 Hello, everybody. I think we'll get started now. I want to welcome everyone to this lecture on praxeology. I should say, as you'll soon discover if you don't know already, I don't have a very loud voice, so if you can't hear, please let me know. You're probably better off if you don't hear, but that's a choice up to you. One thing I'm going to be lecturing on, mainly the first 140 or so pages in human action, which is the part of human action that students find very difficult, especially, I would say, especially, you'll probably find this, if you read the first 140 pages of human action, you'll probably find this not very easy to follow in all respects, at least if you're like most of the students who've been coming through here in the past 35 years or so. So my job is to, as I say, it's a very difficult part of the book for most people to understand, and my job is to make it even more difficult. We might want to ask why do we have to study praxeology? It sounds like a peculiar word, praxeology means the science of action. What can I do with praxeology? Why do I have to study this? Well, you can always open up a praxeology shop, so at least it does have some practical use. But before I go into more seriously, why does Mises say that he wants to, instead of talking about economics, why does he talk about praxeology? It's an unusual term. Why does he say he wants to have a science of action? And what he had in mind, as you'll remember in the lectures yesterday on subjective theory of value, before the onset of the subjective theory of value in the 1870s with Menger, Jevons, and Walras, that economists didn't think they could explain all human choice by reference to subjective values. They thought that they could only explain what producers were doing, according to their theory, which was based on labor cost or more generally the cost of production. They couldn't explain consumer behavior. So they, in their view, they could only explain what production in terms of making money, what producers were doing. So sometimes economics was described as the science of wealth. So if economics was characterized in that way, it would be just part of human action. It wouldn't be totally comprehensive. And if you view matters that way, then you could say what, say, conclusions from economics would then have to be brought together with conclusions from other areas. John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy in 1847 makes this explicit. He said, well, there's an area of the production that we can explain through economic theory, but then we have to bring this together with other areas as well, other parts, disciplines. So economics isn't totally comprehensive. So one of the big aims that in Mises' life was to show that economics is completely general. And this is why he put so much emphasis on having this science of human action. One point about praxeology is perhaps the key point that Mises makes about it is that economics uses a different method from the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, say, taking physics and chemistry as the primary examples, the scientists are looking at particular observations of the world. They're ultimately relying on their sense observations. Of course, they have all sorts of instruments to extend their senses, such as microscopes and telescopes and various other measures, things that they can use. But really, they're relying on sense observation of external objects, say their chemist is trying to figure out how molecules will react when placed in various combinations. And when the chemist is doing that, he is just observing what's going on as it were on the outside. He's looking at the molecules through his microscope, then trying to formulate laws of their interaction. But it isn't as if these molecules have minds that he can know what they're thinking or what they're feeling. As far as we know, at least from the sciences, they don't have any feelings or minds. All that the scientists can do is observe them. And economics, praxeology, is different from this, that the economist has another way, a different way, to understand what's going on other than looking at objects from the outside. We have a direct acquaintance with action. I can grasp through experience that I act. And this is perhaps the key theme in human action that human beings act. Now, of course, this raises the immediate question, what do we mean by action? And Mises characterizes action as purposeful behavior, which is exercise of will on the world. Normally, when we're acting is something, it isn't a very mysterious concept. It's something we're always aware of. We're always acting, say, you got up this morning and you decided to come to this lecture. That would be an act. You have some end in mind and you think that coming, say you want to hear about, learn about praxeology. So you have the view that coming to this lecture will help you learn about praxeology. And you want to do that. So that explains why you came here as opposed to other things you might have done. Action is something that we know we're always doing things. Sometimes actions can be carried out over a period of time, say, for many of you, you have the action of wanting to get a college degree. So this involves various sub-actions. So action is a very, very much something that we're all aware of. In general, an action would consist of