Category: Epistemology and Method

THE ERRORS OF PRAXEOLOGY CORRECTED

(cross posted for archival purposes.)

I would like to weigh in on this discussion but so far it’s a mess.

a) If you want to make claims about Praxeology, then please define praxeology, the praxeological method, it’s axioms and its postulates. if you do you will find that it’s pretty much nonsense to assume much can be deduced from praxeological theory.

From Rothbard:

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AXIOM

“…praxeology contains one Fundamental Axiom–the axiom of action–which may be called a priori, and a few subsidiary postulates which are actually empirical.”

POSTULATES

(Postulate 1) A “…variety of resources, both natural and human. From this follows directly the division of labor, the market, etc.; ” (Believe it or not that is a direct quote.)

(Postulate 2) Leisure is a consumer good.

(Postulate 3) Indirect exchanges occur.

(Postulate 4) Every firm aims always at maximizing its psychic profit; and this may or may not involve maximizing its money profit, and or also stated as everyone tries always to maximize his utility.

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b) If instead we say that it is possible for us to empirically determine the logical rules of cooperation, then praxeology is an empirical method of determining internally consistent rules (a logic of cooperation) for the purpose of testing statements of human cooperation for rationality.

c) This logic, as empirically based, will allow the test of ANY **CONSTRUCTED** description of human cooperation. (Constructed means “articulated as a set of actions, which in science we refer to as ‘operational language’.)

d) Therefore praxeology is, if completed (and it’s not complete) a formal logic of cooperation, that like mathematical logic or language-logic, can be used for the purpose of internally testing any argument for logical consistency.

e) However, ‘true’ statements require BOTH internal consistency, and external correspondence. (I guess I will have to probably teach a few people the meaning of truth by making that statement.) Internal consistency is a PROOF, not a TRUTH. The test of a PROOF is external correspondence in addition to internal consistency. We use the term ‘true’ in the context of proof only to say ‘my attestation is true and therefore corresponds to my assertion’. But proofs are never true in themselves. They are merely proofs.

f) The reasons that we may use the LOGIC of cooperation AS IF IT WERE A PRIORISTIC are i) that the perception of incentives as rational or not is marginally indifferent between human beings. ii) our rational perception of incentives is open to subjective testing – and therefore subjective testing of incentives is EMPIRICAL. iii) If our rational perception was marginally DIFFERENT, then we would neither be able to easily cooperate nor treat cooperation as IF it were a prioristic.

g) However, this said, that still means that the logic of cooperation is EMPIRICAL. It just means that we do not have to rely on external instrumentation and logic to measure the rationality of any incentive. We need only reduce any economic statement to operational language, each step of which is open to the subjective test of rationality.

h) There is very, very little that can be deduced from man acts. Praxeology is NOT deductive. It is a logic – a test of rational incentives independent of theft or involuntary transfer. But one cannot deduce ‘sticky prices’ from it. One can only deduce the incentives that produce sticky prices once one observes that prices are sticky.

c) Mises pretty much abandons his position on apriorism at the end of his career. He has to because it’s pretty clear that he failed at developing a logic of cooperation. He failed because he tried to state it deductively rather than empirically.

j) What we intuitively LIKE about the praxeological logic is that it EXPOSES MORAL AND IMMORAL transfers in exchanges.

k) As such, praxeology is not ONLY a logic of cooperation – IT IS THE LOGIC OF MORAL ACTION. Period.

I will continue to attempt to reform praxeology and get us out of the trap of German Continental and Jewish Cosmopolitan endemic conflation of moral, rational, and scientific statements, and attempt to complete the logic of human cooperation, over the next year, by converting it into anglo-empirical language like all other logics and sciences have been.

However, if you understand the points above, and ponder them sufficiently, you will no longer need to operate under the Misesian pretense that praxeology is a science when it is a form of logic dependent upon empirical testing – dependent upon science.

And you will help us rescue libertarian philosophy from the same silly traps that all continental philosophy has fallen into since Kant: the attempt to recreate christian obscurantist mysticism through the use of fuzzy language that conflates of moral, rational, and empirical statements into pseudoscience.

We are no better than the ‘scientific socialists’ who propagated a pseudoscience obscured by and justified by the use of aggregates to hide systemic thefts.

We are libertarians. We are supposed to be the smart people. We are supposed to be the people who understand economics – the study of human cooperation. Its about time we abandoned continental pseudoscience and relied upon empirical science.

Right now the world thinks we all wear tinfoil hats. And when we argue such obviously false pretenses they’re right.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev