Author: Curt Doolittle

http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-math/MISES’ PRAXEOLOGY AS THE A FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM?

(important)

I have been working to reform anarcho capitalist (libertarian) arguments by translating them from troublesome kantian rationalism, into the transparent common language of science: ratio-empiricism. And, at least for the past few months, I’ve been struggling to develop a narrative structure that would allow me to easily demonstrate the solution to the promise of praxeology as a version of the broader problems addressed by Intuitionism, Operationalism and Constructivism: the search for the meaning of truth.

That mises was another example of the multi-disciplinary failure of the common intuition that there is a problem with science and mathematics, and our application of science and math to other fields – particularly to economics and ethics. That is the conclusion that I have come to – it’s the logical positioning of Mises’ praxeology in the development of 20th century thought – albeit he was even less successful in economics than peers were in physics, math, logic and psychology.

All the major disciplines went through a somewhat failed transformation and only psychology, which was most in need of reformation, fully adopted operationalism as “operationism”. And the result was experimental psychology and the success of experimental psychology versus the pseudoscience that dominated the field before hand.

This narrative, positioning Misesian thought, provides a vehicle whereby I can describe Misesian arguments in the same context as those in physics, psychology, logic and mathematics. All of them as failed experiments in operationalism only because the authors did not and possibly could not look across disciplines and discover that they were merely adding or removing the properties desirable or not for their field of inquiry – but that they were all making similar arguments – ethical arguments.

Why is this important? Because the requirements for construction and operational language, are not only logical but ethical. And while ethics has little place in mathematical principles, and physical laws, it has a great significance to the promise that one is advocating a truth in mathematical and physical propositions – and therefore not ‘polluting’ the intellectual domain with fallacies that might impact others’ work. But in the logic of cooperation we call ethics it is inseparable both from the promise that one is advocating a truth AND in the articulation of its principles and the laws that enforce those principles.

If we had discovered operationalism in ethics first, then perhaps, we would have had an easier time justifying the additional burden that operationalism places upon physics, science, psychology math and logic – and we might have saved a century of pseudoscientific inquiry, just as Bridgman worried; and just as we have seen in a century of fallacious and immoral economics.

The issue for us, in economics and in ethics, is that the problem of arbitrary precision in the construction of general rules – hypothesis, theories and laws – affects only the precision of economic laws in time, but not our ability to state those laws. However, unlike say, mathematics or logic, we never run into decidability in the logic of cooperation, because all phenomenon are reducible to human actions that are open to subjective testing (sympathetic experience). Unlike axiomatic systems such as math and logic, we are never short of information necessary for decidability. Humans are marginally indifferent in their preferences – which is why we can experience shared intent, cooperate, and empathize. As such we can always decide. Buridan’s Ass never starves. Information is always sufficient.

Under operationalism and constructivism, truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and existence requires constructibility. This statement is possible to translate into the axiom that moral (ethical) propositions must be reducible to a series of human actions, open to subjective testing (sympathetic verification).

The problem I face, and the work I must do, is merely in enumerating examples of axioms and laws in different fields and thereby demonstrating the problem of the sufficiency of information for deduction under arbitrary precision in the construction of hypotheses, theories, laws, and axioms; and then placing Mises’ work in the context of all fields struggling with the definition of truth (as ultimately performative – and therefore ethical). So positioning economics and ethics using performative truth, operationalism and constructivism will help demonstrate the concept across ALL domains of inquiry, rather than just within economics, ethics, physics, psychology, mathematics and logic. And thus eliminate the objections to performative truth, intuitionism, constructivism, and operationalism by demonstrating that all philosophical and logical disciplines rest upon the action that one claims to have demonstrated a truth.

Unfortunately, we didn’t discover ethics first – perhaps had Mises solved the problem in ethics, other fields would have grasped the significance. Although, other fields have addressed ethics with softer variants of operationalism and construction – particularly science. They have never reformed ’truth’ as performative (operational and constructible). At least in the discipline of law, strict construction, original intent, and deliberate modification of law is an understood if not obeyed principle.

But whether we retain the approximation of classical reasoning as a practical matter of utility, or adopt construction and operation as a requirement for attestable truth in other disciplines really doesn’t matter as much as in ethics, politics and law. Physics, science, psychology, math and logic are luxury goods and rarely involve involuntary transfer and provide an incentive for conflict. But, cooperation is a necessary good. Politics and law are necessary goods. Strict construction is necessary and beneficial since it permits the rational resolution of conflicts, and as such prevents them. Strict construction makes it impossible to use empty verbalisms to advocate involuntary transfers as ‘moral’.

Under operationalism, performative truth, constructivism, the field of ethics, including the domains of criminal, unethical, immoral and conspiratorial, and conquest prohibitions, can be described as an objective uniform logic as Mises suggested it might be. We can construct a formal logic of cooperation – ethics. And, we can do it using ratio-scientific language, via operational and constructive means. We can do it in the common universal and transparent language of science using hypothesis, theory and law, and model our laws using axioms constrained by correspondence to this empirical laws. We do not need a cult or obscure continental language to do it. An irony perhaps that Mises did not grasp that he was justifying the logic of human action, which is by definition operational and constructive in an argumentative structure that was not operational nor constructive. In hindsight this approach is either humorous or tragic.

The 20th century’s failed quest for a clearer definition of truth, is the narrative structure that I’ve been searching for. I just couldn’t find a way of talking about Mises’ work in the broader context of intellectual development. He clearly intuited the problem correctly, as did those in other fields, but besides having the Jewish obsession with words-as-reality, and the German obsession with authority, he did not understand math and science well enough, and certainly had no exposure to computer science and the problem of computability.

As Hoppe states, Hayek failed as well, to move from the classical liberal and therefore psychological school of thought to the calculative rigor of logic by identifying property as the first and necessary object or unit of commensurability. He did understand the law and the common law, clearly, as the institutional means for resolving conflicts – better than anyone else as far as I know. But he did not grasp the difference between legal REASON (approximation necessary for discovery) and logical CALCULATION (precision necessary for truth). Nor between knowledge of use (correspondence as truth) and knowledge of construction (truth in existence). (Although I’m willing to admit that I might be the only person who currently does.)

Later in life Mises appears to waffle a bit, if not reverse himself, but because of what appears to be his fascination with Kantian a priorism, he didn’t see the parallel between his (inarticulate) argument that economics was both empirical and logical, and reverse mathematics, in which one constructs necessary axioms after using empirical and logical means by which to approximate the solution to a problem.

My original goal was to provide conservatives a vehicle for argument using what I saw as libertarian rationalism. Conversely, I wanted to make it impossible to conduct deceptive arguments in the religious, progressive and postmodern forms, but in doing so I found an answer to a century or more old conflict in the history of thought.

And I think I can rescue mises and hoppe from the ‘fruitcake fringe’ of rationalist argument. Which is helpful. Since I want, like most, a plan to obtain liberty in my lifetime.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Constructive Mathematics:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-math/

Mathematical Intuitionism:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

Operationalism:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

Praxeology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology