Mises versus Ayer on Analytic Propositions and a priori Reasoning

Actually, the analysis below reveals that Mises appears to have misunderstood the logical positivist position to some degree, and that Mises does indeed need synthetic a priori knowledge for praxeology.

First, let us look at this crucial passage from Human Action on analytic a priori inference:

“Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them. Hence, according to a popular objection, it cannot add anything to our knowledge.

All geometrical theorems are already implied in the axioms. The concept of a rectangular triangle already implies the theorem of Pythagoras. This theorem is a tautology, its deduction results in an analytic judgment. Nonetheless nobody would contend that geometry in general and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge. Cognition from purely deductive reasoning is also creative and opens for our mind access to previously barred spheres. The significant task of aprioristic reasoning is on the one hand to bring into relief all that is implied in the categories, concepts, and premises and, on the other hand, to show what they do not imply. It is its vocation to render manifest and obvious what was hidden and unknown before. ….

The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the same source as human reasoning. Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason. The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.” (Mises 2008: 38–39).

So Mises, in the first paragraph, is asserting that aprioristic reasoning “cannot add anything to our knowledge,” according to a “popular” objection, which is a reference to the logical positivism that dominated philosophy in the post-1945 era in Europe and America.

But that was not the logical positivist view at all. To see this, we need only look at the crucial passage of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936; 2nd edn. 1946):

“When we say that analytic propositions are devoid of factual, content, and consequently that they say nothing, we are not suggesting that they are senseless in the way that metaphysical utterances are senseless. For, although they give us no information about any empirical situation, they do enlighten us by illustrating the way in which we use certain symbols. Thus if I say, ‘Nothing can be coloured in different ways at the same time with respect to the same part of itself’, I am not saying anything about the properties of any actual thing; but I am not talking nonsense. I am expressing an analytic proposition, which records our determination to call a colour expanse which differs in quality from a neighbouring colour expanse a different part of a given thing. In other words, I am simply calling attention to the implications of a certain linguistic usage. Similarly, in saying that if all Bretons are Frenchmen, and all Frenchmen Europeans, then all Bretons are Europeans, I am not describing any matter of fact. But I am showing that in the statement that all Bretons are Frenchmen, and all Frenchmen Europeans, the further statement that all Bretons are Europeans is implicitly contained. And I am thereby indicating the convention which governs our usage of the words ‘if’ and ‘all’.

We see, then, that there is a sense in which analytic propositions do give us new knowledge. They call attention to linguistic usages, of which we might otherwise not be conscious, and they reveal unsuspected implications in our assertions and beliefs.” (Ayer 1971 [1936]: 73–74).

We see here that the logical positivist view, as held by Ayer, is that analytic a priori propositions are

(1) not meaningless or nonsense as “metaphysical” propositions were presumed to be;

(2) did have real meaning and sense, and

(3) could and do provide human beings with “new knowledge,” such as revealing “unsuspected implications in our assertions and beliefs.”

In sense (3), then, not even A. J. Ayer denied that a priori reasoning from analytic statements can yield new knowledge: what Ayer was denying was that analytic a priori reasoning gives us necessarily true knowledge of the real, external world.

So Mises was wrong: his positivist opponents did not claim that a priori inference with analytic statements adds nothing to human knowledge.

What they did claim is that a priori reasoning did not yield necessarily true knowledge of the real world. But here Mises clearly disagrees:

“The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the same source as human reasoning. Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason. The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.” (Mises 2008: 38–39).

According to Mises, praxeological reasoning yields

(1) “apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history,” and

(2) praxeology “conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.”

Epistemologically speaking, the only way it can do this is to either

(1) be Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge, or

(2) be the functional and epistemological equivalent of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge (even if Mises chose not to use the term synthetic a priori explicitly).

But the idea that Mises never linked his epistemology to Kant is utterly untrue.

Why? The reason is that the very term “category” comes from Kant, and Mises’s idea of a “category of action” was clearly inspired by Kantian a priori categories:

“Every theorem of praxeology is deduced by logical reasoning from the category of action. It partakes of the apodictic certainty provided by logical reasoning that starts from an a priori category.” (Mises 1978: 44).

“Following in the wake of Kant’s analyses, philosophers raised the question: How can the human mind, by aprioristic thinking, deal with the reality of the external world? As far as praxeology is concerned, the answer is obvious. Both, a priori thinking and reasoning on the one hand and human action on the other, are manifestations of the human mind. The logical structure of the human mind creates the reality of action. Reason and action are congeneric and homogeneous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.” (Mises 1978 [1962]: 42).

