 All right, I think we'll get started now. The topic today, apriorism and posthum in the social sciences, is a rather abstract one. I thought that wouldn't be a very popular lecture. I was considering trying to, as an incentive to get people to come to lecture, I was considering passing out copies of the written exam but I didn't think that would go over too well with the people administering the program, so I didn't do that. I should say some of the material that I'm giving in this lecture will repeat points I made in the first lecture I gave on praxeology. This is a difficult topic and I don't think, I think hearing the same thing another time is sometimes helpful in learning. It reminds me like most things I'm old now and I always have stories. My favorite teacher at UCLA was Walter Starkey. Once he was giving a lecture and someone put up his hand and said to him, you're giving the same lecture as you gave last time. He said, that's the trouble with you Americans. You never want to hear the same thing twice. And just one addition to that is I saw a couple of years ago there was a biography of Jessica Mitford who was one of the famous Mitford sisters in England and mentioned she had been on a, was going on her first lecture tour of the United States in the 1930s. In the book it said she'd gotten a letter from her friend Walter Starkey at Trinity College Dublin which said, you have to be careful. Americans never want to hear the same thing twice. So at least he was consistent. Now, what I want to talk about today is we'll start with a claim that Mises makes with I think a very significant philosophical claim. He says that economics can contribute to epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. Philosophers at least at the time he was writing don't study economics much. There are, you can get various books dealing with philosophy of economics but those books usually don't claim that economics, studying economics can help you understand general problems of epistemology but Mises makes this claim. And what is the nature of the claim that he's making when he says that economics can help us contribute to epistemology? He says that the economics comes up with general laws. We have laws of economics that you've studied in the lectures this week, law of supply and demand, law of diminishing marginal utility and so on. But the way these laws are arrived at, the way we prove these laws is different from the way laws are established in the physical sciences. Now, I should say when Mises claims that economics can make a contribution to epistemology, he isn't confining himself to Austrian economics. He means standard price theory of a sort that you would get in regular neoclassical economics as well or at least economics that was taught at his time. I think nowadays it would be much more mathematical and used a different method, but he had in mind economics at the time he was writing and before standard price theory and he thought that the way economics proceeds what was making a contribution to the theory of knowledge. Now, if he's right, we have a problem is that he says that economics is making a contribution to the theory of knowledge but why hasn't this been studied much by philosophers? If you read books on epistemology at around the time he was writing, you won't find discussions of economics. And Mises had an explanation for this. He said that there are many people who don't like the notion of economic law because this limits what the government can do. For example, suppose that the economy is not doing very well so some people say, well, the way to solve that is to just have the government print money then everybody will be prosperous in the early 1930s. There was a Huey Long in Louisiana had programmed every man a millionaire where he proposed giving everybody a very large amounts of money. Sounds like a good idea, but there are economic laws that show that it wouldn't succeed in attaining the ends of making everybody prosperous. So many people don't want there to be economic laws because this restricts what they can do even though one might think what people should take account of existing scientific knowledge. Many people don't have that attitude. They put one in mind of the... People have that attitude, put one in mind of the man who read so much about how bad smoking is for your health that he gave up reading. Now, in the physical sciences, as Mises presented them, people were studying matter in motion, for example, take a very simple example. In Boyle's law, we have the pressure of a gas times the volume will equal a constant. So we get this law by experimenting and we find that that's true. But when we say this, we're not attributing conscious purposes to the particles. We're not saying, if you have particles with gas, we're not saying, well, one particle will say, well, I have to adjust the volume. I have to go apart from another particle so that this equation will turn out to be true. This will just be a description of how the particles, in fact, operate. They won't be saying that particles won't be thinking of themselves, how do I maintain this relationship? So what we have in physical sciences, we're simply studying, looking at particles in motion, trying to come up with laws about them. Now, what Mises says, well, in the human sciences, especially in economics, matters are different because we're not limited to observing people just as physical bodies. People have purposes we know from just by thinking of our own actions and we can see actions of others. We know people act in the meaning by that that they have purposes that they want to achieve. People have means, they use means to attain ends. So we can use that fact that we know that human beings have purposes to come up with laws in a different way. We're not limited just to observing people as if they were a collection of material