Izzy,
TL;DR is creeping up. Could you quote the bit from Mises and or Hayek that addresses Laotse’s point?
That’s absolutely right, Daniel. I don’t think most people understand that empirical methods must make radical suppositions in order to even begin to do their work. Nevertheless, there are a host of other non-empirical things that Hoppe points out we have rational warrant to hold to.
To restrict the domain of knowledge to things that can be discovered empircally is inherently self-contradictory. Why is it so hard to see that?
Irrelevant. We can wax philosophically on the nature of the cogito or the sum, but the fact is, the world acts as if there is an objective basis for it. As such there are certain laws we can derive for things that always hold, no matter where you are in this possible illusion.
To do this will require a priori reasoning, yes. And that is good. But a priori alone cannot verify anything, other than on how to discuss certain things that have been verified emprically. It is, in my opinion, faulty to start with a priori reasoning.
On the topic of the action axiom, is it not just saying “actors act?” And is that not the definition of circular reasoning?
You need to read more Hume and Bertrand Russell to realize the full extent of the problem of the uniformity of nature and the move from particulars to universals.
However, I do think you’ve struck something that is difficult to solve for those that follow Kant. Austrian Economics is a curious blend between Aristotle and Kant, and when you see the Kantian side emerge over the Aristotelian, you tend to see these sorts of difficulties arise.
After all, wasn’t it Kant’s position that reality is but a reflection of the internal structures of our minds? Reality, then, is not intelligible in and of itself. Or if it is, then it certainly cannot be known in that sense. After this is acknowledged it is tremendously difficult to show how these tautologies have any consequence whatsoever on reality. This is the difference between impositionist and reflectionist views, of which Barry Smith delves into very nicely. I don’t have time to look for his article, but it’s available on mises.org as a PDF in one of the journals.
This is why I’m an Austro-aristotelian.
I addressed this already. The “action axiom” is not circular reasoning (although it is indeed unhelpful, and not Misesian); it’s a pleonasm (saying the same thing twice).
And I’m not referring to solipsism. I’m referring to the a priori of causality.
Really, if you’d just read my paper (assuming you’re not going to read Mises’ works themselves), this would be a lot easier.
Reading through that blog it seems that Mises asserts what I am suggesting:
We may fairly assume or believe that they are absolutely dependent upon and conditioned by their causes. But as long as we do not know how external facts–physical and physiological–produce in a human mind definite thoughts and volitions resulting in concrete acts, we have to face an insurmountable methodological dualism.
What makes humans special is not some metaphysical system of free will, soul, ghost in the shell, etc. but rather the fact that science cannot predict human action. Therefore, the planet with it’s ecosystem, it’s geology, natural disasters, etc. would also fall into the category of methodological dualism since we similarly can’t predict it’s actions. We cannot predict if a human will turn right or left at an intersection and we cannot predict whether it will rain. The reason we can’t predict both is largely the same, too many variables to account for.
The author of that blog (Daniel James Sanchez) also seems to agree with Mises on this topic and based on his interpretation of things (as he has explained it) the planet, and other unpredictable complex objects, would all be methodologically dual (not sure if I can use the term that way, but I am going to anyway).
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.
Yeah, I think predictability in the sense that you are using it is a dead end. You’re trying to label objects as either ‘consious’ / ‘purposeful’ or not, when these words really refer to a way of perceiving or analysing something.
Well I’m not sure this is true (are there not regular discoveries in the botanical / biological sciences, that are improving our knowledge of and predictions of the behavior of plants?). But nonetheless, the reasoning here doesn’t work. Suppose neuroscience does progress to the point of our being able to predict with near certainty what humans will do. Will that then mean humans have no purpose? If being consious or purposeful is something inherent in the nature of an object, why would the nature of that object change when our knowledge of it increases?
True. That is part of why that definition is poor.
I am arguing that purposefulness/consiousness is not something inherent to objects. It is a word that denotes objects that we find useful to analyse using a certain mode: the perspective of intent, desire, action.
I think this definition is needlessly limiting the applicability of praxeology.
Even if we believe the reasons we can’t predict weather and human action are the same (too many variables), the reasons we can predict them differ. As trulib wrote above, a special thing about other humans is that it turns out to be useful to model their actions on the example of my own consciousness. If this method worked for weather analysis that would be one thing, but it doesn’t seem to.
Danny replied that the questions we want to answer necessarily entail a teleological perspective. I think the more general point is that whatever questions we’re trying to answer (about anything!) are never just free-floating; it always matters why we want to know the answer. For what purpose do we want to know? At the deepest level, it would be incoherent to speak of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
For what purpose do we want to know? At the deepest level, it would be incoherent to speak of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
Bingo. This can’t really be done. It is more of a poetic expression of the reason/catagory as to why someone is studying something for their own sake. This is kind of why a free market mentality has difficulty discussing the greater good, society, and things of that nature. It can’t really acknowledge such structures other than contextualizations that are convienent within certain contexts of a telelogical entity that can catagorize facts, which is at odds with the thought of just about the entire rest of the planet.
In so much as this nature exists, it can’t be reduced any further, this is the atomic fact. If the nature, or any part of it, can be reduced it simply isn’t what is being discussed by it’s own nature and it is into the realm of biology or something. There is no amount of biology, physics, psychology or whatever that can explain this away as none of these subjects are being discussed. It simply can not be done, it is beyond their realms by their own definition to not be able to explain such narratives. At all times the individual is the one creating, answering, and validating such questions and answers that don’t actually exist on their own…the universe is not a mechanistic “thing”, it is a word of convienence and custom that we use to manipulate our ends. The previous subjects can not have anything to do with the discussion, we are looking at the beings that are the one that create, value, and contextualize the subjects and finds them useful in the first place.
