So really, every casual act of modeling that humans do nearly every moment entails Quine’s science. When I turn on my faucet expecting water to come out, I am doing science. Is it important to Quine that the hypothesis be “a statement” - what about just a wordless thought? (Such as just imagining water coming out of the faucet when the knob is turned and feeling a sensation that corresponds to what we would communicate in words as, “Yes, that feels like a likely outcome.”)
To further quote the previously mentioned article, Quine views human knowledge as one all-encompassing system of belief, which is accepted, rejected, or modified according to how well it accommodates and explains what is observed. He sometimes makes this point by highlighting the ‘continuity’ between the claims of common-sense and those of more advanced science, where all attempts at making true claims are viewed as continuous in the general sense of being responsive to the same standards of evidence and testability that are the hallmark of scientific knowledge (1976b, 233).
To quote Quine himself, “Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us foresee and control the triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of sensory receptors. The triggering, first and last, is all that we have to go on.”
Wow, that’s the first time I’ve heard a philosopher write on such matters and not laughed out loud. I agree 100%*, and I think as much is entirely obvious when you really take things down to the fundamental level and ask yourself, “OK, what can I really be sure about?” It’s to the degree that it’s been really gnawing at me that no one sees this. This is a ray of sunshine, although I’m just a little upset I didn’t come up with it first
[*Edit: I would just change “sensory perceptors” to “(subjective) sensory perceptions”. Husserl’s bracketing…]
Vernon Smith, the famous “experimental economist” (thereby disproving the claims made by Mises and Rothbard that economics can’t be studied experimentally), had a very thoughtful review of Human Action that brought into focus some serious methodological failings: http://www.indytruth.org/library/journals/catojournal/19/cj19n2-1.pdf.
Ironically, the man who performed many of Vernon’s “disproving” studies, Benjamin Libet, rejected Vernon’s conclusions.
FTA at http://www.indytruth.org/library/journals/catojournal/19/cj19n2-1.pdf: “What is not appreciated by Mises and others who similarly rely on the primacy of reason in the theory of choice is the constructive role that the emotions play in human action.”
This seems totally off-base; Mises’s view seems the exact opposite of this.
The article hardly criticizes anything Mises says at all, and when it does it seems to strawman him. Most fundamentally, it misses Mises’s point: an actor’s subjective evaluation of his state of affairs - definitely including his emotions! - is what determines the deliberate actions that he takes, in particular the action always being an attempt to better his subjectively viewed state of affairs. No observation about science, short of proving that other humans are not actually conscious or don’t actually strive to better whatever state of affairs they believe themselves to be in, could disprove that. To believe so is simply to misunderstand what Mises was getting at.
The article itself is worth a read, though, because it proposes some challenges to the significance of praxeology, even if it fails to address its correctness.
theory of choice is the constructive role that the emotions play in
human action.
Mises and others who similarly rely on the primacy of reason in the
theory of choice is the constructive role that the emotions play in
human action.
Yeah, I think Larry White’s critique was pretty spot on. If anything, however, the demonstration of the correctness of Austrian theories seems to do nothing more than bolster praxeology.
P.S. I always wondered if leftists actually knew what the consequences of actual factual polylogism or cosmological nihilism would be, as it would not really help their case.
Quote
probably the realization that they share the same reasoning as eugenicists and racial supremecists.
Funny thing. I was reading a poster here who mentioned ‘the multicultural left’. I remember the years when I was a teen sympathetic to ‘socialism’, or whatever I believed socialism was supposed to be (not what I realized). My first instinct back then was to associate anybody who mentioned such a term as being a hypothetical ‘bigoted reactionary’ boogeyman.
Only those kinds of people would ever say that kind of thing (Like the Corporate big business Republican Capitalist Empire, whose armies are comprised of like crazy John Bircher Freeper types who think Jews control Evil or whatever), or so I had been led to believe. Basically, I was conditioned to instantly react in some form of shock, horror, or knowing smugness at anybody mentioning such a buzzword as ‘multicultural left’ in a demeaning manner, and instantly write them off as a hopeless racist bigot blah blah neanderthal.
My logical path under the ‘progressive’ aegis, had I continued under it, would then assume such persons’ logic to be chained to the oh-so racist and bigoted reactionary bourgeois blah blah they were enslaved under, and due to this their mental nature is destined to always be hard-wired this way.
The irony is astounding.
1. No, it’s not postmodern. To suggest so reveals an incomprehension of both Austrian economics and postmodernism
I think yo want pos modern to mean something very specific that it doesn’t necessarily mean - which simply can’t be done in the context of this thread.
here you go:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#1
we can even verifiably refute you on your own “kantian” criteria. And to call Austrian Econ “Kantian” is a bit of a dubious claim, or at the least not uncontraversial… but whatever.
Austrian methodology overly relies upon folk psychology, as far as I’m concerned. I would like to see an Austrian economist seriously grapple with Paul and Patricia Churchland’s eliminative materialism
You’re well read, probably better than math and science than most of us here (myself included), but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
In fact I may go so far as to point out all you are doing is making a kind of “list” of things (elim mat, behviorism, Frege, Carnap, hard sciences, empiricism) and only doing a psychologism and appealing to a certain flavor.