particles and then just noting their motions. There are people who have tried to do this. One could take behaviorist psychology as an attempt to do that, just to limit our study of human, what human beings are doing to external behavior. You all know the story of the two behaviorist psychologists who met each other on the street and one said to the other, you're fine, how am I? I must say I'm glad you laughed at that. I told that story to Friedrich Hayek in 1969 and he laughed also. Now there are some people who would question what Mises said, not on the grounds that they deny that human beings act, but they think Mises shouldn't have made a separation between the physical world and human beings. That some people think you can attribute purposes to nature. Also there were German philosophers in the 19th century. Friedrich Schelling is one who thought that there were purposes in nature. Now for most of these, it wasn't that they thought that there was purpose in the sense that there were minds in nature that were acting consciously, but some philosophers thought we could apply the notion of purpose without thinking of a mind. We could have what's called a natural teleology. We could attribute purpose to matter in various ways. This is a position of course, Aristotle had that view and there are many people who hold that view even today. There is, for example, Thomas Nagel is one who is very attracted to that view that there can be purposes in nature without claiming that nature is mental. But whether you agree with that or not, it doesn't alter the fact that people do act and we can. If Mises is right, come up with laws based on being aware of that, being aware of that human beings act and not viewing human beings as if they were simply collections of material particles. Now, when we say that human beings act, there's nothing mysterious about this. It's something we grasp right away, as I say, from our own knowledge. We know we have purposes and we act and we can see other people acting. One mistake I think people make, it's a very dubious philosophical move. They think, well, all I can really see is certain motions of people's bodies. It's just an inference that other people have minds or purposes or act, but I'm not really directly aware of that. Well, I see no reason to adopt that view. It's not a theory that people act. It's something that we directly grasp in experience. We know that people act. It's a given what Mises calls an ultimate given. And there's nothing mysterious about thinking that we can use. We need certain concepts, like the concept of action, to understand what people are doing. Consider this analogy. Suppose someone's talking in a foreign language that you don't know. You would have to learn the language to be able to understand what they were saying. So in a similar way, unless we have the concept of action, we wouldn't be able to make sense of what people are doing. And Mises' essential argument is, since we can make sense of what people are doing, we can do so only if we have the concept of action. That shows that our concept can be used to give us real knowledge of what's going on in the world. Just say these concepts are ones that we have to grasp in order to understand what's going on. We wouldn't have, if we didn't have a concept of action, then the world wouldn't make sense to us, at least the world of human action wouldn't make sense to us. We would be faced with what William James called a booming, buzzing confusion. We wouldn't know what was going on. One point to avoid here, when we say we have to have these concepts in order to understand human action, I don't mean by that that these concepts are biologically innate. This is a logical claim. We wouldn't understand what was going on unless we had the concept, but we're not making a claim of how, sort of a claim about the human brains or how people came up with the concept. So it isn't a question of innate ideas. It's just saying we need to have these concepts in order to understand what people are doing. Now, when we study action in this way, this is what studies human action by thinking about the concept of action. This is what Mises meant when he spoke of praxeology, the science of action. We're using the concept of action in order to understand what human beings are doing. In his earlier writings, which you can find in the collection of epistemological problems of economics, he uses the term sociology for this general science of action, but then he later adopted praxeology instead. And people, what I wanna suggest to you, however counterintuitive, it might seem is that this notion of a priori concept is really not very hard to understand at all. People make it much harder than it is. They think of a priori as equivalent to mental. So they'll think, well, if you have an a priori concept, it's about some idea in your own mind, but this isn't the case. That when you mean, when you talk about a priori concept, is a certain idea that you need to make sense of some aspect of the world, but it isn't, and in the case of human action, it isn't making sense of what's going on in your own mind. It's making sense or trying to make sense of what's going on in the world. Now, here, and again, I mentioned this in the first lecture, there was a famous problem raised by Descartes, the great 16th century French philosopher, that how do we know that we have any knowledge of the external world? He, of course, famously said, well, he said he can't doubt that he's thinking well, if he doubted that his doubt is a form of thinking, so he can't doubt that he's thinking, and from that, he tried to prove the existence of God and from that, he tried to show we have reason to accept the existence of the external world at least when we're thinking clearly and distinctly about it. This is a very interesting philosophical project that's been continued by many