In the last passage, from Mises’s The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (1962), he is explicitly linking his “category of action” to Kant’s philosophy.

I see no way around this conclusion.

Further Reading
“Mises on Kant and Praxeology,” September 15, 2013.

“Barrotta’s Kantian Critique of Mises’s Epistemology,” July 28, 2013.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayer, A. J. 1971 [1936]. Language, Truth and Logic. Penguin Books, London.

Mises, Ludwig von. 1978 [1962]. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (2nd edn), Sheed Andrews & McMeel, Kansas City.

Mises, Ludwig von. 2008. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The Scholar’s Edition. Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.

Robert Murphy gets Mises’s Epistemology Wrong

Over at his blog, Robert Murphy is involved in a new Methodenstreit, and selectively quotes a passage from Mises that demonstrates that Murphy himself does not properly understand Mises’s epistemology:

Robert Murphy, “Mises on A Priori Reasoning,” Free Advice, 12 September.

That is underscored by this comment of his later in the post:

“I was going to be snotty about it, but that would be unfair since many Misesians thought Mises was making synthetic a priori propositions. But, look at literally the sentence right before the one you quoted. Mises wrote:

‘This theorem is a tautology, its deduction results in an analytic judgment. Nonetheless nobody would contend that geometry in general and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge.’

So Mises is here saying that the Pythagorean theorem is an analytic a priori statement.”
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/09/mises-on-a-priori-reasoning.html#comment-73618

First, let us imagine (for the sake of argument) that Mises was really saying that praxeology and Euclidean geometry are analytic a priori. What are the consequences of that?

As analytic a priori systems, neither praxeology nor Euclidean geometry can provide us with any necessarily true knowledge of the real world known a priori. The instant either is asserted as true of the real world, both become synthetic a posteriori and must be judged true or false empirically.

But, if that were true, this has destroyed praxeology as the system imagined by Mises as providing necessarily true knowledge of the real world known a priori:

“Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification and falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events” (Mises 2008: 32).

Mises is saying here that praxeology is not just an analytic a priori system. First, he is saying that it is not open to verification and falsification on the grounds of experience (or a posteriori), but can be known a priori. Secondly, it also provides necessarily true knowledge of the real world that cannot be refuted by empirical evidence (“It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences”).

The only way it can do this is if the theorems of praxeology are synthetic a priori.

Murphy has badly misinterpreted Mises. If Mises really thought that praxeology was merely analytic a priori, then the Mises quote I have just cited above makes no sense. Mises’s epistemology would be hopelessly contradictory and self-refuting.

Secondly, let us return to the original passage Murphy quotes in his post.

But let us quote it in its entirety and with full context:

“Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them. Hence, according to a popular objection, it cannot add anything to our knowledge.

All geometrical theorems are already implied in the axioms. The concept of a rectangular triangle already implies the theorem of Pythagoras. This theorem is a tautology, its deduction results in an analytic judgment. Nonetheless nobody would contend that geometry in general and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge. Cognition from purely deductive reasoning is also creative and opens for our mind access to previously barred spheres. The significant task of aprioristic reasoning is on the one hand to bring into relief all that is implied in the categories, concepts, and premises and, on the other hand, to show what they do not imply. It is its vocation to render manifest and obvious what was hidden and unknown before.

In the concept of money all the theorems of monetary theory are already implied. The quantity theory does not add to our knowledge anything which is not virtually contained in the concept of money. It transforms, develops, and unfolds; it only analyzes and is therefore tautological like the theorem of Pythagoras in relation to the concept of the rectangular triangle. However, nobody would deny the cognitive value of the quantity theory. To a mind not enlightened by economic reasoning it remains unknown. A long line of abortive attempts to solve the problems concerned shows that it was certainly not easy to attain the present state of knowledge.

It is not a deficiency of the system of aprioristic science that it does not convey to us full cognition of reality. Its concepts and theorems are mental tools opening the approach to a complete grasp of reality; they are, to be sure, not in themselves already the totality of factual knowledge about all things. Theory and the comprehension of living and changing reality are not in opposition to one another. Without theory, the general aprioristic science of human action, there is no comprehension of the reality of human action.

