@IRyan
the following is taken from here.
We’ve already done that. This fact is implied in our mutual understanding of the logic of the performative contradiction you illustrated above. That is, everybody’s already conceived of a “useful”, “efficient”, “unambiguous”, and “correct” idea of volition. Done and done. I repeat, the tenets of praxeology need no further explication.
To be clear, I still believe everything which I wrote in that post.
Usually how praxeologists explain what our volition is that they bring up a formal relationship between some propositions or categories, such as that denying that you have a volition is using your volition, that we can build our idea of means and ends with our ideas, of, cause and effect, belief, and desire, and so on. Often how they try to explain what the category of action is that they bring up the fact that there is a necessary connection between one proposition and another, or that combining one familiar category with another one creates yet another. This isn’t surprising. Formal relationships between propositions or categories are the only province of praxeology.
But these formal relationships between propositions and categories are meaningless until thymology enters. Imagine somebody using the word “pon” in their argument, you asking them what “pon” means, and them telling you that ponning that you pon is ponning, or that jensing pon with kent means bonton. Would you have any idea what they were talking about? No, those wouldn’t mean anything to you. They would be formal relationships between proposition or categories, but nothing else. Because you don’t even have a glimmer of the meaning of “pon”, “jense”, “kent”, or “bonton”, to you, those relationships aren’t anything that a formal system couldn’t easily typographically capture.
Bringing up formal relationships between propositions or categories relating to the word in question works assuming that the other person already has at least a glimmer of what the word means. But what if you are talking to somebody who uses the word in a much different way? What if you are trying to explain praxeology to a psychologist, who uses “desire” and “choice” to talk about how neurons fire? Do you think that telling them that denying desire is desiring to deny desire is going to help? Well, it might. But it might not. Either way, the formal relationships help point in the right direction, but the person can’t even see which way your hand in pointing if they don’t already at least have a glimmer of your meaning.
The formal relationships between propositions and categories in praxeology aren’t arbitrary. They reflect something about our mind. So bringing up the formal relationships to a point helps illuminate what you are talking about, but doesn’t give the whole story. In fact, it is a backwards method. The formal relationships come from the categories, which we can observe. We should move from observations to formal relationships, not from formal relationships to observations - that is unless we already know what our language refers to. If we already know what observable “desire” refers to, putting “desire” in a formal relationships with something else would convey something, but not if they don’t already know what observable it refers to. Praxeology is nothing but a language! Most people think that it is much more. Maybe that is because they smuggle thymology into their arguments, which are supposed to be just praxeology.
So that means that explaining these things in terms of their formal relationships presupposes that we have an understanding of them. It presupposes that everybody already observed these things and agreed on what words to use to refer to them. But the problem is that nobody in Austrian economics carried out a scientific investigation to figure this kind of thing out. We just use our common-sense, ordinary language ideas of them. It would be reasonable to call this “folk thymology”. I think that one of the next revolutions in Austrian economics will be making this investigation explicit, and founding thymology as a sister science to praxeology. This would get rid of a lot of the mysticism in Austrian economics. We can’t just keep defining desire, choice, and so on in terms of their relationships with each other. That leads to an infinite regression. We need to stop the regression somewhere, and point to something observable. We can’t just keep defining desire in terms of desire, means and ends in terms of cause and effect, desire, and belief, belief in terms of belief, and so on. Saying that trying to deny trying is still trying to explain what trying is might be useful - but it amounts to defining trying in terms of trying. That won’t convince anybody outside our inner circle. We need to start defining these categories in terms of observables.
I mean. I hear what you’re saying. It sounds like a cross between linguistics and psychology. That is, trying to find a set of definitions that people will find agreeable. I don’t see where “choice” is unintelligible to people, though. Likewise “ends”, “means”, “prefer”.
The audience you have in mind seems to be of the McCloskey mind—insisting that no truths exist and that everything boils down to how one casts one’s argument, or employs one’s rhetorical skill. That is, if you’re speaking with a hermeutician, you’re not going to convince him/her of anything anyways, no matter how fine a point you put on your definitions. So why bother trying so hard to convince the relatively unconvincable?
Short of this, I believe reasonable people can readily agree, or reach agreement when necessary, on the core concepts needed to comprehend action and its implied economic propositions.