 I feel since Hans Hoppe gave an excellent lecture on praxeology last night, I feel I should just ask you, I say, well, he's already given the lecture, so there's no need for me to repeat the lecture. We can all leave, but I don't think they would let me get away with that. One thing is you'll discover if you haven't realized already. I speak in a very soft voice, not very loud, and I'm also a monotone. On the monotone, some people advise if you have a recording of the speech, just speed up the recording about it. Most people recommend to start with a 170.75 and then work your way, whatever suitable. As far as speaking loudly, I remember people told me, eat the microphone. I don't propose to do that. It doesn't sound like it would be a good idea. It's really not in my diet plan. But one other story on speaking loudly, once Robert Nozick gave a talk and said, if you can't hear me in the back, let me know, and somebody yelled out, we can't hear you in the front. So he said, well, go to the back where you can hear me. Now I'm going to talk today about some of the basic ideas of praxeology. This is from a philosophical point of view. One thing I like to point out, the word I heard from my great friend, Father James Sadowski, like to tell people, the word philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophia, which means philosophy. Although I'm speaking on the philosophical aspects of praxeology, one point I think is very important to make is that although Austrian economists such as Mises and Rothbard tend to be very interested in philosophy and they're interested in the philosophical aspects of economics, praxeology is not an attempt to solve the basic problems of philosophy. Particularly, it's not an attempt to solve the problem of other minds or the problem of skepticism. By that I have in mind something like this. There are people who will ask a question like this. Well, suppose I look at the various arguments about praxeology and they seem to be convincing or I think there's something to that, but how do I know that applies to anybody else? Maybe this is just about my own mind. How do I know that there are other minds who also think in this way? Well, remember praxeology is one of the sciences. It's not a branch of philosophy. It's not epistemology, a theory of knowledge or metaphysics. It's one of the sciences. In the sciences, we assume the ordinary world of common sense. Physicists don't say, well, we're looking at all these material particles. We're looking at them through various instruments and measuring them. But they don't say, how do we know any of this exists at all? Maybe, how do we know there isn't absolutely nothing? They don't ask questions like that. They just assume that the material world exists. In the same way in economics, in praxeology, we're assuming that there are other people and that these people are actors. We don't have that as a question. We don't have, say, a question, how do I know, say that I know that I'm thinking, but how do I know that any of you are thinking maybe you're just all cleverly disguised robots who are producing sounds? How do I know that you have thoughts in the way that I do, or at least I think I do? Praxeology isn't an attempt to solve the problem of other minds. One of my philosophers I knew at UCLA, Robert Yoast, used to say people ask him, do you think other minds exist? He would say, not very many of them. As I say, we're not in praxeology trying to solve these philosophical problems. This point will come up later. Just one further example of how we're not in praxeology, we're not trying to solve these philosophical problems. Using, say, we're looking at the Austrian theory of the business cycle, say we're trying to show how this explains the 1929 U.S. Depression, saying comparison with Milton Friedman's theory or other theories. It wouldn't make much sense to say, well, you're trying to ask how the depression came about. We haven't even established that other people exist, so how can we ask this question? You see, as I say, praxeology isn't an attempt to solve these fundamental philosophical questions. Now, we want to deal with the basic notion of Austrian economics, of action, where action is goal-directed behavior. The actor has a certain goal in mind, and he has an idea of means that he can use to achieve that goal, so we have this basic structure of ends and means. It's very important in action, at least as we're talking about it in Austrian economics, where people usually refer to emotions or movements of someone's body. It doesn't have to. We can think of actions that don't involve movements of someone's body. I have in mind, other than the point where people say, well, waiting is an action, but we can have other examples where there is no motion of a person is still. I knew I touched the screen I shouldn't have. Oh, well, we've got a problem already. I knew this would happen. That was an action, always waving to me. I was giving an example. I'm trying to come up with a case where somebody will act, even though there's no physical motion of the body. I could just say, well, will all of those of you who agree with me that there is such a case, please signify this by remaining seated? Since nobody stood up, you've all agreed with me, but that's an action. You've agreed with me that you haven't done anything. That would be a case where you can act, even though you haven't done anything. Now, Peter Klein used to ruin things for me by saying, would everybody who agrees with me please signify by remaining seated? He would just stand up. That isn't a counter example, but it just threw me off stride. It's not a nice thing to do. Now, I think we have a basic idea of what action is. One point about action also, we have in mind that for action to take place, the future can't be certain in the sense that we know what would happen, regardless of whether I act or not. Supposing I say I know this room is going to be blown up in two minutes, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it, so