PRAXEOLOGY REQUIRES SCIENCE AND EMPIRICISM (From Elsewhere) This is going to be

http://keirmartland.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/empiricism-versus-praxeology/NO. PRAXEOLOGY REQUIRES SCIENCE AND EMPIRICISM

(From Elsewhere)

This is going to be one of those necessary intellectual battles that I just don’t want to have. Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Hoppian argumentation.

They’re all half right. That’s a lot better than anyone else has done. But it’s only half right. Praxeology is incomplete and backwards, Rothbardian ethics are incomplete, and Hoppian argumentation is a symptom, not a cause.

I’d rather innovate on institutions, or criticize the opposition. But without correcting where we’ve been, I can’t argue for where we must go.

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Science is necessary to compensate for our cognitive biases, cognitive limitations, an the limits of our perception. We need instrumentation, measures and numbers for the same reason we need money, prices and numbers. We cannot think without them. Because we cannot think about what we cannot reduce to analogy to experience.

Praxeology is only a test. We can test what we can sense. With science, can test what we can reduce to analogy to sensation. And given that our biases and limitations are what define us as human, because we have them in common, we can test incentives produced by those experiences, whether sense perception, or analogies to experience, which we call measurements. That is what praxeology tells us.

But what we can DEDUCE from praxeology is limited. And evidence has proven that to be true.

To say that humans will respond to incentives produced by any given policy is true. To say that the multitude of interweaving externalities is deducible from those incentives is not.

I don’t really desire to correct praxeology or rothbardian ethics, but we must if we are to mature libertarian philosophy.

http://keirmartland.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/empiricism-versus-praxeology