I don’t really understand what mises is trying to get at in this section. Value judgments are conditioned by someones background, so can’t race affect value?
Link?
Uh… I hope this helps
"Polylogism. In short, many logics. The theory that the logical structure of the human mind differs according to certain divisions of mankind and that as a result the ideas and logic of men also differ in accordance with the specified classification of men. Marxian polylogism asserts there are differences according to social classes. Others claim there are differences according to race, religion, nationality, etc."
Mr. Marx seems pretty misanthropic to me. People ought to be able to think how they want. Marx thought proles could only think as how he wanted them to think, or they were wrong thinkers. Perhaps he was deeply self loathing?
I think this is the part in question: http://mises.org/humanaction/chap3sec4.asp
I think that value judgments can change from race to race, ethnicity to ethnicity, group to group and so on. What Mises is denying is that the mode of logical thinking differs between races. i.e. What deductionism or rationalism are doesn’t depend on the person’s race.
Race can and does effect value. However this is different from saying that individuals have different mental structures and are utterly different simply because they are a different race. If a white person was brought up in a black community he may well have similar value preferences to the black person who was brought up in a black community. If racial polylogism was correct then no such mental similarity could occur and the white person would be utterly unable to comprehend what his black counterparts around him were doing half the time as they would follow a totally different type of logic
Even this being said this does not mean that inherent racial differences cannot effect intelligence, merely that each individual regardless of race follows the same praxeological laws.
Mises is laying the groundwork for praxeology. The foundations of Austrian economics is theory derived from pure deductive logic and is thus falsifiable only by logic. If you believe polylogism exists, ie: a black person’s logic is different from a white person’s logic or the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, then the foundations of praxeology simply evaporate because they depend on there being deterministic axioms from which to deduct truth.
What good is an economic theory based on a system of logic where the conclusions are necessarily contained in the premise if different groups of people are only capable of understanding their own premises?
The funny part about polylogism is that, at least in my limited experience, it amounts to little more than ad homs against “bourgeois elements”.