 The last two speeches were about the empirics of man. What I want to do is, and the differences of man, I want to talk about the commonality of mankind. And in previous years I always spoke about economic issues or political issues. This time I want to talk about a philosophical problem and go back to my origins as a philosopher rather than an economist. And as a host, I have arrogated the privilege to myself to a little bit maybe overdraw my allotted time. Now it is possible, for instance, to describe and explain man in naturalistic terms in the same way as we describe and explain stones and plants and animals, namely in the language of physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, neurology, and so on. But a purely naturalistic account of man, while certainly legitimate, and even if it is true, must fail to capture the essence of man, namely that what makes man unique. That this is the case can be easily recognized in asking oneself what it is that one is doing when they're debating the question at hand, namely the nature of man or any other question for that matter. And the answer then is we speak to each other in meaningful words and sentences. We present arguments and we do so with the purpose and intent of argumentative success, of reaching agreement regarding the validity of an argument or the truth of some proposition. Yet it is obviously impossible to give a naturalistic account of this undeniable part of human nature, namely of meaningful words, of sentences and arguments, of intention and purpose, of success and of failure, of truth and of falsehood. There is nothing true or false in nature. Nature is what it is. Only human propositions and sentences can be true or false. That is, all truths are in some most fundamental sense, truths for men rather than truths on sich. Instead of a naturalistic account of man, I want to present what one might call a cultural account which captures what the naturalistic account necessarily must leave out. And we have already gained a non-naturalistic starting point from which we must begin this intellectual endeavor, namely the a priori of argumentation. He just explains this. Men can undeniably argue. Not only is arguing what we do here and now, there is simply no other starting point available for whatever one might choose as such a starting point. We cannot but speak and argue about it. We cannot deny that argumentation must be the starting point and the point of departure of all talk about men without falling in some immediately explained sort of contradiction. Appropriately, this first datum of human nature has been termed the a priori of argumentation. One cannot go back behind it. It is un hintergebar as Germans would say as it has been expressed also. This is revealed in the fact that no one can argue that he cannot or ought not to communicate or argue or rather that while one can say this, of course, anyone who did say so would become entangled in what has been termed a performative or dialectical contradiction. That is, the content of his statement would be contradicted by the very effect of making this statement. Now, setting out from the a priori of argumentation as my necessary and undeniable and hence a priori true starting point, it is in my plan to explain everything that is already implied in this a priori and hence likewise must be regarded as a priori true. The argument takes a form of what is called a transcendental argument. Transcendental arguments are not deductive arguments leading from some explicitly stated, asserted or supposed premises to certain conclusions. Rather, they are answers to the skeptic who denies that there is any such thing as ultimate justification and ultimate and a priori truth. Instead of in a deductive mode, transcendental arguments proceed in what might be called a reductive mode. They try to establish by means of self-reflection. That is, by speaking about speaking what the skeptic must already presuppose and given and true simply in order to be the skeptic that he is. That is, to make his skepticism possible at all. In this vein, my following argument aims to establish and to elucidate what must be presupposed by argumentation. That is, what an arguer must accept as more basic and elementary than argumentation or as the pre-argumentative foundation of argumentation, if you will, and that makes argumentation possible. Now, four immediate insights spring to mind. The first is argumentation presupposes action. Action comes before argumentation. All arguing is acting and every arguer knows what it is to act, but only very few actions are actually argumentation. Second, even most of our speech acts, that is, acts accompanied by words are not argumentation. The employment of language for other, non-argumentative purposes, also comes before and is presupposed by argumentation. Third, in fact, most of the time we do not speak at all when we act. We act silently and silent action too comes before and is presupposed by argumentation. And fourth, argumentative discourse is actually rare and has the unique purpose and aim of resolving disagreements regarding the truths of certain propositions and the validity of certain arguments. Now I will comment on all of these four points. First, since many of you here are familiar with Mises' work, I can be brief regarding the first point I made. Arguing is a special case of acting. Everything that can be stated about actions in general applies also to the special case of argumentation. Like all action, argumentation takes place in time and space and is constrained by scarcity and time. Argumentation too is a motivated purposeful activity. It is aimed at a goal. Like any other activity is motivated by some felt uneasiness, Mises would say, and aimed at improvement. It expresses as all actions an actor's value judgment and reveals a preference. Likewise, it involves as all actions do opportunity costs because the actor could have used his body time for other things except arguing. Argumentation involves again, like every action, the employment of scarce means. At the minimum, the human body and its standing room. I'll come back to this point a little bit later. It involves as all activities the purposeful interference