some sort of physical motion on the out would be, we're changing something in the outside world. You can have cases where just remaining in the position you are is an action. One example I like to give, which I heard many years ago in a lecture by the great British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, was supposing that there's a committee meeting and the chair of the meeting says, all those who agree with the motion, please signify by remaining seated. So if you remain seated, you've agreed with the, you voted yes. So that would be a case where not doing anything is an action, in that case the action of voting. But most actions aren't like that. They involve some sort of physical change. Now, Mises distinguishes between behavior in which you control your body, as in the cases I've given, say you're aware of what you're doing, you have some end in mind and you're doing that. And reflexes that aren't under your control. For example, if say you go to the doctor's office for a medical exam, as people my age have to do with more frequency than we would like, say if a doctor taps your knee with a mallet, your leg will automatically jerk out, at least if it's reflexes working properly. So that wouldn't be an example of action because it isn't under your control. One thing Mises, as I mentioned, Mises wants this to be, action is a very comprehensive category. So when he's talking about action, he doesn't mean only action that we think about very carefully in advance we deliberate on. We could also have action, say from unconscious motives. Mises was very familiar with Sigmund Freud's psychology. In fact, he and Freud were friends. And he thought that say cases studied by psychoanalysis in which people act from unconscious motives count as action. It isn't that you have to be fully aware of what you were doing, what you're doing when you're acting. It's still an action if as long as you have some goal in mind and you think this is the way to achieve it, you have a certain way that you think will get you to the goal. Now, Mises has a very interesting notion of rational action. I remember for him, as I mentioned a number of times already, he wants to have an absolutely comprehensive science of action. So if someone were to object to him, look what you're talking about only covers certain kinds of actions, maybe rational or calculative action. He wouldn't be very happy about that because that would defeat his whole purpose of coming up with this comprehensive science of action. So what his response there is he weakens the notion of when we talk about a rational action, he has a very weak notion of rational. I don't mean something like bad or ineffective. I'm using weak the way logicians do, meaning something that isn't requiring very much when you say something is logically weaker if you can fulfill the requirements more readily than something that's stronger. So if I said something like to get into this lecture, you have to come in and sit down. That would be weaker than saying to get to this lecture, you have to come in and sit down and pass an examination that would be a stronger premise. So Mises has a weak notion of a rational action. All that's required is you have a goal and you think that certain means will help you attain that goal. So your action counts as rational as long as you use the means because of this belief. You can be wrong about it, say you think that a particular means will get you a certain end, but in fact you're wrong, it won't. And you could even hold beliefs that would be considered crazy by most people. For example, supposing someone doesn't like a particular person and he thinks that one way he can injure that person is to make a small replica of the person and stick pins in the replica in the doll. So that would count for Mises as a rational action even if, as most people believe, that wouldn't be an effective way of injuring people. Although I must say I've never tried that, so maybe it would work. You know, it's worth a try. Why not? I can tell you, but I won't go into detail, I'll have a number of candidates in mind. Now, we now want to get into what I think is one of the most important points. I've talked about action, what Mises means by action, but do we act or how do we know we act? Some people, it seems evident to us that we do act. You could come up with all sorts of actions that you've done just today or just yesterday. It seems like action is omnipresent in our lives, but some people argue in this way. They say our behavior is determined by physical laws given, say, the arrangement of material particles, fields, and forces in the universe at any time. What follows is determined that, say, given certain particles, forces, fields, and so on, then at time T1, say, long before we existed, then it's determined by scientific laws, say that the arrangement of particles and so on at now time, the present time, is also determined. Then we would need to add the premise that the people's action, people's physical behavior is entirely composed of these forces, particles, and so on. So according to this account, well, given this arrangement of particles, that this is determined, it's fixed, so it's not up to us that we're not really acting because given this arrangement of physical particles and so on, then our behavior is determined. So we're wrong in thinking that it's up to us