 Hello everybody. I want to say first, I tend to speak in a very soft voice. People have trouble sometimes hearing me, so if you can't hear what I'm saying, please put up your hand. Anyone who put up his hand is lying. I have today to talk to you about the philosophical aspects of praxeology. Philosophy is an interesting subject. The best definition of philosophy I came across was from my great friend, Father James Sadowski, who said philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophia, which means philosophy. But I think I'm very fortunate today to be able to talk to you today about some of the important ideas of Ludovan Mises and Murray Rothbard. These are my view extremely significant ideas and it's a great privilege for me to be able to discuss some of these ideas with you and try to interest you in them. This is one of the great purposes of my life to try to introduce students to some of the basic concepts of Austrian economics. I should say I usually get all these slides mixed up. I hope I don't. That doesn't happen this time. You already noticed from your reading and your listening to the lectures by Professor Solerino and Professor Herbiner that Austrian economics uses a different method from mainstream or neoclassical economics. In the mainstream method, we start off with a certain model and then implications of this model are deduced and then these are tested. But Austrian economics is not like that. The reasoning goes one way. We could call it monotonic. You start off with the initial premise that human beings act and you deduce various theorems from that. You see, in doing that, you don't go backwards. You're only going in one direction. In the neoclassical way of looking at things, you can find out from the results of your testing that there is something wrong with your model. So then you would have to go back and change something in the model. But in the Austrian deductive method, you're just going one way. The question then arises why is Austrian economics proceeding in this fashion? Why is it only going one way? One of the key themes of Mies' great book, Human Action, is that economics is based on a different form of reasoning from that of the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, we're proceeding from sense observation of external objects. We see certain things in the external world and then on the basis of that, we formulate certain hypothesis, trying to explain them, and then we test that to see whether these hypotheses are true. But when we're looking at these external objects, all we can do is just look at them. We have no inner grasp of what they're doing. We don't say in thinking about atomic particles, we can't get into the mind of an atom and see, ask why is the atom choosing to go in a certain direction or not? Because presumably atoms don't have minds and don't think, although there are people who've denied that. But fortunately, I won't go into those people in this lecture. But in Human Action is different in that we have a direct acquaintance through our experience that we act. Each of us can say we're directly aware of acting. What is Human Action? I should say it's, if you think about it, it's rather unusual that, at least from a conventional standpoint, that one would entitle a book on economics, human action. It's a very broad title, and the reason for this that Mises thought, there was a completely general science of human action that applied to all human action, and this is what he wanted to study. So what is Human Action? Well, it's quite simple. It's any kind of purposeful behavior, your exercise of will on the world. Say you have some goal in mind and you think there are means to achieve that goal, so you do whatever you use these means to achieve the goal. That's Human Action. And to get contrast with this, we can contrast this with just the notion of human behavior, in which your body is moving, but your reflexes aren't under your control. Say if someone just comes up to you suddenly and slaps you on the back, you may just react in a very startled way, you'll just jump up. That wouldn't be an action, that would just be behavior. You wouldn't have had any thought in goal in mind that you were trying to achieve. Well, action has to be distinguished from just behavior or reflexes. It doesn't follow from the way I put this, that all action has to be based on conscious awareness of your purposes. It can be the case that you have unconscious motives. You say you're doing certain things, you don't realize that you dislike a certain person and you're making an effort to stay away from that person. You're staying away from the person is an example of action. You have the goal of staying away from him, so you know where the person is and you'll stay away from him, but you're not aware of your motive in doing that. It's unconscious, this sort of thing studied by Freud, who was, by the way, a personal friend of Mises. One story I'll just throw in, just illustrating this. The great logician Kurt Girdel, was very reluctant to meet people he didn't already know, so sometimes he would get requests from people who wanted to see him, so he would just arrange to meet the person in his office at a certain time and then not show up. Someone wanted to ask him, well, if you don't want to meet the person, why don't you just refuse to make the appointment? What's the point of making an appointment and then not showing up if you're not going to be in your office at the time? So he said, well, then I know where they are at that time. One point at which Mises takes a rather different standpoint from many people