 Our next lecture is Dr. David Gordon. Dr. Gordon is the author of many books, editor of many books and journal articles and reviews. He's a member of the senior faculty at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and he is the writer of the Mises Review. Dr. Gordon's talk at this time is on praxeology, the economic method or the method of economics. Dr. Gordon. Thank you, Mark, for your introduction. That introduction was the best part of the talk. Everything is anti-climax from now on. Normally the introductory lecture is on praxeology and Mises University is given by Hans Hoppe but Hans couldn't be here this year so just in case anyone is wondering, I'm not Hans Hoppe. No, I'm not Stefan Malinu, either. And now a lot of people find praxeology, especially the way it's explained in the first 113 pages of Mises Human Action, very difficult to understand but what I'm going to be trying to do in this talk, no doubt unsuccessfully, is to convince you that it isn't hard to understand it's actually quite commensical. Now some people might wonder, well, if I'm right, isn't it still very abstract? What can you do when you learned about praxeology? Well, one thing you can always open a praxeology store but well enough of bad jokes, at least intended bad jokes. Now one idea Mises has that I think is a very striking one is that he contends that economics has an important contribution to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies how we know the theory of knowledge. Normally we don't when, at least what the time Mises was writing and probably true since when philosophers are talking about theory of knowledge, they don't normally talk about what goes on in economics but Mises thinks that philosophies, especially philosophers of science are making a big mistake when they don't talk about, think about what goes on in economics because as in his view, economics uses a different method from the method used in the physical sciences. So economics has its own way of approaching the subject matter but even though the way economics works, the way economists reason is different from that of the physical sciences, it still isn't able to come up with general laws to arrive at general laws. So Mises says, well, the philosophers, especially philosophers of science are making a mistake because when they're considering how science arrives at laws, they're operating from an incomplete set of examples, they're not taking out the special way that economics comes up with laws. Now, when if Mises is right, it raises a problem. If economics has this important contribution to make, to theory of knowledge, why have philosophers neglected this? And I should say when Mises is talking about economics here, although of course he has principally in mind the kind of economics, namely Austrian economics that he himself engages in, he has in mind not only his own Austrian economics but economics in general, a standard price theory. And his view, especially when he was writing in the epistemological problems of economics in the 1930s was that it was a standard economics that all economists accept. This changed a bit later, especially in macroeconomics when the theories of Keynes gain prominence. And Mises reacted to that by saying, well, that isn't economics, that's anti-economic. So in Mises's view, all economists accepted a certain body of theory and he said that the philosophers of science are neglecting this. They're not taking account of this new way of studying a subject matter that enables us to come up with general laws of a kind that are different from those that arrived at in the physical science. So as I say, the question is, well, if there is this new way of coming up with laws, why have philosophers neglected this? You would think that philosophers would be very interested in this because then they'd be, wouldn't this be a very important thing to reason about and say, well, philosophers of science thought that there's a particular way we come up with laws, but there's this other way as well, so you'd expect the philosophers to be interested in this. But Mises has somewhat of a sociological explanation for why they're not that many people, he thinks really oppose the notion of economic laws, because if there are economic laws, especially the kind that there are, they impose certain limits on what policymakers can do. For example, it's a consequence of economic laws that minimum wage legislation won't succeed in raising wages for workers and without creating unemployment. Minimum wage laws won't raise wages and have no bad consequences for other workers. So if it turns out that economic laws impose restrictions on what policymakers wanna do, especially policies that aim for that intervention into the free market, then the policymakers and people who favor those kinds of interventionistic and socialistic measures that these people oppose won't be very happy about this, and so they'll react at Mises thinks by just denying that there are economic laws. And Mises suggests that many philosophers, especially I think he has in mind, especially philosophers at the time he was writing the logical positivists in Vienna who had these socialistic views and interventionist views, so they would downplay or deny entirely that there are economic laws and wouldn't, by doing so, they would be neglecting the important contribution that economics has to make to the theory of knowledge. Now, I said there is, economics has a different way of arriving at laws from that of the physical