these conclusions, although the writings of Bruce Caldwell have been quite influential. I’ll see if I can’t find some pieces that have been particularly insightful and send you a message, I doubt I’ll come up with much though, I don’t read much methodology.
hayekianxyz:
Do you agree with these “realistic conclusions” that the author below is expressing?
And, do you believe that the characterization of social science described in these passages is common to the other schools of thought you are referring to outside of Austrian economics?
“These concepts are also not merely abstractions of the kind we use in all physical sciences; they abstract from all the physical properties of the things themselves. They are all instances of what are sometimes called “teleological concepts,” that is, the can only be defined by indicating relations between three terms: a purpose, somebody who holds that purpose, and an object which that person thinks to be a suitable means for that purpose. If we wish, we could say that all these objects are defined not in terms of their “real” properties but in terms of the opinions people hold about them.”
“What I am arguing is that no physical properties can enter into the explicit definition of any of these classes, because the elements of these classes need not possess common physical attributes, and we do not even consciously or explicitly know which are the various physical properties of which an object would have to possess at least one to be a member of a class. The situation may be described schematically by saying that we know that the objects a, b, c,…, which may be physically completely dissimilar and which we can never exhaustively enumerate, are objects of the same kind because the attitude of X toward them all is similar. But the fact that X’s attitude toward them is similar can again be defined only by saying that he will react toward them by any one of the actions d, e, f, …, which again may be physically dissimilar and which we will not be able to enumerate exhaustively, but which we just know to “mean” the same thing.”
“The common attributes which the elements of these classes possess are not physical attributes but must be something else.”
“…we have to define both the objects of human activity and the different kinds of actions themselves, not in physical terms but in terms of the opinions and intentions of the acting persons…”
“The claim to which I have referred follows directly from this character of the first part of our task as a branch of applied logic. But it sounds startling enough at first. It is that we can derive from the knowledge of our own mind in an “a priori” or “deductive” or “analytic” fashion, an (at least in principle) exhaustive classification of all the possible forms of intelligible behavior.”
“If we can understand only what is similar to our own mind, it necessarily follows that we must be able to find all that we can understand in our own mind.”
(Hayek, The Facts of the Social Sciences)
Regarding your assertion about Mises:
“…Mises was correct in drawing a distinction between theory and history but wrong in dichotomizing them.”
If you can’t provide your own rationale or a cite a work that reaches this conclusion, can we agree to call your statement an unsubstantiated assertion?
Awesome quotes from Hayek.
I’m not particularly sure why you’d post quotations by Hayek in order to defend the sort of a priorism espoused around here, at least, I think the points he’s making are wont to be misleading when taken out of context. I’m also somewhat unsure as to the purpose of the first few quotes, they seem to be concerning subjectivism, not a priorism.
Perhaps you got a different reading of Hayek, but here I see a significant difference between his remarks here and the type of a priorism that many contemporary Austrians adhere to.
As I see it Hayek’s argument is that we can “derive from the knowledge of our own mind in an “a priori” or “deductive” or “analytic” fashion, an (at least in principle) exhaustive classification of all the possible forms of intelligible behavior.”. For one thing, Hayek elsewhere states (I believe in the same essay) that our knowledge of the inside of our mind, so to speak, merely a set of analytical tautologies that are meaningless until applied to the real world, specifically until we begin to study the way that knowledge is acquired.I can’t help but feel that this is very different from what people here speak about when they topic is a priorism. Hayek was considerably more modest in his claims than Mises (and Mises’ followers) were, the latter seemed to think we could say a whole lot more than the former (for example, Mises thought we could make sense of time prefence a priori, Kirzner disagreed).
Concerning my unsubstantiated assertion, I take Mises’ main point to be that you need theory before you analyse history, I think this interpretation fits well with a lot of the intellectual battles that were going on during Mises’ time. Hayek was in agreement with this too, in fact, a lot of the conclusions from The Sensory Order seem to support this. I won’t attempt to summarize his work in TSO here, but essentially his point was that because of the way the mind works any attempt to observe events without some sort of theory is literally impossible. But as I said before, it’s not right to dichotomise the two, if your theory is consistently left unable to explain a huge number empirical events then any reasonable scientist would have to go back and look at his theory.
As a final note, Caldwell remarks in his biography of Hayek, on this very subject, that we need to look at just how unwilling Hayek was to criticize Mises or even to depart from his thinking.
EDIT: Adam, part of my point originally was not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with a priorism but that it’s not really all that unique, or at least need not be all that unique to Austrian economics.
Anything that tries to quote Hayek in support of Mises’ aprioristic view of economics is quoting him out of context since he was always against such a view.
While I have not read any of The Sensory Order, what you have just said reminds me very much of K. Popper’s essay in Objective Knowledge: “Conjectural Knowledge”.
hayekianxyz:
I’m not sure you are taking issue with Misesian or Rothbardian a priorism. I interpret your complaint as going to the difference between two distinct research programs; what Menger would call the realistic-empirical orientation of theoretical research as opposed to the exact approach to theoretical research.
I think you are taking issue with the exact approach (what may be called also the a prioristic approach), whether that approach is practiced or advocated by Mises, by Rothbard, or by Hayek.
If you re-visit the quotes I provided from Hayek above, he is arguing that no physical attributes can enter into the definition of social categories.
If the social event we observe cannot be defined in terms of physical distinctions, this means the very event is defined in terms of the theory with which we approach that event. The theory is the event. This is the implication of what Hayek is writing. The social event is not what is observed, because what is observed is/are the physical attributes. The event, qua social event, is, for the observer, his “theory” of that event. This is the unavoidable implication of what Hayek writes, and I believe it is this that you are taking issue with. It is this essential idea, regardless of who may happen to be advocating it or subscribing to it in varying degrees or forms.
