WHICH IS MORE CRANKISH? SIMPLE SCIENCE AND LOGIC, OR RATIONALIST PSEUDOSCIENCE?
I am pretty confident that the praxeological line of reasoning, as currently constructed, is a dead end, as I’ve argued elsewhere. In no small part because it cannot compete with the universality of the language and processes of the ratio-scientific method. But while an inferior method, it’s still a useful method. And if it helps people understand micro and ethics then that’s good enough.
The challenge at this inflection point in intellectual history, is that Hoppe has created the formal language of political ethics and political economy, and taught most of us to argue politics ethics and morality in economic terms. Yet that language is unnecessarily dependent upon Argumentation, Continental Rationalism, and a misguided attempt to conflate logic and science, in order to defend against a positivism that is not present in the philosophy or practice of science – if it ever was.
Logic is axiomatic, and therefore both prescriptive and deductive. Science is theoretic, and therefore descriptive and deductive.
But we can make statements in logic that are internally consistent yet not externally correspondent, yet we cannot make theories that fail external correspondence, whether or not our language is internally consistent.
But the empirical test is obvious: if praxeology and rothbardian ethics are correct, then why are they both rejected almost universally? If these things are true, then why do we fail?
Comparative ethics, empirically studied, yields a universal descriptive ethics that is theoretically rigid and more sustainable from criticism than rothbardian ethics.
—“in all cultures and all civilizations, manners, ethics and morals reflect the necessary rules for organizing reproduction (the family) and the polity of families, such that they may cooperate in whatever structure of production is available to them. The content of those rules, under analysis, can be represented as property rights, each of which is distributed between the individual to the commons. Demand for third party authority as a means of resolving differences (the state) is determined by the degree of suppression of free riding (parasitism), and the number of competing sets of rules (family structures and classes) within any given structure of production. These sets of rules can be expressed as a simple formal grammar, which allows us to render all moral and ethical systems commensurable.”—
Macro economics, experimental psychology, and cognitive science have contributed all economic insights over the past three decades, and none of these insights were deducible (cognitive biases in particular), or were emergent effects of economic cooperation (stickiness of prices, the time delay until money achieves neutrality, and the quantitative impact on interest and production in the interim, within each sustainable pattern of specialization and trade.)
So, WHICH IS MORE PARSIMONIOUS A THEORY?
Which theory is easier to understand?
Which theory is more obscurant?
Which more accurately reflects reality?
I can explain and demonstrate this theory to anyone with a ratio-scientific background. I know this because it is simply an advancement to Ostrom’s work on institutions and she was able to do so.
Cheers.