I need some clearing up. Please. I’ve read the first chapter of HA - and I do love it, and its points I believe are still very strong even today. I was wondering where things like biological psychology and neuroscience like this have in relation to praxeology:
Mind you, the second link has nothing to do with Zeitgeist when I found it. I hate Zeitgeist, for many reasons. I’m just trying to find out where is praxeology’s place today - among modern science. I know Mises pays tribute to psychoanalysis in HA, and he says that events can be understood both in praxeological and natural scientific language.
How does that hold today? Is it really possible, at the least, to back up praxeology with modern scientific evidence like behavioral biology, neuroscience, etc.? I feel like those same deductive laws can be backed up in that manner, much like Mises used psychonanalysis and serviceable instincts to back up his material.
What do you think? Please give feedback! Thank you!
It seems applicable to neuroscience, at least I believe. Neuroscientists habitually make preemptive judgements as to how value structure of individuals ought to be structured. Any deviation from that normal value structure, manifested in behavioral observation, your are believed to be “mentally disabled”, eg ADD, ADHD ect. It is said that you have a thinking disorder. To put matters in a different way, it’s the equivilent of calling a white person melanin challenged, or Melanin retarded, because thier body did not produce enough melanin to make thier skin darker. The judgement being placed that you ought to have darker skin.
If you do not behave in the manner that the collective body of neuroscientists think you ought to behave, you need to take drugs. Never is the institution of public education brought into the picture. Many of these factors like diet, educational environments, parental environment, among other things are often ignored. The problem is always the child.
Perhaps what is most shocking to me is that we as a society have generally accepted the fact that we all have physical differences. We are different sizes, shapes, and colors, in every aspect of our physical nature. That, to be honest, is one of the things that makes our world beautiful. So I am dumbfounded as to why an entire school of scholors are hung up on the notion that we all simply must all think alike and that if we do not all process information in the matter that they have judged best, we are somehow mentally retarded.
I think that Mises was forced [by the contraversies at the time] to kill a flea with an atomic bomb. After all, what is he working so hard to prove?
I found a key line in HA that really opened my eyes. It’s on page 124 [160 in the pdf]:
…It follows necessarily from our assump- tions that people act (choose)…
So that the book may have well been called Human Choice.
At any rate, is there any doubt whatsoever that people act and choose? And that they will choose what they prefer, by definition?
Mises wrote that to study what they choose doesn’t really need to go into any deep stuff, like do they really have free will, what is going on in their minds and brains when they choose, can we one day plug a wire into their noodles and see stuff. And as one goes further into HA, it becomes obvious that he is right.
Do we need MRIs to prove that people will use a good to satisfy their most urgent need, and then if there is any left, to satisfy the second most urgent, etc? Or that once they feel they have worked enough, they like to relax?
A good example of what is going on is his dicussion of the law of diminishing returns. Some other author thought this was connected to the fact that our senses dull at extreme stimuli. Deep neurological-biological stuff. Mises pointed that out that the law of diminishing returns has nothing to do with all that.
So that bottom line, the issues HA deals with when it comes to economics can be analyzed by common sense [=logic] and simple observations of everyday behavior. Of course, Mises asked intriguing q’s [some of them mentioned above] that capture the imagination, but their answers will not change or prove or disprove praxeology.
Note: The analysis expressed in this post is my own, and it is likely not many people here will agree with it. Or at least, I’ve seen none others formulate similar ideas.
The scientists of his day (and of ours for that matter) rejected the idea of praxeology because they rejected reflection as evidence. To be fair, they had plenty of reason to be suspicious. People can sit in their armchairs and dream up fantastic things with no connection with reality. The very essence of the scientific revolution was that you can’t trust your fantasies to be accurate: You have to go out and look at things in order to formulate accurate beliefs about them. Perhaps, the scientists thought, our beliefs about ourselves are just as deluded as Aristotle’s belief that heavier things fell faster, and that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Our internal experience and knowledge of ourselves cannot be trusted: We have to go out and perform experiments on people to see what they really do.
While Mises knew that this was wrong, he didn’t know quite why: Mises didn’t understand the subtlety of the issue and instead called his ideas “a priori.” Knowledge like “I have certain things that I want and certain things that I don’t want”, “How much I want some things depends on how useful they are for doing other things”, and “Ceteris paribus, I would rather have something sooner than later” are not bits of information with no justifiable basis in reality. They are not unconnected fantasies, as the positivists believed, nor are they undeniable self-evident truths, as Mises believed. They are pieces of Reflective Knowledge. Information about ourselves, which we gain through reflection.
I think praxeology (and catallitics) belongs in its own separate classification of relective-deductive thought. First, the construction of a modal logic through reflection which we may use to formally reason about aspects of our behavior (without reducing1 them). Then, the logical transformation of this logic (possibly through the taking of additional assumptions, like the presence of trade through money) to get derivations which are non-obvious, like the law of diminishing marginal utility giving us the macro-theory of supply and demand. That said, I don’t think the theorems arrived at this way are unquestionable: There is always the possibility our reasoning contains a subtle flaw or assumption that we do not see.
1Praxeology is interested in the outward effects of the black boxes of high-level cognitive mechanisms, not in the content of the boxes themselves. Not that this information isn’t worth knowing, it’s just better done by a separate field of study. Like evolutionary biology and the electromagnetic force that binds amino acids together.
I don’t think that he simply floundered into the label “a priori” or anything like that. It might have been sort of misleading, but he had a pretty clear definition for it. As he said in The Ultimate Foundation, “[a] characteristic mark of an a priori category is that any different assumption with regard to the topic concerned appears to the human mind as unthinkable and self-contradictory.” For Mises, something a priori is simply something absolutely impossible for us to imagine any other way. I can’t conceive of a universe without causality, because I wouldn’t be there. In other words, it’s “a priori” that there is causality. If you can’t imagine something any other way, it’s “a priori” in that sense.
Now, what’s a priori? I think that it’s simply our volition. As long as I’m trying to study and extend the Misesian project, it’s certain that I’m gonna be acting. Sure, one day I mightn’t be around to act, but as far as I’m still here, it’s a safe assumption to make (that I’m acting or whatever). It would be impossible for me to be wrong about this, because the moment that I’m “wrong” about it, I’m incapable of being wrong about anything anyway. Our volition is a priori simply because we need our volition to think about our volition. We must act to consider our action.
But the question is, “Did Mises understand that the a priori facts were simply pieces of reflective knowledge?” I’m not perfectly sure that I know what you mean by “pieces of reflective knowledge”, but I’m pretty sure. Anyway, as Mises said in Human Action, “The starting point of praxeology is[…] reflection about the essence of action.” Isn’t that the same thing that you’re talking about? The essence of action is what’s a priori about the world (right?), and he’s saying to start out with praxeology we “reflect” on the essence of action. Is there any difference between what he’s saying here, and what you’re trying to say? Or somewhere else did he demonstrate that he didn’t really get it?
As to the relationship between the social sciences of “human behavior” (praxeology, economics, and so on), and the natural sciences of “human behavior” (neuroscence, psychology, and so forth).
First of all, I think of them as simply 2 different kinds of models for predicting the same kind of thing. In one model (the social science one), we see other people as conscious. And in the other one (the natural science one), we see them as nothing but 3D objects. In the 1st one, I find that one thing (visualizing something or whatever) causes another thing (my body to move in some way), and later I find if make the same exact assumption about other people, I can predict their movements pretty well. It’s not like I ever actually see their thoughts; it’s just if I use that idea to model how their body would move, I get pretty good results in terms of guessing what they’re gonna do next. But in the 2nd, we simply find that one movement in 3D space (such as some neurons firing or something) causes another movement in 3D space (such as somebody’s arm moving or whatever). We merely find that how one part of somebody’s body moves (their brain or whatever) determines how another part will move (their arms, legs, and so on). One models other people on myself; and the other simply sees them as 3D objects.
So in light of that, I would say that they can back each other up. If the social science model predicts X, and the natural science model predicts the same thing (X), that’s some sort of corroboration, right? Wouldn’t I be more confident about the prediction or something? I guess.
This statement is outrageous. Mises knew precisely what he meant by a priori, and he was fully aware of the subtleties of the issue. The man was steeped in epistemological literature, and wrote 3 books on the subject (4 if you count the first quarter of Human Action as a book in itself). Have you read all 4 of those works?
There is a logical flaw in his article, too. He says that all the younguns in neuroscience don’t believe in free will. Their argument is basically “We cut people’s heads open and there is no soul inside.” Which is fallacious, IMHO. And to say that Occam’s Razor has cut away the soul is a mistake, for empirically we see free will all the time, and feel we have it, with no explanation.
Later he says it’s now been proven there is no soul, referring to the his parapraph about the younguns.
What I’m getting at is that this seeing people as 3D objects, predicting from the neurons etc, is still in the stage of science fiction.
So yeah, if there were such a thing, it would be nice and might corroborate Praxeology. But that’s like saying if we had a spaceship that could fly into the sun and not melt, it would corroborate what we think is happening inside the sun.
