(from elsewhere)
Too long an answer for this forum. If I remember you correctly you’re a smart fellow so here is an analytic reduction for you to mull over:
0 – There are only so many dimensions of actionability available to man, about which he can speak in continuous relations.
1 – A statement of continuous relations (truth) requires consistency of categorical, logical (internal), empirical(external), operational (existential), voluntary (rational), reciprocal (moral), fully accounted within stated limits, and coherent relations (across all above dimensions).
2 – No dimension is closed (knowledge is infinite and semantics and grammar are also.) And therefore any dimension must achieve closure by appeal to (inclusion of) subsequent dimensions. All non trivial knowledge is perishable (closed only within specified limits).
3 – Coherence across all actionable dimensions serves as a competition between dimensions that will falsify inconstant relations within and across dimensions.
4 – Ergo, all arguments are falsifications, and only truth candidates survive tests of all actionable dimensions. Therefore all non trivial statements that survive tests of actionable dimensions are contingent. (actionable).
5 – Mises discovered operationalism in economics, as did bridgman in physics, brouwer in math, falsification by popper in the philosophy of science (epistemology), and Hayek in law (after exploring every field), and dozens of predecessors in accounting.
6 – Mises failure was to rely on the metaphysics (unconscious rules) of his ‘heritage’, as we all do, and conflated law, logic (via-positiva axioms), empiricism (via-negativa theories), and to (again) limit the investments he considered to the intersubjectively verifiable, rather than those investments
7 – The sciences consist entirely of a set of dimensional due diligences against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion and deceit – and justifications ‘reasons’ (rationalizations) are irrelevant. The means by which we arrive at an hypothesis tells us nothing other than we have found an opportunity for falsification, and if survives falsification we then have a truth candidate in the market for general rules of arbitrary precision that assist us in the identification of opportunities that we may exploit.
8 – we do not create justifications (excuses) in science (testimony), we create moral and legal excuses only in human cooperation (morality and law). We create proof of constant relations (identity). We create proofs of possibility of operational construction using constant relations. We identify constant relations in the universe through testing. We eliminate ‘imaginary content’ by the reduction of all statements to the vocabulary (semantics) and grammar (fully formed testable statements) and syntax (testable statements in series, from noun to phrase, to sentence, to paragraph to argument). We objectively test the rationality of choice in matters of conflict (which is possible because in choice we are marginally indifferent). We objectively test reciprocity through property. We test full accounting, limits and parsimony, and finally we test coherence of the constant relations across all actionable dimensions of reality.
9 – The secret of human action is that by limiting our speech to operational language we provide subjective testability to constant relations free of deceits, fictionalisms, obsucrantisms, pretenses of knowledge, suggestion, bias, ignorance, and error. In other words, the most parsimonious testimony we can speak of is in using the constant relations of testable actions of marginal indifference. And if one cannot speak in those terms, one cannot testify to them, since one cannot claim to have performed dimensional due diligence.
For a variety of complex reasons, I think something on the nature of the first 15 chapters of Human Action are nonsense.
If it were not for the kantian nonsense rationalism and pseudoscience promoted by ‘libertarians’ and in particular that propaganda organization we call ‘the mises institute’, then we could rescue mises from criticism.
But his own arrogance was his undoing. he was wrong about a lot of things. Rothbard made it worse. And hoppe made it worse.
But if we look at it differently, that this failure to solve the scientific method in the early part of the last century led, as Hayek suggested’ to a new era of pseudoscience. And that mises popper and hayek and bridgman and brower… and to some degree Kuhn, all made some progress.
The interesting observation is that Boole, Babbage, Godel, Turing, and finally Chomsky were on the right track. And because the philosophical discipline was off in la-la-land, trying to preserve their ‘science’, and because the disciplines did not cooperate or communicate or speak in the same terms, no one united them into a single commensurable language.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine