What is it meant when Austrian Economists say their first principles are self evident? I am a radical capitalist.
I am an amateur at philosophy, so please don’t be offended by huge errors in thinking, I take criticism seriously, I will change my thinking once these theories are better explained of course.
The most easy and obvious response to this provided I take “self evident” to mean what it means in a conventional sense is as follows…
If it is self evident than why has Capitalism been ignored and put down as a system, for well, all of human history?
I view capitalism as a totally empirical system, a gradual building of westerns societies knowledge until the industrial revolution, not something that could have just been worked out by ancient Greek philosophers. I think the concepts and explanations of it are kind of after the fact and would have not been available before we had gained the evidence. My evidence of this is obviously that philosophers (AS FAR AS I KNOW) were not able to grasp fully capitalism until it had actually occurred (or started occurring).
Now this could be a total straw man of the Austrian position, and most of what I know about the Austrian school is from an argument I saw recently between maxpot and some other guy. He talked about a priori knowledge and that kind of stuff, and it sort of freaked me out.
first principles that are self-evident are things like “there is truth” because their denial is logically impossible e.g. to deny truth is to assert the truth of a proposition. Similarlyl, the self-evident proposition of economics, man acts, is self-evident because to deny it is to make an action so the denial is logically impossible.
There are things which are self-evident in and of themselves and things which are self-evident “to us”. That is, the truth of capitalism is self-evident but the discovery of this self-evidence by man took time to accomplish.
The self-evidence referred to is intellectual, but I doubt any Austrian would say the supremacy of capitalism vis-a-vis other systems in any regard is self-evident, even though it is demonstrable from self-evident principles.
I don’t know that you should get too hung up on the Greeks not reasoning out Austrian economics. Couldn’t you say that calculus, thermo-dynamics, and the concepts of gravity and inertia are all self-evident, along with quite a few other advancements of thought that did not arrive until after real capitalism was beginning to be practiced?
Good Answers but I think self-evident is kind of a misnomer, something self evident would be like “I am experiencing”. Something i know immediately just by the fact that I am being and knowing.
So basically self-evident means "You can’t attempt to disprove without using it?
That is reasonable. Just like most rationalist philosophy, start with axioms so somebody can’t come along and wreck your whole theory by saying no one exists or something like that. I didn’t think economists had to do that, which is my surprise.
How can something be self evident in of itself? Who is it being evident to? (I must be misunderstanding one of the terms such as “evident”)
Personally, I think this approach is the best approach to all social science. Social Science=/= Natural Science. The most distincitive element of the Austrian School of Economics, you’ll find, is its use of this.
Who is it being evident to? Whover sees it or hears it. It is proven by itself. It is non-falsfiable. It is undeniable. It is rational. It is axiomatic. It is evident in and of itself in that it proves itself with no need for further dilly dallying.
Okay this sounds somewhat reasonable. Man out of context I was thinking austrians were trying to argue that capitalism itself was instrinsically true. Thank you everyone for clearing everything up.
Well from these undeniable intrinsically true we derive our suport of capitalism. This is not self evident, but it is in itself intrinsically true because it is derived from undeniable principles. Now you can’t argue against these principles and I have never seen a refutation of the idea that capitalism follows from this. A free market is implied once we except the undeniable principle that humans act and follow it through to its logical ends. Therefore capitalism is intrinsically true too even if it was not self-evident.You follow?
I take the term “self evident” (at least as it pertains to economic truths) to mean that something can be readily verified by inspection of personal experience, by virtue of the fact’s pervading all of human life.
So in a broad sense the verity of capitalism from the Austrian perspective may be regarded as empirical.
i think its a semantic trap (which is excusable given all our uses of common/everyday language) to posit answers to incoherent question such as ‘whether Capitalism is true’
Capitalism is a system, it makes no more sense to ask about its truth than it does to ask whether swimming with a breastroke is true, or whether finance a purchase by making a loan agreement is true.
we want to say that facts that we believe ABOUT capitalism are true.
Sigh. I meant either one. You’re conflating questions of justifiability with how something is known (i.e. the source of the knowledge.) They’re not the same. Don’t make the amateurish error of conflating them. In terms of their justifiability, it is a priori justifiable, which is what epistemology is concerned with.
BTW strictly speaking all you observe is bodily movements &c. It is an act of interpretation to treat those as actions.
Why don’t you try denying you act or exist, and do so without contradicting yourself? You can’t, therefore the statements are axiomatic, a priori and identify necessary truths. Any truth the denial of which leads to a contradiction is a priori. Done. So where is the problem? Are you still conflating how something is known with how it is justified? As for actions being purposive, it would be a greater step to infer it from mere observation…