what we're doing. And Mises, perhaps to some people's surprise, doesn't reject this view. He doesn't say that's a false view. At least in most places he doesn't say that's a false view. He just says, we don't know that it's true in any event, even if it is true, we can't carry out these calculations and know what people or what the physical arrangements are and then have laws of correlation where we could tell what people are doing. So he says, this is just speculation, so he's taking human action as what he calls an ultimate given. An ultimate given for him is something beyond which we can't pass that we don't know at the present time. So what's an ultimate given varies with our knowledge at the time. So he says, at least for now, we don't know that this view, this determinist view is true, so we should just go ahead and assume for us action is an ultimate given. Now I want to make just a few points about this Mises approach here. There are all sorts of very interesting issues one could discuss about determinism and freedom, but you'll notice that Mises doesn't get into very much of the philosophical complications. He just says, well, this is something we can't, this determinist view is something we can't know to be true, so let's put it aside. And this I think is one of the important theme, it's an example of an important theme in human action that I think people often get wrong. And the reason they get this wrong is when they read the book, they see Mises is remarkably aware of philosophy and he's read all the great philosophies, he can quote them, he quotes in Latin and Greek, he quotes Henri Bergson, he quotes all sorts of spinoses, one of his favorites, he quotes Hegel Nietzsche. So he's very familiar with philosophy, but what people forget, I think sometimes is, or they have a misleading impression of that, human action is not a work of philosophy, Mises isn't trying to solve the basic philosophical problems, he's, economics is one of the sciences, so Mises isn't going into a detailed analysis of these philosophical issues, he's just trying to clear a space for what he wants to do. Now, that isn't to say, though, that Mises doesn't have some important philosophical ideas, and one of them is his view of causality. He thinks that, say, as I mentioned in explaining action, if we think something is a means to an end, we think it can bring about this end, say if I think, for example, that running out of this room will get me to achieve the end of not having to continue the lecture, then that, I think that doing that, running out of the room will bring about that end. So the philosophical theme here is that causality and action go together, their interdependent concepts. This is a view that you find also that causality and action go together. This is a point that Hans Hoppe, whom I'll be lecturing on tomorrow evening, has stressed very much in his work, and I think it's an important contribution. He's made that Mises ties the notion of cause, how we get the concept of cause to human action, and this is a view we find also in the great Austrian legal thinker Hans Kelsen, who was Mises' lifelong friend. They went to high school together, and they actually, they had the same birth and death dates, 1881 to 1973, so in his book, Society and Nature, Kelsen also stresses the connection of causality with human action. In his case, it's a particular kind of human action that he thinks is particularly related to causality, but it's a similar approach, and I think one project I think would be very interesting to undertake is to show parallels and differences between these two great Austrian thinkers. Now, I want to now raise a question may have occurred to some of you. I've mentioned several times that we experience action from the inside. I know that I act, but how do I know that other people act or how does each of you know that other people act? Mises' answer here, again, he is not trying to solve the philosophical problem of skepticism or other minds. His answer is pragmatic. He says if we act on the assumption that other people have act, then we find this work. So he's not, some of you have probably a number of you have taken philosophy courses and you would have questions like this. Suppose how do I know that I'm not a brain in a vat that scientists are manipulating into thinking that I'm experiencing various things, but in fact, I'm not. I'm just really just lying there not doing anything, but I think all these things are going on. So how do I know that you is false if in fact it is false? How do I know I'm not in the matrix? Mises is not concerned with questions like that. Remember, he's talking about economics. He's talking about one of the sciences. It seems very odd if say, imagine that someone says, well, we've got the government is spending, increase the deficit and spending enormous amount of money. Is this going to cause hyperinflation? Somebody said, oh, well, we can't talk about that yet. We haven't even established that there's an external world. How can we answer that question? That isn't what economics is concerned with. And it's also we're not trying to solve the problem of other minds. We're not saying, well, I know that I have a mind, but maybe all of you were just robots and don't have any internal consciousness. So I just, I know that I'm acting, but how do I know any of you has a mind? Mises is