sciences. But what is the difference? In the physical sciences, what we're basically doing is studying matter or energy in motion. We're considering various events in the physical world and the scientists are trying to come up with universal generalizations that describing the behavior of certain kinds of matter. Now, let's take one elementary example. Of course, it will have to be elementary because that's all the science I know. If that, let's take Boyle's law, which is that if you multiply the pressure on a gas times the volume, you'll get a constant. So increasing the pressure on a gas will decrease the volume. So let's just consider that given this law PV equals K. So what do we see when we're looking at this if we remember what the symbols stand for, which in my old age is difficult? That was supposed to be a joke. You can laugh now. Okay, so these laws of which this is just one example, don't make any reference to purposes or ends that anyone has. We wouldn't say unless we're just coming to come up with some picturesque exact way of explaining the law to children, we wouldn't say the volume of the gas is trying to adjust to the increased pressure in order to maintain this constant. Physical bodies don't have conscious purposes or goals. What we're doing in the sciences is just trying to come up with constant relationships between matter, changes in matter of various kinds. So we're making no reference to purposes. But people, although of course people, at least the ones I know are physical bodies where I don't wanna assume any, I'm not begging any questions on whether the notion of a mind without a body makes sense or whether if there were minds without the body, we could call the mind a person. But the people we know at any rate are physical bodies, but they don't just move in the same way physical bodies do. That's to say we don't just, can't just say, well, people it isn't, there's more to human beings and just saying they consist of matter of certain kinds and they're subject to certain physical relationship. People also have purposes and try to achieve goals. This is unlike matters, we wouldn't say, I said the gas is trying to react in a certain way because it has this purpose, but we wouldn't say that about people. People have act, which as you heard in the previous lecture, is when we're acting, we have a goal and we're using means to achieve ends. I understand in the previous two lectures, people have given an example, suppose someone wants a ham sandwich so that's their goal and then they would have means to achieve that goal, getting the ham and the bread. Now, I wondered about that example. I must say, I don't wanna make any insinuations but it sounds a bit anti-semitic to me. Now, if you look at Murray Rothbard's example, it's man economy and state. Rothbard certainly can't be accused of anti-semitism but he gives the same example, except when he gives the example, he has something like a man wants a ham sandwich and so he gets his wife to make it for him. I suppose we couldn't give it that way either, then you'd probably, if he did that, be expelled from the university. These days are leased up before some sort of panel but regardless of what you think of that example, human beings are different from what matter is studied in the physical science because human beings have ends and purposes and human beings act, that's to say use means to achieve end. Now, there's a complication here, there usually is especially in my lectures. There's some people who think that nature has purposes, not in the sense that these people think that the matter is conscious and is aiming at various things so we could have a praxeology of matter although maybe there are people like that. I mean, there are all sorts of crazy people out there but the people who say that nature has purposes think that in addition to the kind of causation studied in the physical sciences in which we have, say a change in one event will produce a change in another event, we can appeal to the notion of an end or a final cause, something that a goal that some natural process is aiming at not in the sense that it's consciously pursuing that goal but just that what the physical entity is doing can be explained in terms of that goal. This comes up, is used very much in Aristotle's philosophy. It's called a teleological view but Mises doesn't like that, he really doesn't discuss that but that wouldn't be, he just from what he says elsewhere, it's clear that he doesn't go along with that way of viewing things. So the way he's looking at both sciences and economics or human action which is the use of means to achieve ends and then there's the physical sciences and there isn't this notion of purpose without conscious intentions that would be not classifiable in the way that he has. Now, someone might object to Mises where Mises say the economics or part of this more general science of praxeology is required to study how purpose gives you a kind of knowledge because they would say doesn't history study action and history were concerned say with questions like why did Caesar cross the Rubicon in 49 BC or why did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor a few years after that? So another joke incident. So people might say, well, don't we already have a discipline that studies human action mainly history? So why do we need this separate discipline of praxeology? And here the crucial point to realize is that history doesn't give us general laws, it's just explaining how particular events have taken place and what the reasons for those events were but economics does come up with general laws and this is exactly what Mises thought was the distinctive part of economics this distinctive contribution to the theory of knowledge that even though it doesn't use the method of the physical sciences, it's still able to come up with general laws and unlike history. Now, how do we know that human beings act? Well, we see actions all the time we see each of us acts and we're able to grasp the actions of other people. I mean, there can think of any number of examples even if other than this horrible example of the Ham sandwich say, I'm now giving a lecture so I have an end and I have the means to do that. I mean, you could come up with other actions like walking out of my lecture, say you didn't like my lecture and you walked out, then you'd have an end and a means to do that. Of course, we would know your name if you tried to do that. Okay, so what's crucial if we wanna study human action is we can't understand action unless we use certain concepts like ends or means and there's nothing saying that we have to employ certain concepts in order to understand action. There's nothing mysterious about this. Mises talks about a priori concepts in people. There are some people as soon as they see the word a priori, they react in horror. They'll think, oh, well, this is some kind of Kantian terminology and we know from reading Ayn Rand that Kant is the worst person of all time so there must be some big problem here. I mean, since how could Mises possibly talk about the a priori or some people just don't like who are not supporters of Ayn Rand don't like notion of the a priori but I think when Mises is talking about a priori concept he means something quite unproblematic just that we have to have these concepts in order to understand action. Just as an example, supposing you hear people speaking a foreign language that you don't know which you can brazenly do here at this conference. So unless you learn the language you won't understand what they're saying though. You'll know they're saying something but you won't be able to understand what they're talking about. So here in this similar idea I think in what we talked about a priori concept just in the way in which we have to have certain concepts in order to understand a foreign language Mises is suggesting we have to have certain concepts in order to understand action unless we use these concepts we won't understand what's going on when people are acting. So this is what he means by a priori that you have to have grasp in order to make sense of actions. Now a misunderstanding here is when he says that the concepts are a priori it doesn't imply that these concepts are innate that we're born with these concepts or that we have them somehow in our mind and they're just triggered by outside experience. He isn't giving when he talks about a priori concepts he isn't giving us some philosophical theory of how people acquire concepts. If you say you're an empiricist about concepts that's to say suppose you think we get concepts by abstracting from the world or that's one theory I think one that Rand suggests you could hold that theory if you wanted and still accept Mises notion of the a priori all that would follow is until you got these concepts you wouldn't be able to understand human action but a priori as I say doesn't imply any controversial philosophical theory about how concepts are acquired it's just saying you have to grasp these concepts in order to understand action. I will see in a little, I'm actually going to cover this in one of my other lectures a priori knowledge is different from a priori concepts that I'm going to talk about here is just a priori concepts. Now, so as I suggested Mises says we can study action we do so by examining these a priori concepts that we need in order to understand action and Mises called this study the study of human action praxeology and in his earlier book Epistemological Problems and Economics which was written in the 30s he called it sociology but that isn't such a good name because it's of course used for something else. So here we want to distinguish a very strict sense of talk about praxeology and a looser use of the term. When Mises talked about praxeology meant strictly the science or the study of human action. So the method that you're using is not in the strict sense praxeology method of its deductive method of looking at the implication of the concept isn't strictly praxeology but there's a looser sense in which people will call this method praxeology also and I don't think that's wrong it's just not the strict way Mises was using it. Obviously I don't think it's wrong because I myself used it in the title in the lecture for this way. If I had said it was wrong I'd have to admit that I made a mistake which I've done but I don't like doing that. Now when we say that the method of praxeology makes use of a priori I think people make this idea much harder than it actually is and people say well this is very abstract and hard to understand and raise various problems that really rest on misunderstanding and one of the most basic points to remember that well if you remember this I think it'll clear up a lot of difficulties people have about praxeology is that a priori does not mean mental. So when Mises is talking about a priori concepts of action he's not talking about what's going on in his mind or other people's minds he's talking about actions, events that take place in the real world events that take place out there like in this horrible example of the ham sandwich he isn't just talking about ideas of a ham sandwich he's talking about actual sandwich out there I guess who have these lectures just didn't consider the anti-submitting implications but that's I don't want to get sidetracked again if I get sidetracked too much I'm going to start going over Malinus philosophy and then they get rid of me. Okay now what happens if you make this mistake you say well you're thinking Mises is talking about a priori so this means somehow mental then this leads to a misunderstanding I've heard I've been coming to this program for a great many years and someone nearly always will raise this question they'll say well how does Mises know that when he's coming up with all these claimed laws about human action how does he know that he's talking about anything other than what's going on in his own mind how does he know that this applies to anyone else other than Mises himself I mean just as a matter of interest has anyone thought of that or wondered about that question? Well I guess you're better than the people who've been coming around here for the past 27 years if you haven't had that thought but what is wrong with that question what is the presupposition of that question that I think is mistaken is that Mises is not raising the same kind of question Descartes did remember Descartes at the inauguration modern philosophy raised a problem somewhat like this he said he was trying to say is what if anything can he know in the sense that it's immune to doubt and he suggested the physical world isn't something like that that we could just imagine that we're being somehow deceived that there really isn't a physical world so the physical world is subject to doubt and he then went on to argue that he couldn't doubt his own existence and from that he tried to prove that the physical world did exist he said well he could prove then that God existed and God wouldn't deceive us so he thinks he could get approved the physical world exists so what Descartes is doing he's starting with his own consciousness and then saying how do we know the physical world exists and many philosophers although very few accept the way Descartes solved the problem write about this problem how do we know that the world exists the problem of skepticism what is the basis of our knowledge now this is not Mises project he's not engaged in some kind of skeptical solution to skepticism where he's saying I'm starting with my own consciousness and then I'm trying to deduce the existence of the world he is not excuse me, writing as a philosopher but as an economist he's not engaged really although he deals with issues in theory of knowledge he's not engaged in this kind of fundamental project he's starting from his own from the external world so he's taking for granted let me just see is there any oh good there's some water down here for me good they think they think of everything or at least if not everything at least they thought of that okay excuse me oh I guess I guess there's some people who don't want me to continue the lecture probably I don't know how they managed to do that well all right so Mises question is not how do we know the external world exists but given that we do understand actions how is this possible so he's saying what are the concepts that we have that enable us to understand human action so as I said earlier some people say how do we know that the conclusions of praxeology apply to other people in this question really rests on a false assumption because the assumption is that Mises is starting just from his own thoughts or his own actions and then he's asking how can we generalize that to others but he's saying no we find just as a matter of experience that we grasp people's actions I can see that you're all now intently listening to what I say so I can just grasp I can just grasp that you're doing that excuse me so he's asking how are we able to do that how we can see an example how this basic mistake leads us into error if we look at what Mises says about polylogism that's I don't know I assume he invented that word I haven't seen it used by other writers he it's an interesting word and the view the polylogist view is a view that different races or classes have different logics for example the time Mises was writing the Nazi suggested that different races had different logics they would talk about say Jewish physics versus Aryan physics there was a actually a Nobel Prize winning German physicist who wrote a book called German physics several volumes so in this view in this polylogism we find also say in the Marxist at least some Marxist had the view that the different economic classes had different logic so there was a proletarian logic and capitalist logic so in the polylogist view there isn't a single set of a priori concepts that applies to all actions so if you're a polylogist you would say well what Mises is talking about is just possibly right about the when he's trying to understand the actions of a particular class or race but it isn't universal so what does Mises respond to that well he says we just find that our categories do apply universally so he doesn't come up with an impossibility proof he doesn't come up with some way of saying look the polylogist position is logically contradictory but he says that in fact this is what we do we look at people's actions whether regardless of what race or class they are and we find that we can understand them using the same set of categories so he says just matter what we find in experience that this set of categories will enable us to understand all human actions now although you don't find at least in very much in standard academic writings people who are polylogists in the sense of saying people have different races have different ways of thinking but there is a version of polylogism that's popular among some contemporary anthropologists and seeing what what's wrong with this or how what will I think enable us to understand what Mises is doing in praxeology better there's one anthropologist that recently retired from the University of Chicago Marshall Solins who's been quite influential he was following early French anthropologist Marcel Mose who was all of you I assume know was Durkheim's nephew was it son-in-law I can't remember I should have I don't know but one of the two but not both so Solins claims that economic rationality doesn't apply to stone age tribes and also to many other societies and what Solins says is in these societies people don't engage in regular economic transactions they go out and buy and sell things they just give gifts to each other and then they'll expect to get gifts in return so what Solins says is look these economists such as Mises who talk about these universal categories are all wrong because that just applies to Western societies it's just a certain other historical societies we can find groups of people who don't act in accord with this the economic categories that economists are talking about this objection really depends on a mistake about praxeology because what the objection is that is that people in these stone age societies aren't really concerned with amassing material goods in the same way that people today are there concerned more with getting along with other people in the tribe by giving gifts to them so the mistake that's made if this is given as an objection to praxeology is that praxeology Mises are not assuming that actions are limited to one or a few goals like getting as much money as you can and what praxeology is studying is the structure or the form involved in any action it's not studying particular actions or the content but just the form of an action we can by and it's very crucial we understand this notion of the form of an action I think one way to try to understand this compare it with a logical form maybe I'm just introducing another difficult concept to explain this but I will try I hope not but I mean supposing we take any statement or proposition such as I am now giving a lecture we could distinguish say the subject of elect not the subject to the set of the statement I and then we'd have the verb am giving am giving and then the object so we could get for any sentence we could just say regardless of the content of the sentence it would have a certain form kind of grammatical form we could get the logical form so what Mises suggesting is actions can be studied in the same way we can come up with the form of any action that is so we're not talking about what are the particular goals that people have talked about the form the logical form involved in any action the structure involved in any action and that's what Prexology is studying and the one of these basic principles of action I mentioned in the other lectures I've already talked about so far is that every action uses means to attain an end and here we have to bear in mind we talk about any action so we're not limited to carefully thought out projects posing say I impulsively say well I've had enough and just run out the room that would be an action also even though I wouldn't have been thinking about it very longer would just be sudden move out the room and then everyone would applaud so action isn't limited to these carefully thought out projects and again I've mentioned this before but I want to keep mentioning this because it's very important that it concerns what's going on in the world not what you're thinking about but what's actually happening so habitual behavior can start counts as action too supposing say when you get up you put your clothes on you just get dressed you really aren't thinking about it very much you just do it kind of semi-automatically that counts as action also studied by praxeology so does behavior explained by Freud's psychology Mises was actually quite interested in Freud Freud was a friend of his although not a close friend but they they knew each other so Mises was very interested in say ideas that when somebody does something he really has some kind of motive in mind that is not what appears on the surface of the kind studied in psychoanalysis so that would count as action also for praxeology so it's whenever you can use the categories of ends and means you have an action so far that doesn't sound like a very controversial claim that action is all action policy use means to achieve an end but Mises now goes on to make a claim that will be very controversial at least to most people is that all action is rational that sounds very strange when you first hear because you would think well aren't there all sorts of crazy things people could say or do I'm not going to give any examples of them because that would get me into trouble in among certain websites launch their attacks on me if I gave examples of this so I'm not going to do that but doesn't it sound like a very strange thing to say if you say well all action is rational but although it sounds odd Mises doesn't intend anything particularly controversial he's just repeating in a way this non-controversial claim that all action involves the use of means to achieve an end because that's his criterion of rationality use of means to achieve an end so if you accept that then he's not saying anything else by saying that all action is rational so he doesn't mean that action is rational in other sense of rationality for example people can make mistakes in reasoning they do it all the time and their behaviorist behavioral economists like Richard Fahler and Daniel Kahneman who studied or at least actions they claim people make all sorts of mistakes in reasoning so I say well people really aren't rational but Mises isn't when he says action is rational he's not saying that people always reason correctly all he's saying is that people from their point of view are using means that they think will enable them to achieve their end so they can use means that will fail to achieve their ends they just say they they're they picked the wrong means to achieve the end but they think that what they're doing will enable them to get what they want otherwise they wouldn't be doing it so this is enough to count as rational for Mises now here in saying that Mises differed from his a friend of his with the great German sociologist Max Weber Weber distinguished four types of action I'm not going into the details of Weber's classification but he had propulsive rational, valuational, effective and customary traditional so the propulsive rational for him meant conscious calculation say someone wanted to make money so he came up with some project so he thought well he could sell something at a profit he'd make let's say he'd make little dolls of Mises and sell them to children so would be a very popular toy and everybody would get he'd make a lot of money because all the children want to have these little Mises dolls so that would be an example of of calculate propulsive rational behavior because it would be calculative but all of the behaviors they are action Weber was talking about count as rational for Mises he's not again having a very very easy criterion to fill for to fulfill for rational behavior all you have to be to be rational Mises sense all you have to do is use a means to achieve an end and another point at which Mises differed from Weber is that Weber thought that rational action was what he called an ideal type which is an abstraction that exaggerates various features in the world but doesn't strictly apply to the world so an ideal type is an abstraction that really isn't present in the world according to Weber but Mises did not repeat not think that his concept concepts of praxeology are ideal types in that sense he thought they really do apply to the world in the full sense they're not ideal types I notice in their recent book by Peter Betke thinks that doesn't say I was surprised that Mises thinks that the concepts of praxeology are ideal types and you should be aware that that isn't correct he specifically repudiates that view I don't know why he said that it isn't a correct view now water I've said so far that Mises thinks there's we can study human action by looking at the implications of certain concept but what are some of the things we could learn about action by studying it in this conceptual way that Mises is talking about well one is that according to him is that action involves felt dissatisfaction you're acting because you want to change things for the better so it doesn't mean that you're you have to be feeling bad in some sense or you're sort of in some kind of psychological state that you don't like and then you think you can do something to get out of it say something like you say well I've got a headache so I think if I take some aspirin I'll feel better he's not talking about felt dissatisfaction in that sense it's just that you think that by acting you'll be able to improve things now strictly speaking that's there's a slight modification we could make but I'm not going to go into that because I'm making this too complicated already so basically so he says action involves felt dissatisfaction you want things to get better now it doesn't follow from that that supposing you're you made a choice that you're satisfied with say it works out the way you want that it doesn't imply that things are always getting better for you say you're dissatisfied with things so you think say I have a headache and I think I'll take aspirin and it works so I that I feel better but it doesn't follow from that you might think it doesn't it doesn't that things are always going to get better I say I'm not thinking of a case where you made a mistake like say you take you want to get better from your headache so you take some extra strength tile and all that somebody's laced with poise and I'm not thinking of a case like that I'm thinking about a case where you actually do succeed in in and in dealing with your felt dissatisfaction but it doesn't follow from that that on the whole you're getting better you could be getting worse on the whole it's just that if your action successful you'll be better than if you hadn't acted so your overall condition could be getting worse say but you're at least doing what you did will has improved things now all action according to me is involves choice we always have various ends we could pursue you could instead of coming to my lecture you could have done something else probably many of you thinking well you made a mistake you should have done