have written about action is when, as I mentioned, when you act, you have a goal in mind and you have, I think there are certain means that will enable you to attain that goal. In Mises' usage, whenever this is the case, your action counts as rational. It doesn't have to be true that the means you've selected is a good way of getting that goal. So supposing President Biden says he has the goal of reducing inflation, and he says the means for that is that employers should pay workers higher wages. This isn't a very good way of getting the goal of reducing inflation, but as long as he thinks that's an appropriate mean, it counts as rational. I suppose that's one of the few senses of rational in which one would apply that adjective to him. Mises gave this definition in relation to the work of the great German sociologist, Max Weber, who was a friend of his who distinguished various kinds of rationality. Mises wanted to get rid of those. He thought all action was rational. Murray Rothbard doesn't characterize that action in that he doesn't say all action is rational. He doesn't use that category in praxeology really, so that's a bit of a difference between the two of them. Now economics or praxeology in the sense that Mises and Rothbard use the term, as I say, a science of human action, I should say just one point of terminology that sometimes the term praxeology means the science of human action, just the body of knowledge that constitutes the science of action, and this was the way Mises used the word, but it's also sometimes used to mean the distinctive deductive method of the used in economics, and so this ambiguity as long as you're aware of it shouldn't cause any trouble. So if there's a science of human action, this, of course we have to ask the question first, do we act? Supposing there's no such thing as action, the notion of a science of human action wouldn't be a very useful one, and there are people who deny that we act. There are various sorts of groups who deny this. One view is that all our behavior is determined by the laws of physics, given the arrangement of the various material particles, forces and fields in the world at a particular time, what follows is determined. According to this view, if we think our behavior is up to us, we're mistaken. All that happens is there are certain material particles at one time causing other material particles. At a later time, and there's no, if we think that we're influencing how these particles will react, we're not, everything is going on at this physical level. Mises, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, doesn't say this view is false. He doesn't say it's true, either he just, he just says that speculation we don't, if there are such material causes of action, we don't know anything about them. But I think we can go a little further than Mises here, and I'd like to just go into this question of determinism a bit more, that when we're talking about action in the sense that we're interested in economics, we have in mind the choices of the type we make in everyday life. For example, each of you decided to come to the Mises University, there are various other activities you might have done instead, but you decided to do this. So these conscious choices are just a matter of ordinary acquaintance. It would be very odd to deny that there is any such process going on in our mind. So we're not in saying that we make choices of that kind, entering into any speculations on what's going on at the level of physical particles. We're not making any kind of judgment about that, except that if there were a view that denied that we make such choices, that would be something to be rejected. It's obvious that we do. So we're not also saying that there are no causes for the choices, let's say at some psychological level or some other level. All we're saying is that we're aware of our making choices. And one, so any view that's inconsistent with our direct acquaintance of action in our consciousness is to be rejected. A similar view I mentioned when I talked about the differences between human action and behavior, there was a school of psychology that was very influential in the first part of the 20th century. It still has some adherence today called behaviorism, which said that there aren't any actions at all. All there is is behavior. And if that was the case, then we could see this view couldn't be correct because the behaviorist has the view there's no such thing as action in the sense of conscious purpose. It's just behavior. But in saying that, he's talking about the notion of conscious choice action. So he presumably has the concept of action. But if there were just behavior, there's no such thing as action. There wouldn't be such concepts either. So his view is really self-refuting. So what the behaviorists were trying to do was to say, well, if you talk about what's going on inside our mind, this is an unscientific view. Science is based on external observation. Only, of course, observations also are to make an observation, we have to record the observation based on our conscious awareness of things. So the view is self-refuting on that score as well. So as I say, the behaviorist wants to say everything is based on external observation. You recall the story which I told to Friedrich Hayek in 1969 of the two behaviorists who met each other in the street. One said to the other, you're fine. How am I? I'm glad to tell you that Hayek thought that joke was funny. So if we think of something as a means to an end, we think it can bring about the end. And if, say, whatever you want to choose something