Concerning Sanchez’s point on “radical anti-teleology,” I think it needs to be stressed that methodological dualism then, is a provisional approach, and not necessarily incompatible with other methods.
I would contend that, as presented by Sanchez, Misesian economics is a form of epistemological desperation: since materialistic explanations are too complex for human inquiry, we are methodologically committed to dualism. If the former had sufficient data sets and algorithmic compression, we could abandon methodological dualism.
When I encounter Austrian economists, they are absolutely hostile to more empirical approaches; for instance, the field of neuroeconomics has made inroads to better understanding economic action, but Austrians dismiss it outright. I’m not sure Mises, from his own premises, could categorically prohibit such intellectual inquiry.
When discussing “mathematical catallactics,” Mises is implicitly assuming that better (i.e., more realistic) models can never be developed, but that’s simply not true. Frankly, let’s look at what businesses do: in the pursuit of profit, they generate models to help maximize revenue, etc. Are we to trust Mises or the market? Is Google leaking profit by hiring “Chief Economist” Hal Varian?
P.S. To claim that “the intellect” precedes empirical input (cf. Leibniz) is, at least to me, obviously correct; however, that does not give us epistemological sanction to trust what we natively believe.
P.P.S. Sanchez, if you can, please correct me where I’ve misunderstood you or Mises, or where I’ve outright ignored your arguments. I have much respect for your informed opinion on these matters.
You say “as presented by Sanchez,” but your response here reads like you didn’t even look at his post above. You seem aware of the fact that you may have “outright ignored” some arguments, but if so it is just bizarre that you would post while being cognizant of that. It is not that I think you are necessarily wrong, but this is starting to seem like an intellectual merry-go-round.
I find it very useful to model other people on the example of my own consciousness, and I assume that you do too. In our everyday life, we hardly make the model very rigorous or explicit, but in praxeology that’s the whole point. There’s absolutely no difference between modeling other people on yourself in your everyday life and doing praxeology, except that the first is loose and mostly subconscious, whereas the second is supposed to be rigorous and completely conscious.
But you could also try to model other people as 3D objects (e.g., something in their brain doing whatever seems to always occur before their arm moving in some way or whatever). If you find that more useful in some or all situations (for prediction!), that’s great. Maybe we’ll be interested in how we could predict that way too. But that wouldn’t destroy the methodological dualism or something. There will always be at least two ways to proceed: (1) model them on your own consciousness, or (2) model them as 3D objects. If we totally forget about one of them because it totally blows in comparison to the other, the other doesn’t disappear or something. It’s just useless.
I like this definition that consciousness and purpose are defined by things similar to ourselves and the more dissimilar they are the less conscious and purposeful they are. This makes the world not conscious yet mammals more conscious then reptiles which are more conscious than insects. It seems to fit the desired set of objects very nicely.
About the problem of the move from particulars to universals, where exactly would I find that in Hume and Russell?
Hi StrangeLoop,
As AJ said, you don’t seem to have addressed my last post at all.
The teleological perspective is a lower-resolution of reality. I would claim we can (and should frequently) take the intentional stance when explaining human action; however, this is fundamentally for economical and heuristic reasons, not for more precisely approximating truth.
To prohibit anti-teleological explanations from economics is to privilege a particular methodology arbitrarily. A more pluralistic approach (e.g., neuroeconomics) can be illuminating.
You still seem to be missing my point. By undertaking the effort of “explaining human action” or looking for explanations in economics, you are already taking the intentional stance. I posted an edit list for my paper, which includes a more refined statement of my position that will hopefully make it more clear…
Some claim that “methodological dualism” is a provisional stance, resorted to only because we do not yet have the technology to fully explain the complexity of the human brain, and that this stance can eventually be dropped once we do achieve that level of technology. However, to add an argument of my own, complementary to Mises’, humans are not special for science just because they are complex. They are not basically on the same scientific grounds as weather patterns. They are special for science because the very questions we want answered about them are teleological in nature. 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.”
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 do not 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. Their position is ridiculous, because it would involve the abandonment of all economic, sociological, ethnographic, and historical questions, but at least it is more logical than that of 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.
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 the human mind can never resolve teleology into causality without abandoning teleology altogether, and to study human affairs without considering purpose is not to study human affairs at all.
Dennett’s intentional stance seems to be exactly the same as the teleological/praxeological one:
The only difference I see in phrasing as that while Sanchez mentions explaining human action, Dennett speaks in terms of predicting what actor will do. Explaining vs. predicting. Now it seems to me that Danny’s points just now apply to the endeavor of explaining human action, but do they apply to the endeavor of predicting it? Your “more pluralistic approach (e.g., neuroeconomics)” may be helpful for that perhaps?
Also note that Dennet’s three levels of abstraction are almost exactly what trulib posted above:
Compared with trulib (order reversed):
In other words, if I may try to strengthen StrangeLoop’s argument, what if there are non-teleological questions we want to ask about humans, such as what they are likely to do in a given situation? Like I said above, I can use psychology or even statistics to better predict whether a chick will come home with me. Does that type of reasoning have any use for economics? (I haven’t thought this through, but I am a little tired of seeing this particular gridlock, so I am leaping without looking in hopes of mixing things up.)
So modeling other people on yourself isn’t as useful as modeling them strictly as 3D objects?
The AE people use the word “economics” to refer to a specific branch of praxeology (the science of modeling other people on yourself), but if you want to use it to refer to something else (such as the science of modeling other people in general), that’s fine.
They aren’t “privileging” a particular method (modeling other people on yourself) over another one (modeling them strictly as 3D objects); they’re simply making sure to keep the two separate.
So basically, it’s not that neurobiology necessarily can’t help us predict human behavior, it’s just that we wouldn’t want to call that type of prediction “economics”?