then it would be no point to acting in that case. I would have to have some way of thinking that what I would do would have some effect on what would take place in the future. One point that's very important here is Joe Salerno mentioned this in his lecture. When he was mentioning the criticisms that Mises made of Carl Menger, it doesn't have to be the case that the person has a correct idea of what will affect the future. He has some idea. It's just his view of what will happen. He thinks that doing such and such will aid him in achieving what he wants. Supposing say someone believes that you can injure your enemies by making a wax image of them and then sticking pins in the image. So even if that is a wrong idea, it doesn't have any effect. It's still something he's doing. Although I must say it's worked for me every time I've tried it. One point also on knowing the future. It's an argument sometimes people give, I don't think is a very good one. You may have heard, some of you may be familiar with this argument. They'll say, well, you can't predict what someone will do and then tell the person what the prediction is because then if you tell them what the prediction is, then they can just say, well, I'm not going to do what you predicted just because I want to show your prediction is wrong. So that shows you can't predict what someone is going to do and then tell them about it. Now, can anybody tell me what's wrong with that argument? Are there several things? Of course, if you think it's right, tell me what's right with it. Does anyone have any ideas about that? So your point was if you know that somebody is going to do the opposite of what you say, then you could just predict they'll do the opposite. Well, that is an interesting suggestion. It's a very good suggestion, but it isn't quite the case I have in mind that I'm dealing with your predicting a particular thing rather than a different prediction that you would have made taking account of the person's reaction. I'm predicting you're going to do such and such and I'm telling you about that. What, is there a problem with that? Oh, yes. But the prediction is, so you're saying when you make the prediction, when you make the prediction, you're possibly changing what the person's information was, but supposing the information includes that you're giving them the prediction. This is what the prediction is. Well, those are very good suggestions, but I think one, a couple problems with the argument. First, the most obvious one is just assuming that the conclusion is true, namely that the person is assuming that the prediction is false, namely that telling them about the prediction will upset the prediction. We could come up with cases where this doesn't seem very plausible. For example, I suppose I say, well, you're not going, I'm predicting of each one of you that you're not going to go out and murder someone during lunchtime. Well, you could say, okay, just to show that Gordon really doesn't know what he's talking about as if that needed any demonstration, you can kill somebody just to upset my prediction. But if prediction's right, you're not going to, so it's just really begging the question. It's assuming that the prediction is false. And a relage of this really is we could say, well, isn't it in some sense logically possible, however unlikely, that you could act in a way that's different from the prediction? It isn't a requirement of predicting what somebody is going to do that it's logically impossible that the person do something else. For example, suppose I say, I predict that a certain person will win the lottery and the person does win the lottery, then it would seem I'm successfully predicting he's won the lottery. But it isn't that it's certainly logically possible that he didn't win. In fact, it was extremely unlikely that he did win, but I predicted it. So it isn't a requirement of predicting something that it's logically necessary that it must happen. So I think that's what's wrong with that argument. Now, the question now comes up, which Hans Hoppe dealt with in his lecture last night, is how do we know that human beings act? And here Hans mentioned an argument, which I think is a very good one, although I look at the argument a little bit differently from his use of it. The argument he gave was supposing someone denies that people act. Somebody says, well, I don't think there is such a thing as action. So his very saying that would be an action, he's saying, I don't think people act. In denying action, he's acting himself. So he's showing that his own argument is wrong when he says that human beings don't act. That is an action. That's sometimes called a retortion argument. It's showing that the argument is self-undermining. And I think that's a very good argument, but I think in this perhaps where I differ a bit, I think that the main way we know that human beings act is just it's part of our ordinary experiences. We all act. We do it all the time. We say, you decided to come to this lecture and you did come. You're now thinking you probably made a mistake, but it's a requirement of the program. But otherwise you'd all be leaving. Maybe some of you'll be leaving even though it is a requirement of the program. But the main way we know what we act is that it's part of our experience. Now, the point where I think people might place too much importance on this self-reportation argument is this. What I suppose seems right, the argument is right that the person who is denying that people act is himself acting. So that shows that there's at least one action, namely the person who's denied action is acting. But it doesn't follow from that that all that action is a fundamental category for understanding human behavior. Someone could hold that action. Really, it's better to explain human action through some kind of external point of view, just say as product of reflexes or some kind of operant conditioning, which was something invented by