Don’t forget my own argument that I added after explaining Mises’:
I would also add that the reason we study human action in the first place is that we have certain questions which have are inextricably bound up with the human purposes that anti-teleologists dismiss as ‘mentalist fictions.’ For example, people are vitally interested in economics largely in order to discover the legal and institutional arrangements by which humans can prosper. How can one explain “how humans prosper” when the teleological, “mental fiction” of ‘prospering’ is dismissed as nonsense at the outset? I would challenge any anti-teleological economist to even define (let alone explain) “goods”, “money”, “profit”, “loss”, “income” without using the teleological, “mentalist” language they deride as “folk psychology”.
There is nothing wrong with neurobiology and neurochemistry; indeed these sciences are achieving wonders for us. But the social sciences can never be resolved into these natural sciences, because our finite minds can never resolve teleology into causality without abandoning teleology altogether, and to study human affairs without considering purpose and intentionality is not to study human affairs at all.
Humans are not special for science just because they are complex. They are not basically on the same scientific ground as weather patterns. They are special for science because the very questions we want answered about them are teleological in nature.
Inquiries into the causes and nature of the wealth of nations are fundamentally different from inquiries into the causes and nature of the humidity of trade winds.
If we had precise enough instruments and powerful enough computers, we could explain every single thing about a trade wind.
But no matter how precise your instruments, no matter how powerful your computers, all you will find in the brain are chemical, electrical, subatomic and other physical patterns and processes. You will never find preferences, purposes, costs or proceeds.
This is not to say the former does not cause the latter. It is rather that the terms in which our minds grasp causality and teleology are fundamentally different, and simply don’t translate into each other.
The most thorough-going radical anti-teleologists are actually right insofar as, in the language of causality, there is no such thing as teleology. That is why they don’t want to explain teleology in terms of causality; instead they want to abandon teleology altogether. They’re ridiculous, because they don’t realize what that entails (the abandonment of all economic, sociological, ethnographic, and historical questions), but at least they’re more consistent and clear than people who think they can answer teleological questions with causality answers.
We have many causality-related questions about our bodies (including our brains), because our bodies are useful to us.
But we also have many teleological questions about choice, success, failure, prosperity, and poverty.
Once you abandon teleological language, you’ve effectively changed the question. So, as long as we are still asking teleological questions, we need to continue providing teleological answers.