later philosophers, a problem of skepticism, but this is not Mises' problem. Mises is not concerned with the philosophical issue of skepticism and many people, I've had students come up and ask questions like, well, how does Mises get from what's going into, what's in his own mind to anything about the external world? This is not what he's concerned with in the sciences. We take for granted the existence of the external world, say we don't in physics, if we're studying the inner composition of the earth, we don't ask how do we know there is an earth at all or how do we know that there are observations or anything other than mental. Those questions just don't arise in the sciences. So again, this is covering what I've already said. What Mises is saying is given that we do understand action, we see actions all the time, say I'm giving a lecture now, other people are listening to the lecture or I hope, but this is something that we know is taking place. So what we're doing in praxeology is attempting to explain this. Again, we're not in praxeology starting with what's going on in our own mind and then saying, how do we know that there are other minds or other actors? This is resting on the false assumption that praxeology is about the human mind rather than action in the world. Now, we now come to, that's perhaps been not the most interesting topic, but we now get a bit more lively because we can come up with the opposition to Mises. It's always, I think in fun and philosophy, when you get struggles or battles between conflicting groups. And Mises' chief opponents in methodology, people who denied his claim that economics give you this special method of proceeding by a priori knowledge were the logical positivists or the Vienna circle. This was a group that had started, was started by the Moritz Schlick, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. And he had a group of philosophers who met with him, that they included Rudolf Karnapp, who became a very famous philosopher of language and he wrote on mathematical logic. There were others, Friedrich Weismann was in the group. He was a friend of Wittgenstein, who sometimes met with the positivists and Otto Neurot, who was the one Mises really hated. He couldn't stand. There were various other people in the group. I should say, if you look at the, most of the positivists were very left-wing politically. Otto Neurot had been a minister in the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which had taken power very briefly in Bavarian in the 1920s. Most of them were very left-wing, but Schlick himself was a classical liberal, but he was probably the only one. There were, the mathematician, great mathematician Kurt Gerdl met with, sometimes sat in on the group, but he wasn't a positivist. He was also very left-wing politically, was sympathetic to Trotsky. Just as a digression, Schlick's career illustrates some of the perils of academic life. One of his students who was a PhD student of his had some grievance. It isn't clear what the grievance was, but he was really upset with Schlick. His name was Nelbach, was the last name. He went to the University of Vienna and he expressed his discontent with Schlick in a rather dramatic fashion. He shot him dead. So then he was then imprisoned and then during the World War II or after the Anschluss, which was the takeover by Germany of Austria in March 1938, that Nelbach applied for release on the grounds that he had been trying to get rid of a Jewish positivist, but Schlick wasn't Jewish, but he was paroled anyway. And I think he wound up his career. I think he lived after the war into the early 1950s. He worked as a forest ranger. But so as I say, you have to be very careful in if you're teaching. I mean, I try to avoid arguments with students. So what the basic idea of the positivist was opposition to metaphysics. What do we mean by metaphysics? Well, this is the contention that just by thinking about the world, we can come up with theories of its nature that tell us something significant. Leibniz would be an example of people. Flossru held that view. Leibniz held that the world really consists of what he called monads, which are spiritual, small spiritual substances. And the entire world is composed of these monads. We think there appear to be to us to be physical objects, but these are just what Leibniz called well-founded appearances. There aren't really physical objects. One very interesting 20th century philosopher who was like that was a British idealist, John Taggart, who in his book, Nature of Existence said, he started with the statement, something exists. And from that statement, he claimed to deduce that the world consists of minds, entirely of minds that exist eternally in the time and the world of physical objects is just an illusion. So the logical positive is that this is really, you won't get anywhere this way. You can't get knowledge just by thinking about things without empirical testing. The only way we can get knowledge is through the method of the physical sciences. Now, Mises thought, that was their main program was opposing metaphysics. Mises thought they had an additional motive in mind that they wanted to get rid of economic knowledge, since most of them were socialists, and Mises is shown by the socialist calculation argument that socialism can't work. He thought that they wanted to deny any knowledge, but the physical sciences, so they could get rid of economics. The one I mentioned, Otto Neurot, who was his particular one he hated, was one he thought had that motive. So what Mises said to counter these positives was they said that you could only get knowledge through the physical sciences, but he said, well, what about economics? This is a science and it uses different methods, deductive method based on setting the concept of action. So he says, well, the positives are wrong because there's