THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL The logic of human action is not

THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL

The logic of human action is not deductive. The logic of human action, including the discipline of economics, is entirely empirical. Empirical meaning ‘observable’.

The canons of science require that we use instrumentation and logic to reduce that which we cannot sense to analogy to experience; that we test what we cannot perceive for internal consistency and external correspondence.

But, we can test the rationality of incentives directly by pure perception. Our perception of voluntary exchange, involuntary exchange, and the satisfaction of wants is in itself the most reductive form of perception: we can both sense the rationality of incentives in relation to any change in state, and we can test the rationality of the incentives of others as well – because human incentives are marginally indifferent – at least outside of taste. Even then we can distinguish between rational tastes and non.

As such, the logic of human action is constructed from, as all knowledge of truth is, empirical observation.