Well, I don’t know anything about any of this stuff, but one of my friends was telling me about a study where they used a brain scanner to predict which button (out of two possible ones) the subject was gonna press a few seconds in advance. I mean, isn’t that an example of exactly what I was talking about? Apparently one movement in 3D space (whatever the image on the brain scanner referred to) caused another movement in 3D space (the subject pressing one of the buttons instead of the other).
And if all that they can tell you is “which part of the brain gets more electric charge when you read a book you like”, then what the hell are they writing about in all of those 1,000’s of pages of stuff? What are they talking about when they say “visual cortext”? What do they mean when they say that changing the structure of one part of somebody’s brain would make it so they can’t recognize some part of the world? And so on. Isn’t all that stuff simply about how one 3D object (their brain) affects another 3D object (the rest of their body)?
Which for as long as I can remember has employed the use of Neurophysiology, Neuroimaging, and various other subets of neuroscience to justify thier findings.
I think we all knew that something happens in your brain when you decide to do something. So what your friend told you is that a guy was given a choice, and made up his mind. This increased the electricity in the “press the green button” part of his brain. Their screen saw it. He then used a few seconds to have other parts of his brain think it over in a general way, and pressed the button. Interesting, exciting, but I don’t see any great repercussions philosophically.
They are mapping as much as they can of the brain. Which part gets more electric charge when you read a book you like, one you don’t like, when you solve a math problem, etc etc. Of course, they may be drawing wild conclusions as well, the kind Tom Wolfe wrote about, but the raw science is but what I describe,
Which part gets the charge when you see things.
Just as if you poke out someones eyes he wont see, so too if you cut out the part of his brain that makes him see, he won’t see either.
Yes it is. BUT we knew that for thousands of years, that the brain affects the body. As we knew that a hammer affects a nail. But there is no evidence for or against a soul in charge of the brain, as there is a person moving the hammer. Maybe the brain is just a robot, programmed from birth by its DNA map or whatever to do its thing, which I highly doubt. And maybe there is free will in there somewhere, a soul.
In any case, I’m sure you know that Mises pointed out that for now, the best working hypothesis that explains events and allows prediction is the assumption of free will. That has not changed one iota since he wrote that back in the day.
(Did I imply that I thought that there were some “great philosophical repercussions” or something?)
Sure, but have we known for thousands of years what we now know about the specifics of how the brain affects the body (A in the brain causes X in the body, B in the brain causes Y in the body, and so on)?
Just as we’ve known for thousands of years what we now know about how exactly a hammer affects a nail (the physics of the whole thing)?
(I mean, contrary to that I assume that we know more now than we did back then.)
I’m not sure what that has to do with my point.
I mean, what would be the difference between a “robot, programmed from birth by its DNA map or whatever to do its thing” and “a soul in charge of the brain”? In both cases, we would experience the same thing: A human body moving around in certain ways (the legs doing X, the brain doing Y, and so on). I see 2 different sets of words (“robot, programmed from birth by its DNA map or whatever to do its thing” vs. “a soul in charge of the brain”), but I can’t seem to come up with 2 different sets of meanings for them.
So for predicting what people will do in everyday life, at least for now the social science model is more useful.
Sure, but there are also a lot of ways that the natural science one is useful. Like, if somebody gets into some sort of accident, the natural science model can tell you why the person isn’t acting like they used to, and how the accident will affect their behavior. Without neuroscience, psychology, and so on, wouldn’t we be at a loss to predict what would happen in a lot of different situations? So isn’t the natural science model useful for a lot of predictions that the social science one isn’t? Or maybe they complement each other or something?
Also, I can’t figure out how my points had anything to do with whether people have “free will” or not.
Ryan, you are right. I got two topics mixed up. You brought up the ability of neuro science to predict, and I added another topic, what does this predictive ability say about free will.
Confining myself to your original topic, what can they really predict. That if you bang him on the head and damage his visual cortex he won’t see? Yes, that’s important, I suppose, but not related to the [by comparison] sophisticated predictions made by praxeology. They are a long long way from that.
So that for now, possibly forever, the two fields are as far apart as praxeology and first aid, which says that if one breaks his arms he wont lift heavy things because he can’t.
The fallacy is here is putting one method of procedure against another, placing experience and logic/reason against each other into some kind of false dichotomy. The truth is, both methods need to be employed in nearly all situations, the degree to which each one is used depends on the situation.
One does not cancel out the other, the two are used mutually to find truth. They serve us best when we use them togethre to reach a common goal, truth. There are absolute details and instances in which an apiroristic method is preferred but later on what we deduced from that method will help guide us in a sea of empirical data, and vise versa.