and you think the means will enable you to achieve it, the notion of causality and action go together. This was one of the key points of Mises that the notion of cause comes from our acquaintance with human action. And his lifelong friend Hans Kelsen, who sometimes had very different views from Mises about all sorts of things, also held this view. So if you look at Hans Kelsen's book, Society and Nature, it's very good to look at if you want an understanding of causality like that of Mises. Now one question that sometimes comes up when we're talking about action in a science based on human action is people sometimes ask, I understand my own actions, but how do I know that other people act? Maybe everybody else is just, for all I can see, all I can see is their external behavior. Maybe for all I know everyone except me is some sort of robot acting mechanically. How do I know that other minds exist? One of the philosophers at UCLA, Richard Yoast, when he was asked, do you think there are other minds, his answer was not very many of them. So Mises' answer here is a pragmatic one, which is just if we act on the assumption that other people have minds, this will be successful if we take other people to be actors too. And I think this illustrates, Mises' answer here illustrates an important point about praxeology that I think many people are mistaken. As you have already seen, Austrian economics is concerned very much with philosophical issues, but it isn't a philosophy, it isn't a branch of philosophy itself. In the sciences we take for granted the existence of the external world. If you've taken philosophy courses or watched the Matrix, you'll be familiar with scenarios in which we're not as we think we are acting in the world, but we're just being programmed to have certain experiences. How do we, philosophical problems, how do we know that that view is false if indeed it is false, which I hope it is, or how Descartes raised a problem like that. How do we know that evil demon isn't manipulating us to have the illusion that we're in contact with the external world? Praxeology isn't an attempt to answer that question. It wouldn't be very sensible, suppose somebody said, do you think that the inflation we're now undergoing will lead to a hyperinflation? It wouldn't be a good response to that to say, oh well, we can't talk about the effects of inflation because that presupposes that there's an external world, we need to prove that first. So that isn't the way, that isn't an economics question. In the kind of knowledge, deductive knowledge, it's what's called a priori knowledge. It's conceptual and deductive. So some people object to that, they don't think there is such a thing as a priori knowledge in the way that Mises and Rothbard do. According to one group of philosophers who were very influential in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, the logical positivists in this group became more influential later because most of the people in the group had to leave Austria when the Nazis took over in 1938 and many of them wound up in the United States and other countries so they became very influential in American philosophy. So according to them, the only a priori knowledge we have is what they call analytic statement. So an analytic statement is either a definition or part of a definition or a law of logic. For example, suppose I say all bachelors are male. So that's true because of a definition of an unmarried male, at least an unmarried male, above a certain age. So it's true you don't need to test that out from any kind of experience, but it isn't really telling you anything about the world, it's just a matter of how we use the concept. So according to the logical positivists, all Mises' project of signs of human action really would just consist of tautologies if it's based on a priori knowledge, it couldn't be really giving us any knowledge about the world. Now Mises' response to this was that you could say the same thing about mathematics as well, but clearly mathematics gives us knowledge at least. Certainly the theorems of mathematics are very surprising to people. They're not just empty definitions. I should say the logical positivists did accept, or at least many of them did accept that consequence. They thought that math consists of tautologies also. So Mises rejected the basic point of the logical positivists were making that analytic statements, as that a priori knowledge just consists of conventional uses of definitions. Mises' view was that there are certain concepts that we need to think about the world. We wouldn't be able to understand experience without using these concepts. For example, supposing I didn't have the concept of action, I wouldn't be able to make sense of what was going on in the world. I would see various objects moving in certain ways. I'd hear sounds coming out of people's mouths, but if I didn't have the notion of action, I wouldn't be able to understand what was going on. So in Mises' view, we need these concepts in order to understand what's going on in the world. One argument that we could use here is when supposing somebody denies there's such a thing as action, somebody say the logical positivist says, well, if you say you're just choosing to define a notion of action in a certain way, but it isn't really telling us anything. So supposing somebody says, well, there's no such concept, then one response that could be given is that the person who's saying that is acting, if someone says I'm not acting, that is an action. So his saying that is refuting what he's saying. He's saying there's no such thing as