It is an instinct that may be surpressed by a person. So not supressing it is choosing not to act differently. That is what orthodox AE says.
Goal: I want to get somewhere. Course of action: I will walk.
Goal: Walk properly. Course of action: Take steps.
This could be broken down until it’s down to the cells, and not any kind of human action. For instance, I cannot control my heartbeat. So my heart beating is a circumstance and a fact, but not a human action.
People realize that actions take variable and possibly uncertain amounts of time. Some take more time or less time than others. That’s all there is to know about the temporal quantification of action.
I don’t get this question either. How do you unconsciously buy an ice-cream?
You can do it from habit but that is totally different and you established that habit because of a value and goal you had.
Maybe if you are a food-addict you could buy ice-cream unconsciously cause it can also be defined as an action that resist conscious control. But in the long run you can overcome such behaviour so it doesn’t really make sense either.
The average human makes thousand of decisions per day. Normally these decisions are guided by feeling or habits in which case they require very little thinking but you still consciously accept to act on these impulses. It is only when these impulses don’t exist or go against your reason that you might be actually aware of making a decision. But all of these things are filtered by your conscious mind, you can stop if something makes you alert to the decision making.
For instance if the dude here already spent most of his salarity and the next payday is still far away he will be much more awere of decisions involving money and probably choose not to buy the ice-cream.
If you can’t stop even when made especially aware of the particular choice first then it can be said to be unconscious.
If you can’t stop even when made especially aware of the particular choice first then it can be said to be unconscious.
and the Misesian perspective is to ascribe such ‘instinctive behaviour’ into the realm of ‘mere data’ to which the acting man that it concerns may or may not adjust themselves to (as their judgement see fit)
Whether the action is conscious or unconscious doesn’t matter because of how “action” and “value” are defined within the framework of AE. Regardless of the degree of deliberation prior to going out and getting ice cream, the very fact of doing so places it at #1 in your scale of values at that point in time, by definition.
That people seem to do things against their self-interest owing to psychoanalytic reasons is probably indisputable. However, AE does not judge action via any “scale” such as “stuff that’s good for your health”. It merely observes that humans act, and derives a subjective value structure from that very fact.
In this case the purchase of ice cream is not a value judgement, it is no different from an animal choosing to walk to a puddle of water and drink some.
Yes, to purchase ice cream or not involves choosing. Even if you do it so often that it is a habit and you give it little thought, you are still choosing and acting.
If you were very obese and were told that one more bite of ice cream would certainly kill you, then your death would have to be ruled a suicide. You could not blame it on an accidental death caused by being housed in an unconciously acting, uncontrollable automaton.
“An act of buying going out can have a part of it about buying ice cream.”
This statement, absent the assertions which follow it is true. An individual can have multiple ends, constantly changing ends, and choices of means to achieve those multiple and changing ends.
Praxeology, as applied in the methodology of AE, makes no judgements concerning those ends and means. It demonstates that action occurs.
“In this case the purchase of ice cream is not a value judgement,”
How is it not a value judgement?
If one purchases something then the very act of purchasing demonstrates that the individual valued the ice cream more than the money it was exchanged for. Likewise, action on the sellers part demonstrates that the seller valued the money more highly than the ice cream he got rid of
The claim that it is not concious action cannot substantiated.
One could just as easily assert that any time someone goes on a walk they intend to buy and ice cream and that if they do not, then they were subcounciously compelled not to without even thinking.
Equating such a claim to AE or praxeology is either a misunderstanding or pure imagination.
There is no such thing as AE devoid of praxeology.
It seems like the ice cream example was a bit too much to start with, and has caused miscommunication, lets use the “walking” example instead. A person decides to go on a walk, prefers it to alternative perceived actions and their guessed psychic revenues. Now then, he is taking a walk, is a single step of the walk an action(assuming person walking does not pay specific attention to it). Or is even the slightest movement over the Planck time unit a seperate action? Or is action only the entire walk as a whole? How does action look in the time domain? If only it as a whole is an action, then applying praxeological laws to parts of it in isolation appears to be incorrect.
a single step of the walk can be an action. the whole walk can be an action. the walk-to-the-park-and-back-every-day-for-a-year-to-get-healthy can be an action. Action is certainly not mere behaviour. You need to adopt an intentional/teleological stance with respect to it.
Can be? But how does one know for sure. Since sure knowledge is necessary if we want to determine whether it is a praxeological category, whether it by itself implies a value judgement. It requires concrete certainty to be able to claim these things.
I think you are confusing understanding praxeology on the one hand with ‘applying’ praxeological insights to the real world by fusing it with thymology and other contingent considerations, such as the arrangement of objects in the environment etc. on the other.
How rational is, i.e. multiple considerations such as profit, social, environmental, political, etc. in any given order or combination of priorities is buying and selling various and particular goods and services? Arbitrarily deciding to purchase an item regardless of any prevailing circumstances seems to happen all the time where I work. But sometimes people do not have enough cash, didn’t know the price, etc. I’m looking at the exchange by face value, and completely jettisoning the idea of subconscious decision making. I mean everyone has preferences. I want to know if you can tell within AE framework how arbitrary an action is.
This is pretty silly. The necessary observable acts (walking to register, looking at flavors, talking to cashier, ordering, paying, picking up cone, etc.) entailed in the action of “buying ice cream” cannot reasonably be performed unconsciously. This is self-evident. “Subconscious” is a colloquial term, not one used in science or philosophy of mind. There is conscious and there is unconscious.
Regarding “walking,” the particular physical movements of walking (individual steps) may be habitual (based on automaticity) and thus unconscious, but the action of walking down the street (or whatever the action that walking entails e.g. getting to cash register to pay for ice cream) is reasonably said to be necessarily conscious (with the exception of somnambulism and the like).
Your problem is not with the “applicability of the austrian method,” but with anything that cites revelation through human action (e.g. experimental psychology) as there is no way to absolutely determine via observation that action is conscious.