something else but again it's too late now if you leave now we're noting your name so that was another joke incident according to me is we always choose the end we rank highest at the time now some philosophers don't accept this view they say look their cases where we don't always choose our highest valued goal and they would have in mind a case like this supposing someone thinks that smoking is bad for your health so he thinks well if I smoke this will increase my chance of getting lung cancer and so I don't want to do that so I don't want to smoke and that's more important to me than whatever pleasure I get from smoking so the person says well it turns out he smokes anyway he'll just light up even though he holds that according to these philosophers he holds that smoking is bad but and he also thinks the fact that the badness of smoking outweighs that whatever pleasure he gets from smoking but he smokes anyway so the philosophers who speak of this describe this as weakness of will or in the greek term akrasia so the idea they have is well you could have a highest preference in the sense you're ranking something highest but you don't do that because there are various theories on how this takes place that you're somehow you're you're you wind up doing something that isn't your highest value goal now as Mises would analyze a case like this a praxeologist would analyze a case like this you would say well the person at the time he was acting just changed his mind about what was the highest value goal when he was acting he just at that time whatever he thought he'd get out the pleasure of getting the what he thought he'd get from smoking did outweigh these other factors against it otherwise he wouldn't have smoked so it could be that immediately afterwards he would regret his action so we could have weakness of will in kind of a weak sense of weakness of will that where the person or almost always regrets certain kinds of action but in Mises' view you couldn't have what they is called a strongly strong akrasia which is this view that you can act against what choose something other than your highest value preference so that view is one that Mises wouldn't help I will say in thinking about this someone smoking even though it's bad for you reminding me of the story of someone who read so much about how bad smoking is for you that he gave up reading okay now another of the principles that Mises says we can learn just by thinking about the concept of action is what he calls methodological individualism and this is the what he means by this is the notion that only individuals act so if we talk about a collective action entity such as a class or a nation when we say suppose that we say something like the United States declared war on Japan December 8th 1941 so according to the methodological individualist this would have to be analyzed as talking about the actions of particular individuals say a president Roosevelt gave a speech December 8th and after he gave a speech various people in Congress voted for a declaration of war and then this resulted in further actions by other individuals so it we couldn't say according to the methodological individualist that the United States declared war and that's all there is to it that they're there that's can't be analyzed further so it's only it's only individuals act I'll just say I'm passing here Oscar Levant who was a I'm sure a figure you don't remember he goes back a long way very good composer and humorist he once said he wondered why is it we can say Hitler invaded Russia or Germany invaded Russia but we can't say Germany invaded Stalin or Hitler invaded Stalin something something to think about but that won't be on the final exam that question I do have some limits so one thing about methodological individualism when we say only individuals act this view doesn't deny that nations or classes exist it isn't saying there's no such thing as the United States or all that really exists or individuals just saying that it's only individuals who act now what I've been giving in the lecture various claims about action that Mises has made such as that just mind just gave only individuals act your action involves choosing your highest value preference oh how do we know that these claims are true how do we know that Mises is right it Mises answer is well we just think about the concept of action and what it involves so what we're doing according to him is just trying to make explicit what we already implicitly know in his view we have a we have the a priori concept of action and what we're doing in practicality is studying this so we're trying to understand what in a sense we already know so sometimes people are a bit confused I'll say well the system Mises system is deductive so in a deductive system they think say in mathematics you start with certain axioms or postulates and we don't really ask how do you know the axioms or postulates are true they're just assumed and then we try to draw deductive consequences from them but praxeology is the way me in the way Mises conducted isn't like that they're not we don't start with arbitrary postulates but we we start with with concepts and principles that we already know and we know these to be true because they enable us to make sense of action well all right i'm finished now i think uh i was supposed mark did you want to make the announcement i i was supposed to do that we mark said he wasn't going to be here and i was going to have to announce we're going to lunch but he is here so