B. F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist. So somebody could say, well, action really isn't a very useful concept, but someone who held that wouldn't be saying that there aren't any actions at all. So that's why I think that argument is a bit limited. It's a bit similar. There was an argument sometimes made in logic that says, well, you can't really deny the law of non-contradiction because law of non-contradiction says something can't both be and not be at the same time, at least in all respects. So one of the arguments was, well, if you deny this law, if you say there can be true contradictions, then you're at the same time affirming it. You're saying that the law is true because if there are non-contradiction is false, then all contradictions are true. So then it's all so true that no contradictions are true. So I think that argument, a lot of people accepted that argument fairly recently in the 20th century development really. One logician, a Graham Priest, pointed out a problem with that, that someone who denies law of non-contradiction need not be saying that all contradictions are true. He's just saying there's at least one true contradiction, but he's not contradicting himself because he's not saying that all contradictions are true. He's just saying there's at least one of them. You see, it's kind of similar to this point about if you say that you're acting, if you deny that you're acting, you don't think there's any action, that your denial is itself an action, that just one action. So it doesn't show that action is fundamental. You have to be very careful about what it is you're affirming or denying in logic. I should say there was one person who used to be a summer fellow here for a number of years who didn't agree with me on this. He would say, no, no, you have to show for each person that the person is contradicting himself if he denies that he has. He thought this was really unphilosophical to just start with the notion of action. Just say, well, it's ordinary common sense. So I disagree with that. Maybe that's why he's no longer a fellow at the programs anymore. But I think although I've disagreed with this argument, the point that it's making is fundamental that the first person perspective, from our own points of view, we're acting really can't be eliminated. That say if there are various scientists or others who say all human behavior can be explained as a result of certain interactions of material particles, they themselves are acting their doings things they're involved in using means to achieve ends. So if we try to eliminate the first person perspective, we're really doing something that undermines our own activities. So that really can't be done. Now let's see if I can get to the next slide on my own. Oh, good, I made it. I was hoping I would. I now want to mention some criticisms of praxeology. And one of the most important criticism was raised by the logical positivists or logical empiricists who were a group of philosophers at the University of Vienna, who had a group called the Vienna Circle. It was centered around one of the philosophy professors, Moritz Schlick, and there were various other important philosophies who were part of that circle, Rudolf Karnapp was a member of it, Otto Neurot, there were various other people in it. And that movement became very influential because after the Nazis took power in Austria in March 1938, the people in that circle had to flee abroad, many of them were Jewish or they were politically radical. So a lot of them wound up in the U.S. or in England, so the movement became very influential here. And I can say one of the logical positivists illustrates some of the dangers of being a philosopher. There was, as I say, the head of the founder of the movement was Moritz Schlick, and there was a student name of his who had gotten his Ph.D. with Schlick named Hans Nellbach. And he, for the various theories of why he did this, he thought that one theory is he thought Schlick was interested in a woman that he was very attracted to. And he wasn't very happy about this, so he came up to Schlick one day after his lecture and shot him dead. So later, I think after he did that, he was put in an insane asylum for a while. Then he got out after, I think when the Nazis came to power, he said, well, he just was trying to eliminate a Jewish philosopher who was corrupting philosophy, although Schlick wasn't Jewish, but never mind that. So I think after the war he wound up as a forest ranger. So what the positivists said was they thought that philosophy should be made scientific. They thought that there was, there had been in metaphysics, there had been a lot of philosophy. There really didn't mean anything, they didn't mean much. So they proposed what they called a criterion of meaning, which is called the verifiability criterion of meaning. And what this said is that they just, they've distinguished between two different types of statements, which were analytic statements and synthetic statements. An analytic statement is either a definition or part of a definition, or it's called a tautology, which is a logical truth that doesn't really have any content. As an example, suppose I say a bachelor is an unmarried male. That would be an example of a definition or a bachelor, a bachelor, all bachelors are male. That would be part of a definition or a logical tautology would be something. Suppose I say, someone asks, how is the weather? And I say, it's either raining or not raining. So that really doesn't tell you much, but it's nevertheless true. So they said, well, that's an analytic statement. And the other kind of meaningful statement is something for it to have some truth about the world. It has to be testable in some way. So we would have all meaningful statements are either analytic or synthetic. And when this in praxeology, we have, remember the laws of praxeology are supposed to be deduced just by thinking about them. We have a notion of action and then we think