Theme: Operationalism

OPERATIONALISM IS SYNONYMOUS WITH HUMAN ACTION

I guess, I just assumed that it was so obvious that I didn’t need to say it. But apparently it’s not.

So why would you try to rely on all this Kantian nonsense, in order to justify human action? Instead, why wouldn’t you base the philosophy of human action, on human action?

What is the difference between, say, justifying something aprioristically, and simply stating that it appears that we are able to use description, deduction, induction, abduction given the amount of information available to us. But that deduction is possible only when describing constant relations?

What is the difference between stating, the obvious falsehood, that categorical descriptions of human actions are axiomatic, as in mathematics, and therefore not bounded by reality, rather than that any general description of human actions is theoretical, parsimonious, with broad explanatory power, but remains bounded by reality?

Why would one want to appeal to an authority using verbal contrivances, instead of honest descriptions of human actions? Why would you base the theoretical system upon which we analyze human actions on anything other than human actions? Especially when to do so you must misrepresent that which is ‘axiom-like’ but not axiomatic, as that which it is not?

Unless you were trying to justify an appeal to an authority? To grant to that which is empirical, scientific and theoretical, the authoritative content of mathematics and logic, which because both are axiomatic, are fully tautological and unbounded by reality?

Misesian reasoning, and rothbardian ethics, could be simply an intellectual error. Or it could be a dishonest use of obscurantism to hide the fact that human actions are observable. Even introspective actions are observable by the actor who makes them, and if communicated, observable by others. And as observable, those actions are empirical.

Theories may be very hard or very weak. Some theories are very hard, in that under most conditions they are true. But because of time and space, no economic theories are axiomatic. They are bounded by reality. This does not mean that they need to be tested. That is a fallacy of positivism. It means that there are always the possibility of conditions under which they may or may not apply, for any given period of time. In axiomatic systems this is never true. That is what defines them as axiomatic.

Operationalism solves the problem of reducing all statements to empirical (observable) and therefore sympathetically testable terms.

Praxeology is either an empirical science for the purpose of determining the rationality of human actions, and the voluntary exchange of property, and therefore it is the test of moral action – or it is another of the many, many, cosmopolitan and continental fallacies.

If you cannot explain human actions as human actions, then you are either unsure of what it is that you speak, or engaging in obscurantist deception. Continental and Cosmopolitan authors were (and are) trying to preserve traditional authority in the face of science, for the purpose of maintaining group homogeneity. We must treat their arguments as specious. Because they are.

All we need is property rights, a contract for their fullest expression enforceable under the private, common, law, and the willingness to organize and use violence for the purpose of obtaining the opportunity to construct those property rights, contract, and private common law.

Everything else is obscurant nonsense.

Science won.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute.

Kiev.