We start out in economics with the idea of volition. We observe our own private worlds, come up with that idea, and then try to unpack it into its components. We need the idea of cause and effect for the idea of volition, because we can’t try to achieve anything unless we have an idea of what to do to bring that about. We need the idea of beliefs, because it isn’t just that causes and effects exist in the world; it is that we have a belief of the causes and effects that exist in the world. We need the idea of desire, because that is what drives our volition. We get the idea of means and ends from adding the ideas of cause and effect, beliefs, and desires together. And so on.
I didn’t try to make that very exact; I just wanted to give you an idea of what is going on. I call that “pure praxeology”. It is just the logic or mathematics of volition. We start out with the idea of volition, which we find in our own private worlds, unpack it into its components, and build a vocabulary that we will have to use to make sense of things in the public world. The fact that I can form of the idea of volition in my own private world is a matter of fact, to use the vocabulary of David Hume; whether it exists or not is a matter of fact, and it wouldn’t be absurd to say from a third person, god-like point of view that it just isn’t there. But what makes it “a priori” is that, if I am talking to you, you can’t deny that you have volition, because you will be using your volition to deny that you have volition, and would be caught up in the absurdity of trying to deny trying. So, though that just comes into play in arguments and communication, it is pretty useful, because you can show anyone reasonable that it is a permissable starting point.
We start out with the idea of volition and break it into its components. We get causes and effects, beliefs, knowledge, means and ends, desires, wants, preferences, opportunity costs, pyschic losses, psychic profits, value scales, exchange, choice, satisfaction, gratification, and so on. A lot of those things overlap, and some of them are pretty ambiguous, but it is up to us to unpack the idea of volition into its components in a useful, efficient, unambiguous, and correct way, so we can have a good vocabulary to use for talking about market conditions. We need a good vocabulary before we can talk about market conditions in an effective way.
The mainstream economists of his time used categories like causes and effects, means and ends, desires, choice, and so on, but they just didn’t make their investigations explicit. Ludwig von Mises knew that you had to start out by examining your own private world to come up with a good vocabulary to talk about market conditions, and knew that you got that from your idea of your own volition, so he was in a position to try to make the vocabulary that he used systematic, but the mainstream economists of his time didn’t know that, and weren’t in that position, so what they did was, though they used the same sort of vocabulary, they didn’t get it from systematic investigation into the nature of their private world; they just got it from their “commonsense”. They didn’t not use his method; they just replaced what could be systematic and scientific investigation with unsystematic and unscientific intuitions about things.
I think that we should start out in the same sort of way to study language. I think that we have to start out by observing our own private worlds to create the vocabulary that we need to talk about languages. And I think that most of the terms that linguists use, such as nouns, adjectives, tense, grammatical voice, prepositions, and so on are just unsystematic and confused ways of referring to things, because they are just using their commonsense intuition to come up with the terms.
(I will try to give an example in a bit.)