about what's involved in the action. And if we carried out the deductions correctly, then the actions, the results of what we've come up with are not ones that can be empirically tested at all in the sense that we can't show that they're wrong. Supposing to take in the Austrian view, you always love diminishing marginal utility. If you add another unit of a good, you'll put the unit of a good to a lower value use than the ones that were higher on your list. That isn't something that can be tested. We couldn't come up with a case where that's false. So what the positivists said, and this was a criticism that was made by, actually made by some of them was, they said, well, this is just if, this is just analytic, if that what the Austrians are saying is that they're just defining the lower value use as the one that you put the good to. You're just saying, well, you have the goods, you always use the good to the one that ranks highest on your list so far. So then you're just defining that one that you have as the highest value as the one that you actually use. Or they would say you've shown your preference by choosing something so that's just you've defined preference just in that way. So the one you prefer is the one you just defining the one you prefer is the one you actually choose. Now that criticism isn't really right, is it? At least I hope not because if it is right then we're all out of business here. So what's wrong with it is that it isn't that you've defined your preference as the one that you actually choose. It's just in thinking about it you'll see that you will choose your highest value preference. That's the one you'll choose but you've not defined it in that way. So what is really happening here is that the problem that the logical positives are trying to solve is that they're saying that all truths about so-called truths that we can know a priori which means knowing things just by thinking about them are just ones that are analytic where that's taken to be a matter of definition. So that's not a theory one would have to accept. And as we'll see if I have time to get to the next slide which is in doubt Mises and Rothbard had different ways of trying to show that. But the basic idea to keep in mind is that if we say we can know something by thinking about it that's something that it means we can think about the world. We can use our ideas or our concepts to come up with truth about the world. It isn't saying that when we say something is a priori we're not claiming it's an analytic truth in the sense of a definition it's just claiming we're just claiming that by thinking about things we can discover truths about the world. The positives are really trying to just arbitrarily say that you can't do that. That all knowledge that isn't strictly testable isn't really about the world. This is really just an arbitrary assumption on their part and we could come up and say well look in praxeology we're actually using conceptual thought to come up with truth about the world so that shows that this proposal is false. One point about that that was one of the criticisms raised of the logical positivists right away in the beginning when I think in the 1930s the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingaard was one of the first to bring up this criticism. Other people raise it as well like the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin was that the statement all truths are either analytic or empirical. Doesn't itself appear to be an analytic or empirical statement. It isn't analytic that all truths are about the world or of this kind. And if it's claim it's an empirical statement it seems falsified by the existence of praxeology and other disciplines so it's rather a self undermining type of argument. There are other problems with it as well for example suppose we have the ethical claims about morality we say it's wrong to kill people for fun that would have no truth value it wouldn't be a truth about the world it's not analytic and it's not something that could be tested so the positivists really responded to this they accepted that they say well those are just expressions of liking or disliking so they accepted that although most of us wouldn't find that plausible so then they would get into problems because we would have the laws of mathematics and logic don't appear to be testable either in that sense of what should we say the laws of logic don't apply to the world either. That doesn't seem very plausible supposing say we can figure out mathematically that certain things about the world we certainly think that what we come up with in the calculation has direct application to the world this isn't a matter of something we just conventionally true it actually is true so that would be an example showing what seems like the posibus view isn't correct now one point Mises made about the posibus which was interesting how he didn't claim this refuted them but he thought that one of the main motives that the positivists had in coming up with their criteria was just to rule out praxeology many of them were socialists quite left-wing politically except for Schlick who was the classical liberal but most of them wouldn't dislike praxeology because if it's correct it would show that there are errors in the whole socialist project so Mises thought this was a reason to this was the motive they had in coming up with their criteria of meaning he tended not so much to stress as most other people do that they were opposed to metaphysics which didn't have much meaning now one reason Mises didn't put much stress on their opposition to metaphysics is that he was opposed to metaphysics himself and he criticized it rather on the same grounds they did so I think we're about out of time now so I just summarize and say the principle lesson we should learn the philosophical lesson we have to learn about praxeology is that philosophy isn't really basic in understanding praxeology it's a matter of common sense so thanks very much