actually an example of a science that is not a physical science that gives you real knowledge. One thing I should mention earlier is interesting when you look at Mises' views, he didn't disagree with the positivists about metaphysics. He rejected metaphysics too. That isn't part, I mean, you could have different views but you could think metaphysics really does give you knowledge and still be a praxeologist, but Mises didn't differ with the positivists on that point. He rejected metaphysics and this would be one instance in which Mises and Murray Rothbard had different views because Murray Rothbard was an Aristotelian and Thomist in philosophy, so he would be much more sympathetic to metaphysics than Mises was. But in any event, Mises said, well, look, there's more to knowledge than the physical sciences because we have economics, which proceeds by a different method. And the positivists said to them, economics as Mises practices it really isn't a science because economics doesn't meet what they call the requirements of what they call the verification principle. So what is the verification principle? Well, this is the view that any scientific statement, one that claims to give you knowledge of the world must be something that can be confirmed by sense experience. For example, suppose I say there are more than 10 people in this room, this would meet the verification principle because I could count the number of people and if there were more than 10 people, then that would be a verifiable statement. I could come up with a mistaken claim, say I said there were 100 people in this room, that would still meet the verification principle even though it's incorrect. But as long as you can come up with something that appealed to sense experience, then it passes the test. Now, there's a stronger version of the verification principle, stronger in the sense of more demanding that some of the positivists adopted, which is not only that empirical statement, empirical statement, one claims to give you knowledge of the real world has to be confirmable by sense experience, but that the meaning of the statement is what is required to test it. So the meaning of the statement is what you do to test it, but this doesn't seem very plausible. For example, suppose I say Caesar crossed the Rubicon River 49 BC, it doesn't seem at all plausible to think that what that statement means is that if I look up various history books or various records, I'll find the sentence Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC. That would be how I would verify it, but that's not what the statement means. Now, you might think this wouldn't pose a problem for praxeology because suppose I say, for example, you always choose your most highly valued preference. Say if I have a choice between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, so I like vanilla better, at least at the particular time I'm choosing, so I pick that one. So couldn't I say, well, I verified the statement, I always choose my most highly valued preference because I did pick the vanilla rather than the chocolate and that was the one I most highly valued. So the posivist said, no, that isn't good enough, that doesn't meet the standard because they said that Mises is claiming you can know this proposition a priori, you can know it to be true by thinking about it. It isn't that you examined a lot of your choices and you just found out you always happen to pick the one you prefer the most. Mises says, well, by thinking about the concept of action, then we grasp that it's true you pick your most highly valued preference. So the posivist, again, you see in philosophy, there's always a thesis and then there'll be an opposition to that counter-objections and keeps going as long as you want. There's always a reply in the works. So the posivist said in response, what Mises is giving here is just a tautology. He's just saying something that really isn't conveying any information. He's just defining highest valued preference as the one you in fact choose. So what he's saying when you said you choose your most highly valued preference, it's just you choose what you choose. This isn't really giving you any knowledge. It's just, it's certainly a true statement, but it doesn't get you anywhere. But is that claim correct? Is what the posivist is saying correct? Well, again, what is a tautology? It's a definition or a part of a definition or a law of logic. So a tautology, as I just mentioned, doesn't give you any information about the world. To give an example that Wittgenstein uses in the Tractatus, suppose you ask someone what's the weather in a certain place and the person tells you, it's either raining or it's not raining. So he hasn't really, what he says is true. It's just an application of a logical law. It's an instance of a logical law, but it doesn't tell you anything. So a definition, if you just define say, highest value choice is the one you in fact choose, it isn't really telling you anything. You can't learn something about the world just by defining a term in a certain way. I should just point out just as a side point, there are philosophers who've denied that at least some versions of the famous ontological argument do claim, for example, that by, from its definition of God, it follows that God exists. So that claims controversial, but in any event, that's what the positive said. You can't gain knowledge of the world just by definition, something, something can't be made true by defining it to be true. Now, what Mises' response here was that the positivists are just wrong about this. We do gain knowledge of the world just by thinking about things. And he gave us an example of mathematics. We learn truths about the world by thinking about mathematical concepts or proving theorems about mathematics. And according to the positivists, mathematics consists of tautologies, but