not trying to solve that problem. I remember one of the professors of philosophy at UCLA, Robert Yost, who was used to say if somebody asked him, do you believe in other, do you think there are other minds? His answer would be, not many. Now, we now in the time remaining, I want to get into the difficult stuff. What we've gotten through so far, that's the easy part. Now we're going to get into the harder stuff. If you thought it was bad so far, wait till you hear what's next. We now come to what's called a priori knowledge. Many people wish they'd never heard that word. Now, a priori knowledge is conceptual and deductive. We're not, if something is known a priori, it can be known to be true apart from experience. So say some examples, suppose I say two plus two equals four, I can know that to be true just by thinking about it. I don't have to keep counting two objects and counting another two objects and then counting them all out to see if they add up to four. Now, there were some people that were called the logical positivists or logical empiricists who were a group in Vienna, who were active in the 1920s and 1930s, who, to say the least, didn't like very much. So according to some people, a priori knowledge consists only of what's called analytic judgments. Now, an analytic judgment is either a definition or part of a definition or an instance of a logical truth where a logical truth is viewed as tautologies. So I mean by tautology, is a tautology is a statement that doesn't give you any information. For example, suppose we take the logical truth, either it's raining or it's not raining. That would be an example of the law of excluded middle. If I say that, I haven't given you any information about the weather. If, say, I was wondering, is it going to rain later today? And someone says, well, either it will be raining or it won't be rainy. The person hasn't told me anything interesting. So according to the positivists, our priori knowledge isn't really significant because it doesn't give us any new information about the world. Say, again, another example, suppose I say all bachelors are unmarried. That's just part of, since a bachelor is an unmarried male above a certain age, we wouldn't say, for example, a three-year-old child is a bachelor, three-year-old men. So we're not, according to the positivists, we're not learning anything if we say that we're just giving example how we use words. Mises' response to that is that you could make the same claim about math. And in fact, the positivists did make that claim. They said mathematics consists of tautologies. And there were later problems for this view with those of you who have studied, say, the girdles in completeness theory will realize there are certain problems with the view that all mathematical statements are tautologies, but fortunately I'm not going to go into that right now. But Mises says, well, you could make this claim about math, but it's clear that math does give us knowledge. We certainly wouldn't say we're looking at, say, some math book with all sorts of difficult theorems. And we wouldn't say, oh, well, this is just all tautologies. I'm not getting any information from this. Why did the mathematician bother writing it? So Mises' response here, I think, very much gets to the heart of things. He just says, well, look, you can have this argument, but it's just false because we have this example of math. And this is clearly giving us knowledge, but it isn't. So it's false that the a priori knowledge, math, I think would pretty universally be taken to be an a priori discipline. It's false that a priori knowledge doesn't give us any new knowledge. So Mises then rejects the view that a priori knowledge just consists of certain conventions about how we use words. His view was that we have certain concepts, such as action, that if we need to understand the world, to understand what's going on, we must use these concepts. Say if I didn't have the concept of action, I wouldn't understand what people are doing. I might see people moving their bodies in various ways, but I would just be viewing it as if, say, a chemist views physical particles. I wouldn't understand what's going on. So Mises' view, which is derived from Kant to a large extent, is that we need to have certain concepts before we can understand what's going on in the world. Now, one thing I find you may have noticed from what I've said so far, the way I presented Mises, he doesn't use an argument that you'll find many people are using. You probably encountered this argument in your studies of Austrian economics, those of you who've taken courses in Austrian economics. Sometimes the argument is given that suppose somebody denies that human beings don't act. So the person's very saying that shows that the statement is false in that the person saying that is itself an action. So if I say human beings don't act, I'm acting myself. So then that shows that what I'm saying is false. This is sometimes called a performative or pragmatic contradiction. For example, suppose I say in English, I've never uttered an English sentence. My uttering that sentence in English shows that what I've said is false. So many people these days take that to be the key move in understanding, in demonstrating that human beings act. They say, well, if you deny it, you're refuting yourself in this way. Now, Mises doesn't make