Hi Graham
OK I think I can explain the difference. Here is what you wrote above:
Let’s take an example of an action - the one you brought up before: a guy using a vending machine. I (the observer) watch Bob drop a coin into the machine, press a button, and then the coin drops and a bottle of coke comes out. How can I make sense of what has just happened?
First, I may not consider Bob an acting being at all. I may consider Bob’s behavior to be purely reflexive or instinctual; he could be a robot. But this doesn’t help me much in making sense of what happened. A more fruitful way of [my] interpreting what just happened is that Bob was indeed acting: he had a purpose in mind when he behaved as he did.
Now at this point I can put on any one of a number different 'hats’. I could put on my 'physicist hat’, or [put on] my 'mathematician hat’, or [put on] my 'psychologist hat’, or [put on] my 'catallactian hat’… in fact there are 8 hats, each one defined by a class of action and an approach to cognition.
And then depending on which hat I’m wearing, I can describe the event in different ways. I could talk about the role of gravity in what took place (physics); I could talk about how there was one less coke bottle in the machine afterwards (mathematics); I could say that Bob valued the coke bottle higher than he valued the coin (catallactics). So it’s not that certain actions belong to certain classes, but that an observer could think of any action as being in any class, and then [he/she could] describe it accordingly. And he has the choice of explaining the action in terms of either the exact laws that were operating, or the empirical laws.
In these passages you have referred to at least 18 instances of your own actions.
Here is a defintion of action proposed by David Gordon, a Rothbardian:
“Any conscious behavior counts as action–an action is anything that you do on purpose.”
You could, if you wanted, take those 18 actions of yours, and all the other actions you are consciously aware of performing, and begin classifying them according to various criteria. This is what I’m referring to as the various classes of actions.
Now, for each of these actions (the 18 actions you performed above, as well as all your actions), what is the exact law that applies to those actions, meaning: what consequence X, must happen to you when you perform action type 1? What consequence Y, must happen to you when you perform action type 2? What consequence Z, must happen to you when you perform action type 3? And so on…
This is what I’m talking about.
What you keep referring to is a person in front of you (spatially related to you) Bob, who is located over there next to that tree. And you want to describe that person’s “action” from your, the observer’s, point of view. Thus, you are talking about objective meaning (the meaning of “external” events) and you are referring to the same events that are referred to by physical science (objects and events of the “external” world). But praxeology does not deal with objective meaning, it only deals with subjective meaning, the meaning of the actor himself.
You can see the difference in this passage from Schutz:
“For it is obvious that an action has only one subjective meaning: that of the actor himself. It is John who gives subjective meaning to his action, and the only subjective meanings beging given by Jerry and Julie in this situation are the subjective meanings they are giving to their own actions, namely, their actions of observing John.” (The Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 32)(I replaced X, F, and S in Schutz’s passage with John, Jerry, and Julie)
I’m talking about the laws of subjectivity, not the laws of objective nature.
Here is a post that elaborates a bit more:
Adam