they still give us how on that view, could we explain how we get knowledge of the world? He said, it's just false that just by thinking about things our knowledge is just a system of definitions, just a system of arbitrary concepts. So he said, well, if the positivists are right, how could just a set of definitions give you knowledge about the world as mathematics obviously does, and he thought they couldn't explain that. I should say now, but what about the specific example I gave? One about the preference, you always choose your most highly valued preference. The response here is that it isn't that Mises is defining your highest valued preference as the one you in fact choose. Your highest valued preference would be just something like you imagine you have various actions available to you and you rank them in an order and the highest valued one would be the one you rank first. That isn't defining highest valued preferences, what you in fact choose, but the claim is once you think about highest valued preference, just characterizing that way, you'll grasp, but it's true that that's the one you in fact choose. So he isn't the positivists were wrong in the way both examine that specific case and in the more general point that you can't get knowledge about the world just by thinking about it. So just a little bit more on verification principle. I know this is a, we wanna go on to something else. I know the verification principle is thrilling, but we do have to get on to other things. When Mises is talking about a priori concept, this is just a local matter in the sense that all he's claiming is that we need the concept of action in order to understand what human beings are doing in the world. He isn't making a general claim about all our knowledge that he isn't saying that all human knowledge requires a priori concept. He's just talking about what's required for praxeology. Then another thing on the verification principles, famous criticism of it is it appears to be self-refuting. And it says, well, all true statements are either ones that are tautologies, a priori truths or tautology, or ones that are empirically testable, but that statement doesn't appear to be one that's either a priori true or one that's capable of being testable. Being testable, it's more of a proposal. If somebody, it's just the posers were suggesting this so someone could just say, well, okay, you propose it, we don't accept it and they wouldn't have much to respond. Now I have more on verification, I think we'll, well, yeah, might as well go on with verification. I just can't tear myself away from it. Another, not that I haven't tried, but another problem with the verification principle is the positivists couldn't state it in a way that got them where they wanted. Remember, what they wanted to do was to show that only scientific statements, the physical sciences give you real knowledge about the world and metaphysics is excluded, but they couldn't state the principle in a way that enabled them to have all an only scientific statements as the ones that were verifiable. There are various logical tricks that I won't go into that can show that for any formulation of the verification principle, you could do various things to it, to show that really everything can be, is admitted under the principle, they can't get it the way they want. But I remember once, when I gave a lecture on this subject in one of the early Mises Hughes, I mentioned this point and I said, I'm not gonna go into the logical details. And Murray Rothbard was in the audience, and I said, no, no, no, show us the proof. So I had to think, could I remember how to do it? And I managed to come up with something, but to me, one of the simplest ways to counter the verification principle is to just say, why should we accept this? It seems like just an arbitrary statement, suppose you like metaphysics or you think there's something to it. Why should somebody who doesn't, not predisposed to accept the verification principle, give it any credence? It just seems like, suppose someone said, for example, for a statement to be true, it has to be found in a particular book. Only statements in this book can be accepted as true. We would want to, let's to avoid difficulty, suppose that very statement is in the book, so we avoid a certain problem. So we could still say, why should we accept such a principle? It's just arbitrary, there's no reason to go along with it. Now, I wanna, in the last few minutes, I'll just, a couple of minutes, I'll just mention another objection to a priori truth. This was raised by the great American philosopher, W. V. O. Quine. And what he said was, there aren't any a priori truths because every statement in principle is subject to refutation. We could always say, he thought there were certainly, principle would be very reluctant to give up, principles that he thought were at the core of science, but he thought that in principle, everything could be, any statement could be overthrown by future experience. And he went so far, at least in some of his writings, although sometimes he was a bit hesitant on this, to extend this laws of logic themselves. He said, maybe we could imagine, think abandoning the laws of logic in certain cases. But that seems, at least to me, although Quine was a great flaw through that, seems an implausible position to me. So I'll just finish up with a story about Quine, that Robert Nozick was once upset that there was a review of his book, The Philosophical Explanations that had come out by Carl and Romano, who wrote on, I think it was in Chronicle of Higher Education. So it was a very negative review when he showed it to Quine and Quine said, every knock a boost. Fortunately, that principle isn't reversible. So all right, so having, I hope I haven't bored you unduly with the verification principle. So I think we'll stop at this point. Thanks.