Mademoiselle has the floor. This is going to be the real meat and potatoes of her paper. Till now it was just the intial softening up, to let us know who this Mises fellow is that we are dealing with: a muddleheaded old guy who confuses things right and left. So don’t be surprised when we catch him sheltering in the wrong trench.
What I want briefly to show is that, in so far as I can understand
von Mises’s position, it is not, in fact, Kantian. He seems to be sheltering
in the wrong trench,
So who cares? So he wasn’t Kantian.
and once his position is exposed, and left to stand
on its own logical legs, its tenability seems highly doubtful.
Oh, I see. Not only is it not Kantian, it’s highly doubtful.
Well, I am no student of philosophy, so I leave it to the experts to say if it is or it isn’t Kantian. To be honest, I don’t care, but that’s just me.
Let’s look into her other claim, that “its tenability seems highly doubtful”.
It is not too easy to discover precisely what von
Mises’s fundamental propositions are,
No, it’s not an easy book. Written for the intelligentsia.
but two important ones appear
to be that all human action—as distinguished from mere physical
behaviour or what he sometimes calls ’ vegetative reaction’—is
purposeful (he usually uses the term ’ rational’, but in a special sense)
1. When people do things, it’s for a reason.
I think she got it wrong. The very first page of Human Action [after the Intro] says the book is about, you guessed it, human action.
And it then DEFINES “human action,” for purposes of the book, as “a person doing something for a reason.”
In other words, humans do many things. They couch and sneeze and many other things. But the book is about people doing things for a reason.
and that the general purpose underlying all action is to remove ’ un-
easiness ’ or ’ dissatisfaction’, to exchange a less desirable state of
affairs for a more desirable one.
2. The reason people have for doing things is to feel better somehow.
(Economics is about that special class
of action where the conditions of the two states which are exchanged
can be fairly thoroughly described in terms of’ possessions’, which
are measurable on the same scale, using possessions in the widest sense
to include such things as ’ leisure’.)
And this is what’s not going to have a leg to stand on. Those two are the highly doubtful, untenable, muddled things.
OK, have at it, Anne:
Such propositions do not appear to belong to the category of
Kant’s ’ synthetic a priori '. They may indeed be a priori because they
depend on a particular definition of action; von Mises writes, for
instance 'The statement " he acts irrationally" is meaningless, because
it is not compatible with the concept of action '.* But that would
make them analytic propositions, i.e. truths of definition alone; von
Mises requires that they be synthetic, since he wishes these propositions,
or their consequents, to be empirically informative, to tell us about
the real world.
In other words, if we accept the definition of action used in the book, he’s right. But Mises wants more than that. He wants us to believe that what he says tells us something about the real world. Which of course it doesn’t. It’s just a truth based on a definition. It’s an elaborate way of saying A is A. Now A is A is true, but it tells us nothing about the real world.
Hmm, if she is right, Mises is not only non-Kantian, he’s been exposed as writing true but trivial jabber.
Let’s open the book and see the quote from Mises in context [from Epistemological Problems of Economics], with my comments in bold:
We must next deal with the objection of those who never weary
of asserting that man does not act rationally at all.
[OK, first things first. What are these people talking about? For defiteness, let’s take two examples he gives in Human Action. A witch doctor trying to cure the sick by waving sticks around, and someone who gives up material gain for principled living. Such people are sometimes called irrational
A****ccording to Ms Martin, the guys saying witch doctors and principled men are irrational are right. Or at the very least, Mises will not prove them wrong. All he can do is fiddle about with his A equals A.]
It has never been
disputed that man does not always act correctly from the objective
point of view; that is, that either from ignorance of causal relations
or because of an erroneous judgment of the given situation, in
order to realize his ends he acts differently from the way in which
he would act if he had correct information… Only a
perfect being, whose omniscience and omnipresence would enable
him to survey all the data and every causal relationship, could
know how each erring human being would have to act at every
moment if he wanted to possess the divine attribute of omnis-
cience.
If we were to attempt to distinguish rational action from
irrational action, we should not only be setting ourselves up as a
judge over the scales of value of our fellow men, but we should also
be declaring our own knowledge to be the only correct, objective
standard of knowledge. We should be arrogating to ourselves the
position that only an all-knowing being has the power to occupy.
[English translation: If those guys mean people are always going about getting what they want the wrong way, well that’s true enough. It happens all the time. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody knows it all, and thus cannot know the best way to get what he wants. But they certainly do they best they can, under the circs. And that’s what rational means. If we insist that rational mean the best way to do the deed from an objective standpoint, not from the perspective of the actor with his info and brains, then we can never be sure anythig is rational. Only an all knowing being can know what is the objective best way.
That’s the defense of the witch doctor being rational. He is doing what logic dictates to do, given his assumptions.
So that takes care of “irrational means”. How about “irrational ends”, like the man of principle who won’t sell out? Voila:]
The assertion that there is irrational action is always rooted in
an evaluation of a scale of values different from our own. Whoever
says that irrationality plays a role in human action is merely saying
that his fellow men behave in a way that he does not consider cor-
rect.
[In other words, what a person wants is also to be judged entirely from his perspective. If A says B wants something irrational, he is saying that B should want what A wants, not what B wants. But what makes A’s scale of values the correct one? Nothing. So the man of principle is also being rational.]
If we do not wish to pass judgment on the ends and the scales
of value of other people and to claim omniscience for ourselves, the
statement, “He acts irrationally,” is meaningless, because it is not
compatible with the concept of action.
[Because action means getting what you want the way you think is best suited to get it.]
OK, time for the summing up. Has Mises merely prattled off a tautology here? I didn’t think so. He is pointing out that any attack on a man’s actions as “irrational” are either value judgements or assumptions of omniscience [both big no nos, of course]. Was he merely saying A is A here? Nope. Has he taught us anything about the real world? Sure has. He has taught us HOW TO LOOK at the real world. To avoid value judgements and assumptions of omniscience.
Now, truth be told, her mistake is even worse than it looks. She is making the same mistake Bryan Caplan did, that I discussed in this post
When studying a system of logical reasoning, be it high school geometry, or advanced math topic such as set theory or group theory, or Mises’ system of economics [=praxeology], one has to be careful to distinguish the system itself from statements ABOUT the system. The system consists of the undefined terms, the initial assumptions about those terms, and the conclusions that may be drawn from those assumptions using logic.
An example from geometry: Undefined terms: triangle, degree, sum. Initial assumptions: a point on a straight line is surrounded by 180 degrees, and the parralell postulate. A conclusion: The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
A statement ABOUT this system: You will never be able to prove the parallel postulate from the other postulates.
Ms Martin chose to accuse all Mises’ assumptions and conclusions of not referring to the real world, but be mere self contained tautologies. In other words, the assertions WITHIN praxeology are useless toys. She chose as an example a statement Mises made ABOUT praxeology, one OUTSIDE his system, which was DISCUSSING, not DEDUCING from, praxeology.
In other words. Mises assumes as his starting point that people use means to acheive ends. His critics attacked this by saying "people are so irrational when they do that. There is no point discussing it. Would one seriously study the sound and fury of a madman that we know in advance signifies nothing? And he defended with the above, you are judging or presuming yoru own omniciensce when you say that.
That whole discussion has nothing to do with Ms Martin’s question, which is “Do the conclusions drawn WITHIN the system apply to the real world?”
Whew. We move on in the next post.