action, but his saying that is an action. So it's a type of self-rebutation. But I think it's a good argument. It isn't one that Mises himself uses. Mises placed the most emphasis on our direct awareness in experience that we're acting. Rothbard does use this argument. Although I don't think it has primary emphasis in his thought. He does use that argument. And it plays a very important role in the thought of Hans Hoppe also uses this. But I do think it can be overemphasized. I remember there was one person who was a senior fellow here who thought that, well, you really don't know that other people are acting unless each person has gone through the process of saying, realizing that denying that he acted would get you into this sort of paradox. But that seems a very strange view to hold. I don't think it's a coincidence that this person isn't a summer fellow anymore. Now Rothbard has a somewhat different answer than Mises does. Remember Mises says that we have certain concepts that we have these concepts need these concepts in order to make sense of the world. Rothbard's view was that we can directly grasp and experience that people are acting. The senses present us, say, with colors, shapes, sounds, and so on. But this isn't all they convey. The mind abstracts from what the senses present. For example, we see various colors and shapes and we can grasp that a color is not the same thing as a shape. So we can get certain concepts from experience. And in Rothbard's view, our minds can grasp that there are substances that have essential properties. So in Rothbard's view, we can directly see that human beings are acting. So as Rothbard views, it's somewhat different from Mises. Mises' view is that we have certain concepts. We need these concepts to make sense of the world. So the concepts are somewhat like a grid that we impose on what's ever out there. This is a view, rather, Kantian view. Mises was very influenced by Immanuel Kant, who was memorably referred to by Eingrand as the machine gunner of the mind. Rothbard's view is different from that, that Rothbard said, no, we directly grasp the essences of things in action. So in grasping action, we're seeing the world as it is. So in this, Rothbard, you see, is like the empiricists, like the positivists in this way, that he takes our knowledge to start with what's given to the senses. But he disagrees that everything in the world is contingent, that say, according to the positivists, whatever happens might have happened in a different way. There is no such thing as necessity in the world. And you remember, why did they think that? All necessity is just based on analytic statements. The only a priori knowledge is analytic, and analytic judgments or statements are just conventions, the way we decide to use word. So Rothbard didn't agree with this. He said, if there are substances that we can directly know grasping by abstraction, we see that they have essential properties so we can directly understand the necessity of action just from our direct acquaintance with the world. So in Rothbard's view, if it's necessary truth that human beings act, we can say this is an a priori truth. It's a priori, not in the sense we can know it apart from experience, but it's just one a priori in the sense it doesn't require further testing or any kind of test to know that it's true. So since it's about the world, it's a synthetic a priori truth. Synthetic means whatever isn't analytic. So it's synthetic, it's about the world, but it's a priori true for Rothbard. So he can say the truths of praxeology are a priori true, even though he's using a priori in a somewhat different way from the way Mises used it. Now one feature of praxeology is very different from mainstream economics is that it's conducted in ordinary language. You don't get a lot of complicated mathematical formulas if you read human action or man economy and state. You don't really get any simple, well you do get a few simple mathematical remarks in man economy and state, but you really don't get very many of them. And according to Rothbard, it wouldn't be an advantage as some people propose doing to formalize praxeology using mathematical logic. Why not? The answer to this is in praxeology and we're starting the notion that human beings act. So we need to understand every step of the argument. We need to see how various theorems follow from the concept of action or the action axiom. So if we have a formal mathematical logic, that isn't the case. Once we put all the terms we assign meaning to the various symbols we're using, the rest of the deduction follows by a purely mechanical process, an algorithmic process. So we don't understand each step in itself. We're just interested in the starting axioms and the conclusion. And in praxeology we want to know what's going on at each step. This is in the theorem used by Kant. It's called an ostensive proof. So this is a different sort of proof from that in use in neoclassical economics. Now one last point I think I'll give is called methodological individualism. And this is, I mentioned the action axiom, human beings act. So one view that Mies and Rothbard held that if we think about the notion of action, we can see that only individuals act. And if we say that collectives act such as nations or social classes, this happens only through the action of individuals. So it isn't that there's no such thing as nations or collectivities where their action take place only in through individuals. So I think I see it's fortunately for the audience we're out of time now. So I think we'll adjourn for lunch now. So thanks very much.