I sense that as well, and this is the part of his theory that I find myself closest to intuitively agreeing with (although I may just be agreeing with what I think it means). I don’t mean it’s a flaw in his work, but that for whatever reason I have not understood it. I don’t understand most of Menger’s writing either. Something just, again, is not crossing the inferential gap. I’m not making sense of the words and sentences as they’re presented, and I often cannot isolate just one particular meaning in each sentence - I quickly amass a pretty wide array of possible interpretations before I get into the meat of the theory. I suspect it’s partly a difference in our respective quirks of writing or thinking styles, severely compounded by the difficulty of using language at this extremely deep level of analysis.
Here’s an example that seems very important to Adam’s analysis, but I cannot read between the lines enough to figure out why he wrote the last sentence at the point he did (sentence bolded by me; from http://www.praxeology.com/downloads/8642_Knott_TR2.pdf).
An instructive example of social interaction which I have used previously is that of a person who, upon walking into a park, sees a bronze statue. As he nears the statue, he realizes that it is a person who has painted himself, and is posing as a statue. As he approaches closer, he now realizes that no, it is a statue, and not a person. When he thought that the object he saw was a person posing as a statue, he thought that the object in front of him was an object having a human consciousness, i.e., an acting being. He thus attempted to place or locate “action” or consciousness spatiotemporally.
I just don’t see that there’s any attempting necessarily implied here. The man perceived the object as a person, OK…so what’s this about attempting? It seems to come out of nowhere and yet the text that follows entirely relies on that fact that the man is in fact attempting something. It not only doesn’t seem to be “missing a step,” but missing several steps. It’s pretty difficult to fill in the blanks when there seem to be several steps removed, and this seems to happen in rapid succession from near the beginning of each of the texts.
Adam repeats his explanations over and over and at great length, but the same details I’m looking for clarification on (usually one sentence for each would do) always seem to be missing or somehow not obvious to me. Or not missing, but just interpretable in more than one way, and then the next sentence also seems interpretable in more than one way, until I find myself trying to keep track of 20 or 30 possible permutations of interpretations on his overall meaning. The same happens with Menger, but in Menger’s case I literally can’t understand hardly a single sentence he writes. Mises I understand quite clearly, but with Menger I find myself trying to judge among 5 or 6 possible interpretations by the time I’m two sentences in. There’s clearly some unspoken context in both cases that I’m lacking.
For instance, even if I assume Adam means that the attempt to “place or locate” happened in the above scenario when the person tried to interact with the performer, it still doesn’t make sense to me that he in so doing would necessarily be attempting to place or locate a consciousness. Or even if he must for some reason place or locate a consciousness in realizing that the statue is really a person, it seems more natural to say, “He thus judged that there was a conscious person existing spatiotemporally (over in that part of the park),” or at least that there was a consciousness that could be accessed through that object (a person’s body) over there. And perhaps the person thereby assumed, say, that the performer would react to his approach (by moving, speaking, etc.), whereas a statue wouldn’t.
If, however, we were to add in the step that the man attempted to ask the performer the time, or ask how it felt to stand still for so long, then I could see an attempt taking place. Yet still, not an attempt to “locate or place a consciousness,” but an attempt to get information (no matter where the consciousness really resides, if anywhere) through the object* before him (the performer’s body, which he is not attempting to locate because he already knows where it is).
*Regarding this, I suppose Adam may object here and say that I am conceiving the situation as the man treating the performer as an object, not an acting being. However, such a distinction seems to be one of the things he is setting out to demonstrate with the text, not a starting assumption.
Anyway, that would make sense to me, but that is so far from what Adam seems to have intended that I feel pretty uncomfortable making such a deep assumption, and even if I do that’s just one of several possible ways I can think of to interpret the text, each of them likely not what he had in mind. Yet this seems to be a crucial part of his exposition, so there’s a pretty big problem if I can’t figure out precisely what the intended meaning or significance is and how the conclusion was arrived at.
I wrote the above not to start a discussion about the above passage, but just to show a typical example of what I meant by the words not crossing the inferential gap. They seem to cross it for others, but for some reason I find myself routinely not able to get at his intended meaning, even after extensive clarification. The sentences often just don’t seem to flow in a way that corresponds with any familiar sort of progression that I can isolate or unambiguously identify.
I hasten to add that I have seen Adam write in ways that seemed utterly clear and convincing to me on other topics (natural rights, etc.), and I know for sure that he is choosing his words very carefully because of the nature of the investigations he’s undertaking. Perhaps the difficulty is that his words are chosen so carefully that they have become something of a special-purpose language with which I am not yet conversant, or perhaps just not yet able to disambiguate well enough to bring the total number of permutations of possible meanings down to something where I can reasonably infer what he’s talking about. Basically when I read Adam on praxeology I constantly have the feeling of juggling several possible interpretations almost from the outset, and it multiplies into an unmanageable number of possibilities from there. I can sure guess as to what he means, but every time I do I seem to miss.
An instructive example of social interaction which I have used
previously is that of a person who, upon walking into a park, sees a
bronze statue. As he nears the statue, he realizes that it is a person
who has painted himself, and is posing as a statue. As he
approaches closer, he now realizes that no, it is a statue, and not a
17
person. When he thought that the object he saw was a person
posing as a statue, he thought that the object in front of him was an
object having a human consciousness, i.e., an acting being. He thus
attempted to place or locate “action” or consciousness
spatiotemporally
An instructive example of social interaction which I have used
previously is that of a person who, upon walking into a park, sees a
bronze statue. As he nears the statue, he realizes that it is a person
who has painted himself, and is posing as a statue. As he
approaches closer, he now realizes that no, it is a statue, and not a
17
person. When he thought that the object he saw was a person
posing as a statue, he thought that the object in front of him was an
object having a human consciousness, i.e., an acting being. He thus
attempted to place or locate “action” or consciousness
spatiotemporally.An instructive example of social interaction which I have used
previously is that of a person who, upon walking into a park, sees a
bronze statue. As he nears the statue, he realizes that it is a person
who has painted himself, and is posing as a statue. As he
approaches closer, he now realizes that no, it is a statue, and not a
17
person. When he thought that the object he saw was a person
posing as a statue, he thought that the object in front of him was an
object having a human consciousness, i.e., an acting being. He thus
attempted to place or locate “action” or consciousness
spatiotemporally.