with the help of physical means and guided by knowledge in the form of recipes with the natural course of events. And as in all action, the means chosen and the recipes applied to attain one's goal can turn out suitable or unsuitable and the action or sequence of actions can accordingly be evaluated by the actor as either successful or unsuccessful. But not all action is argumentation. Argumentation is an activity so generous. Second point. Now, while arguing is also a form of communicative that is language using action. Aimed at the successful coordination of actions of a community of speakers, most communicative action is non-argumentative. We speak also to command, to warn, to ask, to greet, to apologize, to promise, to chat, to tell a story, and for countless other purposes. In fact, in any type of human speech, we can distinguish two categorically distinct parts or constituents. On the one hand, all speech has a propositional part. In this part, something is stated regarding certain facts. What it is that we are talking about. And on the other hand, every speech has an illocutionary or performative part, whereby the speaker places the propositional part of his speech into a social or interactive context, commenting, so to say, to other speakers what to make of what he is saying. I'll give you examples. The same propositional content, for instance, this is a banana, can be presented in various performative modes, such as, is this a banana? I promise you this banana. This is my banana. I'm telling you a story about the banana. I'm ordering you to get rid of the banana, and so on. Speaking, then, is more than a mere statement of facts. Facts being what we are talking about. It involves always and invariably that the given propositional content is uttered and placed in some specific mode. Now, accordingly, the success or failure of a communicative action depends on a two-fold accomplishment. The understanding of the speech's propositional content and the acceptance of the mode of proposing this statement. Coordination is successful if I ask you, for instance, to bring me a banana and you bring me one. It is unsuccessful if you don't know the meaning of banana or bring, and you bring me a teddy bear instead or you respond to my request by saying, for instance, I'm 60 years old, indicating that you haven't understood the entire purpose of my speech. Likewise, coordination is unsuccessful if you understand what I say, but you reject my proposal and replies, let's say, I don't take orders from you or simply walk away from me. Moreover, and more importantly, unsuccessful coordination or discoordination can take two possible forms of outcome. Simple disappointment or serious conflict. Again, after you disappointingly walked away from my request to give me a banana and my speech act has failed, we both go about our daily business as before silently. I was a means under my control and you was a means under your control. That is a case of simple disappointment. A conflict on the other hand results if instead of you bringing me a banana, which would be a successful communication or walking away from me, which would be a disappointing communication, instead of these two outcomes, you respond, let's say, by taking a pocket knife against my protestation out of my hand or pull my hair. As well, a conflict would result if I respond to your disappointing refusal by following you against your protestation into your house, the house previously owned by you. In both cases, we clash because we want to employ the very same scarce means, namely the knife, the hair, the house for incompatible purposes. And because of the scarcity of physical means, only one purpose can be realized and fulfilled. So we must clash in this situation. Now let me pause here for a moment, for a brief comment. The achievements of the social sciences are often belittled or even ridiculed. In view of this, it should come as reassuring and refreshing to observe that much, if not most of human speech is successful, both in being understood and in being accepted for what it is. Far more communication is successful than not. Failed communication, in the form of conflict in particular, is actually a rare occurrence. And its notoriety is derived from this rarity. By and large, we are amazingly successful as speakers in bringing about coordination, which is the purpose of communication. And if speaking is and does for us in the social world what engineering is and does for us in the natural world, then we must actually come to the conclusion that we are quite successful as social engineers that is as people engineering coordination by means of speech, by means of words. Moreover, even if communicative action sometimes fails to attain coordination, we do have a method of learning and improving. On the one hand, in order to reduce the failure, we can learn to make our speech that is the meaning of our words and sentences more clear. And on the other hand, as for the performative part of our speech, we can learn how to convey more clearly the legitimacy of our speaking in the mode that we do and so increase the likelihood of acceptance and successful coordination. And we accomplish this by clarifying and legitimizing in the same way and by the same method we used when we learned how to speak a common language in the first place, namely, ultimately, by engaging in some playful activity with others, what Wittgenstein has called language games wherein the correct use of words is trained and controlled by the performance of certain actions and the non-performance of these actions indicates that the words has been used incorrectly or misunderstood. In learning how to speak better and more clearly by improving our command of language, that is, we increase the likelihood that our actions result in coordination and hence are successful. Or to sum it up, he who can speak better and is more eloquent with his words will be more successful as far as social relations are concerned. Indeed, even in the comparatively rare case of conflict, we are left with a method of learning and improving, namely, argumentation. We can still argue with each other and try to institute what one might call a public trial of arguments. Now, I'll come back to argumentation shortly, but before I have to come to the third observation that I previously made. We have to give attention also to silent action. Most of what we do is silent action, getting dressed, cooking, eating, walking, working, building, measuring, counting, cleaning, repairing, driving, drinking, and so forth. In all of these activities, we follow ordered practical recipes of how to use scarce means in order to reach a goal, namely being dressed, having cooked, and eaten, and so forth. If we were asked and on reflection, we could give an account of our actions in terms of meaningful words and sentences about their purposes, about the means used, and about the recipes followed and applied in using these means. And other speakers could understand this account because we are united by a common language learned through common practice in language games. But we are silent because we judge the success or the failure of our action as independent of any communicative effort, otherwise communication would play a role in our action. We stay silent because we deem the success of our action as dependent solely on us, as if we were the only person on earth, as if we stood in a purely monological relationship to the world, and were the sole judge of success and failure. Now again, a brief comment at this point. In contrast to some fashionable relativistic views, even of the natural sciences, it is worth pointing out that also in particular, most of our silent actions are amazingly successful. Sometimes things go wrong. My pants are soiled, my toaster has broken, there is no salt to put on my eggs, the key to my car doesn't fit and so on. But most of our silent actions succeed in bringing about the desired result. And in the rare case, they do not, we immediately recognize where the failure lies and what needs to be corrected. And this indicates that the recipes we use for combining various means to attain our ends of identifying, ordering, measuring, counting, mixing, dividing, proportioning, forming, timing them and so forth. And then also the recipes for constructing out of given means, other different means, and still other ones out of those, that all these recipes must be largely and overwhelmingly true and correct recipes, given their purpose that they have. Most of, to explain this a little bit further, most of the world around us is not raw nature, but made up of manufactured means or goods. These are artificial objects which are engineered with a definite purpose. Most of them work as they are intended to do. The how stands, the machine turns, the toast or toasts, the clock times. The recipes leading up to these products must then be correct recipes. And in fact, we have developed increasingly more correct recipes to successfully engineer a continually greater number of different manufactured goods. So much for any skepticism concerning any solid or ultimate foundation of knowledge and hence the possibility of any growth of knowledge. On the other hand, when we fail to reach our purposes, when the house collapses or the machine, the toaster or the clock stop doing what they are supposed to do, we attribute this to a 40 or wrongly applied construction recipe to 40 identification, measuring, counting, computing, timing, mixing and so on. What distinguishes a working house, a working machine, toaster, clock, counter, calculator or whatever from a broken one is not nature or the laws of nature. The laws of nature apply to both a functioning and a 40, to 40 implements in exactly the same way. What distinguishes is the presence of a human purpose, the fact that only a standing house, a toaster and a timing clock is judged by us a success, whereas a broken one is considered a failure. And accordingly, that only a recipe that leads to success can be considered a true recipe. Truth and truth seeking then are our methods and means for the attainment of our ends that is of success. We do not seek the truth on sich. We seek the truth because it leads to and is a requirement of success. And the more true recipes we know, the more actions we can successfully perform. I'll come to my fourth point. By argumentation, it's a special thing. Now, these recipes that I just mentioned, they can, of course, be right and wrong. But we rarely, if ever, argue whether they are right or whether they are wrong because if they are right, this all refers to silent action, because if they are right, they lead to success and if they are wrong, they lead to failure. And the decision then is always easy. The proof is simply in the pudding. Lengthy public trials a la Galilei or so are not needed to decide in the field of manufacturing and engineering. There is no need for a public debate about what the recipe to follow in constructing a plain surface, a ruler, a triangle, a circle, a clock, a brick, a wall, or a house. Everyone can simply try and see the consequences for himself. And because of this intimate connection of truth and success, new and improved recipes, once they become known, are quickly without much or even any discussion, if you will, frictionless, adopted by other actors as in their own interest of success. A need for any lengthy discussion regarding the truth claims of various recipes that is for argumentation arises typically only in connection with conflict. That is, the first time we seriously discuss and debate matters of truth, whether or not something is really true is in discussions concerning matters of justice, of right and wrong. You and I want to use one and the same good for incompatible purposes. Plain communication has failed to achieve coordination and we clash, but we can still argue. And in any case, it is impossible to argue consistently without falling into contradictions, that we cannot do anything about our apparent discoordination except to fight. We can do something else as this very argument in claiming itself to be true manifestly and conclusively demonstrates. Now, we can describe the actions leading to our conflict verbally, and we can identify two incompatible truth claims as a source of our conflict. Either you are the proper owner of the good in question, the knife, the hair, the house or whatever, and hence your plan comes to execution versus I am the proper owner, and hence my plan will be implemented. By means of words then, we can institute a trial conducted in a public language in which we present our rival truth claims with the purpose of finding a definitive answer of yes or no, true or false, right or wrong. That is the true recipe that will restore coordination and prevent future conflict. And we have discovered such an answer which explains why conflicts are comparatively rare in our lives and the overwhelming bulk of our actions was a communicative or silent runs actually peacefully, even if sometimes disappointingly. The recipe concerned the proper was a right, was a true, was a correct ownership, meaning exclusive control of scarce physical means. It prescribes that proper ownership of means or property is to be established solely through first that is unopposed or conflict free appropriation and subsequent transformation of such means or else through a mutually agreed upon and likewise unopposed transfer of property from one actor to another. Formulate as a rule, always in all of your actions employ only such means that you have first unopposed, unappropriated, appropriated or produced or that you have received in a mutually agreed on exchange from others who had unopposed possession or property of the good in question before you. If you follow this recipe, the world will be still full of surprises and disappointments but all conflicts can be avoided from the beginning of mankind so to speak until its very end. And that we indeed know the correct recipe of conflict avoidance is revealed in the fact that in our daily lives we routinely abstain from interfering with the use of means that are already under visible and noticeable control of someone else and restrict our actions instead exclusively to means that we already have control of. However, this knowledge of is largely habituated and subconscious. It is only upon reflection in speaking about actions and typically motivated by some rare event of conflict that we can not only verbalize and formulate this rule but that we can recognize further through a transcendental argument that this very rule is already implied in or more correctly presupposed by argumentation. That is that following this rule is what makes argumentation as an action sui generis at all possible and hence that its truth and validity as a recipe of engineering social coordination cannot be argumentatively denied without falling into some form of contradiction through a performative contradiction. Argumentation is a purposeful activity. It is not aimless, free-floating sounds. It is speech acts aimed at coordination. More specifically, it is speech acts aimed at coordination by means of nothing but arguments. But as an action, argumentation also involves the employment of scarce physical means. First and foremost among these means is our own physical body. Both the proponent and the opponent of an argument must make use of their bodies to generate their arguments and engage in argumentation. I must use my body and you must use yours. And my proper ownership of my body and yours of yours cannot be argumentatively disputed with falling into a contradiction because to argue back and forth and to impute the arguments to you or me as my arguments or your arguments, you and I must recognize each other's proper ownership of our distinct and separate physical bodies. Moreover, both our bodies are already naturally appropriated in that only I can control my body directly at will and that only you can control your body directly and at will. And in reverse, I can control your body and you can control my body only indirectly by using our directly controlled bodies first, which demonstrates the practical and logical, or as Mises would say, the praxeological priority of direct before indirect appropriation. To claim, for instance, in an argument that I am the proper owner of your body or you of my body involves a contradiction because I must presuppose that I am the proper owner of my body with which I make my argument and that you are the proper owner of your body with which to produce your argument. To impute an argument to me or to you, the means employed to produce this argument must be mine or yours also. And there's something else besides each person's proper ownership of his naturally appropriated physical body that is presupposed by argumentation. You and I have already acted silently and communicatively long before we ever engaged in any argumentation. Prior to any argumentative encounter, you and I have with the help of our respective bodies and unopposed by either you or me already appropriated, produced, exchanged, consumed or accumulated countless goods. We could not be engaged in argumentation now without such prior activities and prior possessions. They make our present argumentation at all possible. Accordingly, we must admit and we cannot deny without contradiction that prior and ultimately first possession is the proper route to the ownership of scarce physical means. In presenting our arguments back and forth, you and I affirm that we are not only the proper owner of our naturally owned and directly controlled physical bodies with which we produce these arguments, but also of all those things that you or I have previously prior to our argument and unopposed by you or me purposefully done or produced. Indeed, to argue consistently to the contrary, namely that property be established and determined by disputed later and ultimately by last possession is literally impossible because we would have no feet or ground on which to stand on and make our arguments if that were the case. Neither you or I could have ever acted silently on our own or separately from one another side by side, sometimes maybe disappointed, but in any case without conflict. Now, philosophical analysis then confirms and reinforces our intuition. We have indeed a perfect and unfailing recipe of how to avoid conflict and thus systematically improve coordination and we have a perfect recipe of how to resolve each and every conflict should it occur and with this recipe, we also have a true and unfailing criterion of justice, namely of deciding between just or true versus unjust or false ownership claims and determining how to restore justice if injustice has occurred. Not everything is open to dispute in an argumentation over conflicting ownership claims. The validity of the priority principle of just acquisition itself cannot be argumentatively disputed for without it any argumentation is between you and me would simply be impossible. Under dispute then can only be the application of this principle in particular instances and with respect to particular means. There can be dispute about whether or not you or I have misapplied the principle in some instances and with regard to particular means. We can disagree as to the true facts of the case who was where and when and who had possession of this or that at this time and that place and so forth. And this can be at times tedious and time consuming to establish and sort out these facts. However, just as a principle is beyond dispute, so is the procedure or the recipe of sorting out the relevant facts and reaching a conclusion. The procedure is logically dictated by the principle. In every case of conflict brought to a public trial of arguments, the presumption is invariably in favor of the current owner. And on the other hand, the burden of a proof to the contrary is always on the opponent of some current state of affairs and of current possessions. The opponent must demonstrate that he, contrary to current appearance, has a possessive claim on some specific good that is older or dated prior to the current owner's claim. And hence that he has been dispossessed by the current owner. If and only if the opponent can successfully demonstrate this beyond a reasonable doubt in a public trial of arguments must the questionable possession be restored as property to him. On the other hand, if the opponent fails to make his case, then not only does the possession remain as property with the current owner, but the current owner in turn has acquired a possessive claim against his opponent for the current owner's body and time was misappropriated by the opponent during his failed and rejected argument. He could have done other, better, preferred things with his body time, except argumentatively defend himself against his opponent. Now, now let me come to a relatively brief conclusion, not that brief. What I have tried to do here is to refute the naturalist or behaviorist who wants to explain man or the nature of men fully and exclusively in terms of the natural sciences, and more specifically and importantly, to refute the skeptic who claims that there is no such thing as a constant and unchanging human nature and immutable laws of men, of men's essence. Who claims instead that everything there is to say about men is a story and study of history, that is of past actions, and that the best we can achieve is knowledge of past regularities and based on these of tentative conjectures concerning future events, and that the most that we can thus attain are hypothetical, not yet falsified truths, but that no such thing exists in human affairs as apodictic, as Jesus says, apodictic or a priori truths. And in any case that there is no such thing as universal and immutable principles of justice, that is of right and wrong. Now, I have argued instead that we do know and that we cannot without performative contradiction deny to know quite a few a priori truths about men. There's some more than the ones that I point out, but these definitely are qualifying. Once spelled out, they appear almost self-evident and trivial, but their recognition has nonetheless important philosophical consequences. We cannot deny that we can argue with each other in a common public language, that we can communicate with each other, that we can coordinate our actions by means of words and can become better, that is more successful in our attempts at communicative coordination in learning how to speak better, how to use our words more properly and clearly. Now, with this, we can immediately dispose of all talk about solipsism, of other egos, of ultra-subjectivism, and also of all Hobbesian ruminations of a war of all against all as idle mental gymnastics and pseudo problems. Because whoever writes about these matters refutes himself by virtue of the fact that he writes and argues his case in a public language and thus shows himself as a cultured or socialized person. That is, he is neither a solipsist nor is he a wolf. Whoever says that one man is another man's wolf contradicts himself by the very fact of just saying these sorts of things. I have not never heard a wolf that says it. Further, we cannot deny that we can act in silence alone and without any communicative purpose whatsoever because we have acted alone before we started to talk with each other and we can stop talking again. That in doing so, we employ directly and indirectly appropriated goods with the purpose of producing some more highly valued future good that we follow recipes, there's how to do rules in the pursuit of this goal or good, whatever it may be, that these recipes can lead either to success or to failure and hence, given their purpose, can be objectively true or false recipes. And that we can learn from our successes or failures and methodically correct and improve our recipes by means of successive experimentation. That is, by trying them out. Now, this refutes all fashionable talk about methodological anarchism, Paul Feierabend and people, untranslatability of language, Willard Van Quyne for instance, or the incommensorability of paradigms, Thomas Kuhn, and of the impossibility of a systematic growth of knowledge. And finally, we cannot deny that we know the true recipe of how to avoid conflict and how to resolve it should it still occur. That we can distinguish between unopposed prior possessions as argumentatively justifiable possessions or as property versus opposed later possessions as argumentatively unjustifiable dispositions or as theft. And that we know how to restore justice if injustice has occurred. And this, of course, refutes all talk about cultural and ethical relativism of legal positivism and might makes right. And with this, I do what I just pointed out. You can do, you can always stop talking. Thank you very much.