that argument. It's not that there's something wrong with the argument, but that isn't the way he does make argue that we actually just says, well, it's evident that we act. We know this from experience and we have no good reason to deny that we act. The various deterministic theories are just speculation. It's an ultimate given for us that we act. And I think we could see he has a considerable point to what he's doing because suppose we take this pragmatic inconsistency argument. As I say, it's a good argument, but all it shows is that there's at least one action. It doesn't show that action is central to understanding human behavior. So the real way to go here, I think Mises is quite correct, is that it's known in experience that we act. I don't want to go into a difference between Mises and the other great, the two great economists of the 20th century, Ludwig van Mises and Murray Rothbard. Murray Rothbard had a somewhat different answer from Mises to how we know why we have a priori knowledge. And Mises, Rothbard, like Mises says, we know that people act because we see that they do. The senses, say, present us, sometimes we can directly see that people are acting. According to Rothbard, say, when we sense the external world, it isn't just that we can see various colors, shapes and so on. But the mind can abstract from what it sees and come up with generalizations, come up with concepts. For example, we can judge that color isn't a shape. Say we see, imagine we see a red round shape, we can distinguish just by abstraction between the color and the shape of the object. And taking this further, Rothbard says that we can grasp not only the difference between colors and shapes, we can grasp that there are things in the world, things that have essential properties. So the mind, the human mind can see directly that human beings act because we abstract this from the senses. We see that this is an essential property of human beings that they act. We grasp it immediately. So the distinction between Mises and Rothbard on this point is that understanding why people act is that according to Mises, I'm explaining concepts are something like a grid that people have that they impose on an external world that they are able to understand the world by seeing the world within, by using these concepts without these concepts, we wouldn't understand what's going on. But for Rothbard, the concepts aren't something like a grid or something between us and reality, but the concepts present the object as it actually is. So in this way, Rothbard is like the empiricists in that he takes all our knowledge to start with what's given to the senses, but he disagrees with the empiricists. Remember the empiricists think that everything that we know about the world is contingent as to say it could be otherwise. The empiricists would like would say like a positive say, well, we can certainly Rothbard is right, we can certainly know things about the external world by observing them. But these won't be telling us what must be the case. This is just contingent. It could have been otherwise say I could see human beings, if I could see that human beings act, I couldn't see that human beings necessarily act. This is a necessary property of human beings, but Rothbard disagrees with that. He says, if in fact it's necessary that human beings act, and this is something we can grasp through knowing, seeing that human being by abstracting from what we see, we grasp that human beings act, we can say that it's an a priori truth in the sense that it's, we know this by thinking about it, but our thinking about it isn't separated from our external perception. It isn't that we have some conceptual logic that we've imposed on the world, we just grasp that human beings act in this way so we can call it a necessary truth and we could define, we could characterize an a priori truth as one that's necessary in this way and that would be necessary in the sense that it's synthetic, it gives us knowledge about the world, so it's a synthetic a priori truth, but it's very different from a synthetic a priori is understood by the in content philosophy. You'll notice Mises never in fact uses the term synthetic a priori in human action. So I'll just conclude by another point Rothbard makes and Mises would certainly agree with this is that praxeology is conducted in ordinary language. It wouldn't be an advantage to formalize praxeology using mathematical logic and the reason for this is that in praxeology, we need to understand every step of the argument, not just to follow a mechanical procedure say if we have in say in a mathematical equation we could solve it in certain case my case, I probably wouldn't be able to solve it, but if we could solve it, we could solve it by some sort of certain rules that we would just follow automatically, and we would be interested in the conclusion but we wouldn't know the step of the proof wouldn't have a separate meaning. So Rothbard stresses that in the study of praxeology, we want to understand every step of what's going on. So this is what Kant has this notion I was called this an extensive proof and so this is why in praxeology we don't use mathematical logic rely on ordinary language. So I think I'll stop now I hope I've given you some idea of some of the basic concepts of praxeology and succeeded in confusing you at least a little bit.