What does it mean to prefer A to B?
It won’t be possible to even address that question without resorting to explaining the causal connections, between, on one hand, some way of thinking, and, on the other hand, a way or moving or another way of thinking. How could we explain what the “will” is without talking about something appearing in our private world causing something else to appear in our private world or our body to move in some way? In Austrian economics, it is just “folk thymology” which tries to answer that question, and as such it tends to sound like mysticism to most people. It doesn’t give a scientific development of the ideas of “desire”, “belief”, and so on, but just assumes that everybody already have a clear enough idea of them. They use our folk thymological ideas of “desire”, “belief”, and so on; and this tends to come off as mysticism to a lot of people.
Praxeology can say, for example, that wanting A, and believing that B will lead to A, means wanting B, but can’t tell you what the hell wanting or believing even are. Wanting A and believing that B will lead to A doesn’t cause wanting B, but just is wanting B. For example, if I were to want to get home, and to believe that walking in some direction for some time would lead to pulling that off, I would of course want to walk in that way; but, in that case, wanting to get home and wanting to walk in that would by no means be two different things. Wanting to get home would just be wanting to walk in that way. There wouldn’t be a sequence in time. Assuming that I have that belief, wanting to get home and wanting to walk in that way are just two different levels of description of the same thing. Praxeology doesn’t talk about any caual sequences in time. It just talks about the necessary connections between one kind of acting and another kind of acting. No, even that would be exaggerating it. It doesn’t talk about anything but the fact that proposition A about acting means the same thing as proposition B about acting, or that it means something different. Praxeology is the logic or mathematics of action, but, until thymology gives it meaning, is just a bunch of arbitrary, formal relationships between propositions. Wanting A, and believing that B will lead to A, means wanting B. But what the hell is wanting and believing? Where can I observe wanting? Where can I find believing?
But thymology can tell us what wanting and believing are. It doesn’t have to say anything about one desire causing another desire. It doesn’t need to say that wanting to drink alcohol at some frequency is associated with wanting something else at some frequency. That kind of thing is history. When the people who you are paraphrasing say that praxeology isn’t concerned with the contents of the value scales or desires, that is exactly what they are talking about. It doesn’t matter what desires generally cause what other desires. It doesn’t matter what value scales generally precede what other value scales. But this isn’t what I am talking about. What I am talking about is explaining what wanting and believing are in terms of how, in the most general sense, they are causally connected with other things. Wanting and believing exist. Wanting is an object and belief is something else. But both are observable. Imagining something conjoined with the object which we usually call desire and imagining moving your body in some way preceding that colored by belief is causally connected with moving your body in that way. This is a pretty rough outline what we call volition.
The category of action is a thymology category. We group what is contained in this category into a group only because the objects in the category are casually connected with other things in some way. The logic of this category is conditioned by those causal connections. Just like most other categories, the category of action gets its meaning from its casual connections. We refer to cars as “cars” simply because they are casually connected to us in some way - they transport us in some way. We refer to chairs as “chairs” simply because they are causally connected with us in some way - our bodies conform to it in such a way that they let us, well, you get it. And so on. It is the same way with the category of action. For example, the word “desire” refers to a group of observable objects in our private world, and we group those objects together under that word simply because all of them are casually connected with other categories in some way - there is no other reason.