In passage B above, when you write “empirical events,” this can be interpreted in one of two ways:
An event which is empirical in its physicality, and to which an observer attributes social meaning. This is what Hayek’s essay is describing.
An event that has a social meaning that is an empirical (observable) fact. Then the problem becomes, given Hayek’s argument, how that social meaning can be ascertained, if not by referring to the physical attributes of that event. You are suggesting that this can be done by “study[ing] the way that knowledge is acquired”
(I’m skeptical, since any such study may be confronted with physical facts to which social meaning is given by the studying subject, the same issue Hayek is describing.)
In any event, #1 and #2 indicate two different research programs.
I interpret you as saying you favor research program #2, based on a conception of social events as empirical facts, over research program #1, based on a conception of social events as theories of the observing subject.
Have you read Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle? Admittedly, Hayek’s poor English writing style makes him difficult to understand, but he seems to say the opposite in it (this was published in 1929, AFAIK).
Honestly, this is a direct quote from Hayek from the previous post:
What about it do you not comprehend?
He probably comprehends Hayek a lot better than you do, considering Hayek himself may have had a misconception of what Misesian apriorism entailed, something Roderick Long has argued, that in fact their two approaches were far more similar than superficial disagreements would allow one to believe.
Could you actually cite a quote by Hayek for I have Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle in front of me as I type, and in no way does it contradict what he stated from Hayek on Hayek. In fact, here are a couple quotes from Chapter I: The Problem of the Trade Cycle:
Hayek’s methodological opinions are quite clear in the above quotations.
And all of this without a single quote to support you, merely unsupported assertions that does not even bother to explain what were these “superficial disagreements”. Honestly, it is plain intellectually dishonest to say that someone knows an intellectual better than that intellectual knows himself.
Those are the quotes I was referring to. What he seems to be saying is that economic knowledge needs to be deduced a priori, but can be disproved through a posteriori empiricism (not proved, however).
In no way do they support an a priori view of economics because he allows for the falsification of knowledge in the sphere of economics. What his views in Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle come down to is the fact that one must have a theory that is logically sound before one begins to analyze empirical events, but that those empirical events may show one’s theory to be lacking. Hence the final judge of the soundness of an economic theory is whether or not it can explain the phenomena it seeks to explain for a theory may be logically consistent, but still fail to explain the empirical phenomena. Hayek does not suggest that the logical soundness of a theory is the only determinant of the soundness of that theory, which is what one would expect from any aprioristic methodology, and when Hayek’s comments here are understood in light of his philosophy of mind, keeping in mind that Hayek already had developed much of the core views of The Sensory Order before the publication of Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, it is absurd to declare him a supporter of aprioristic economics.
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/long.pdf (p. 54 onwards)
Goes a long way. I’ll try find the exact article or blogpost I had in mind though, it argues that their methodological differences were largely due to misconceptions Hayek had regarding Mises’s method…
Actually no. If the axioms or some other postulates were wrong, that’d be problematic too, and Mises recognised this…
Actually, no; you are putting an aprioristic methodology (which for at least the third time he explicitly rejected since at least 1937) into Hayek’s mouth, twisting the facts to support a antecedent belief. You seem to not comprehend the fact that while Mises was a rationalist, Hayek was emphatically not (which is the heart of the disagreement between the two), and never suggested that sound reasoning alone could result in a completely sound economic theory. If he had, then yes he could be interpreted as supporting an aprioristic view of economics, but he always (in a very Popperian fashion) emphasized the importance of having the theory be able to explain the phenomena it seeks to.
Actually yes, apriorism does entail exactly what I said. Whether Hayek realised that or not is his own problem, not mine. Mises never argued internal consistency alone was sufficient to ensure the correctness of a theory. Regarding the sense he was anti-rationalist, read the book I mentioned from p.54 onwards. Praxeological theories seek to provide a framework of descriptive analysis to explain observed phenomena in the first place.
Honestly, in no way does the article identify the methodological misconceptions that Hayek had with Mises, and all that he discusses is what Hayek would refer to as the “logic of individual choice”, which Hayek had stated can be known a priori. Furthermore, Long never really discusses the primary point of contention between the two: the proper use of reason, and Hayek’s rejection of rationalism. Surely there are plenty of claims about Hayek in the essay, but never are his differences with Mises ever elucidated.
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I can play the same game: no it doesn’t.
But the point is sound nevertheless: the fact that Hayek gave a role for Popperian falsification in his methodology separates his notion of economics from any aprioristic one. Perhaps Mises did agree, as you suggest and I also believe, that the soundness of a theory is also dependent on whether it explains the phenomena it seeks to (at the same time I believe many contemporary Austrians would deny this), but this does not alleviate the methodological tension between the two because while Mises has stated this theoretical failure is because of the failure of aprioristic reasoning, Hayek would not for he has never suggested that the “[deduction] with unexceptionable logical from the fundamental notions of the theoretical system” is done from axioms a priori, and sound hermeneutic of his views on both rationalism and the mind would corroborate this.
Then I guess we are using different meanings of “Rationalist”. Furthermore, the book is absolutely empty of everything you stated it would have, and yes I scoured 164pgs. for little. If Mises is not a rationalist, then what is he?
I firmly believe that many Praxeologists would disagree with this statement, and would instead state that Praxeology does not seek to provide such a framework, but rather it seeks to fully understand the conclusions of the action axiom without any reference to observed phenomena. However, we need not enter the hermeneutics of Mises’ understanding of Praxeology compared to many contemporary Austrian’s own understanding. If we were to, then one of the issues that must be contended with is whether Praxeology is an area of study, or a methodology, which many Rothbardians seem to endorse.