The relation between reason and experience has long been one of the fundamental philosophical problems. Like all other problems of the critique of knowledge, philosophers have approached it only with reference to the natural sciences. They have ignored the sciences of human action. Their contributions have been useless for praxeology.

It is customary in the treatment of the epistemological problems of economics to adopt one of the solutions suggested for the natural sciences. Some authors recommend Poincaré’s conventionalism. They regard the premises of economic reasoning as a matter of linguistic or postulational convention. Others prefer to acquiesce in ideas advanced by Einstein. Einstein raises the question: ‘How can mathematics, a product of human reason that does not depend on any experience, so exquisitely fit the objects of reality? Is human reason able to discover, unaided by experience through pure reasoning the features of real things?’ And his answer is: ‘As far as the theorems of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’

However, the sciences of human action differ radically from the natural sciences. All authors eager to construct an epistemological system of the sciences of human action according to the pattern of the natural sciences err lamentably.

The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the same source as human reasoning. Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason. The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.” (Mises 2008: 38–39).

First, it is quite clear here that Mises is rejecting the “popular objection” he refers to in paragraph 1. Mises is saying that Euclidean geometry provides real knowledge about the external world, despite being a system of tautologies derived by deduction from the axioms. He is implying that Euclidean geometry is Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge (because Mises cannot properly distinguish between (1) analytic a priori pure geometry and (2) synthetic a posteriori applied geometry).

Secondly, although it is poorly expressed, Mises appears to be thinking of synthetic a priori knowledge when he says that:

“In the concept of money all the theorems of monetary theory are already implied. The quantity theory does not add to our knowledge anything which is not virtually contained in the concept of money. It transforms, develops, and unfolds; it only analyzes and is therefore tautological like the theorem of Pythagoras in relation to the concept of the rectangular triangle. However, nobody would deny the cognitive value of the quantity theory.”

Mises cannot seriously believe that his monetary theory provides no necessary knowledge of reality, and it seems that he is referring to the synthetic character of these theories by his reference above to “the cognitive value of the quantity theory.”

Next, Mises is very clear in rejecting the analytic a priori character of praxeology when he rejects (1) Poincaré’s conventionalism and (2) Einstein’s view of mathematics as being divided into (a) pure mathematics (which is necessarily true) and (b) applied mathematics (which is only true of the real world contingently).

The final paragraph of Mises clinches my argument:

The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.” (Mises 2008: 39).

This entails that praxeological theorems are necessarily and absolutely true, and are known a priori, but also yield necessary knowledge of the real world. That is nothing but Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge.

And, finally, if Mises did not think that praxeological theorems were synthetic a priori, why is Mises desperate to defend the existence of synthetic a priori in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (1962)?:

“The essence of logical positivism is to deny the cognitive value of a priori knowledge by pointing out that all a priori propositions are merely analytic. They do not provide new information, but are merely verbal or tautological, asserting what has already been implied in the definitions and premises. Only experience can lead to synthetic propositions. There is an obvious objection against this doctrine, viz., that this proposition that there are no synthetic a priori propositions is in itself a — as the present writer thinks, false — synthetic a priori proposition, for it can manifestly not be established by experience.

The whole controversy is, however, meaningless when applied to praxeology. It refers essentially to geometry. Its present state, especially its treatment by logical positivism, has been deeply influenced by the shock that Western philosophy received from the discovery of non-Euclidian geometries. Before Bolyai and Lobachevsky, geometry was, in the eyes of the philosophers, the paragon of perfect science; it was assumed that it provided unshakable certainty forever and for everybody. To proceed also in other branches of knowledge more geometrico was the great ideal of truth-seekers. All traditional epistemological concepts began to totter when the attempts to construct non-Euclidian geometries succeeded.

Yet praxeology is not geometry. It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch. In dealing with the epistemology of the sciences of human action, one must not take one’s cue from geometry, mechanics, or any other science.

The assumptions of Euclid were once considered as self-evidently true. Present-day epistemology looks upon them as freely chosen postulates, the starting point of a hypothetical chain of reasoning. Whatever this may mean, it has no reference at all to the problems of praxeology.” (Mises 1962: 5).

In other words, the collapse of Euclidian geometry as synthetic a priori knowledge does not apply to the synthetic a priori status of praxeology!

This, if nothing else, is breathtaking in its pig-headed unwillingness to reconsider the epistemology status of praxeology given the fall of Euclidian geometry as the paradigmatic case of synthetic a priori knowledge.

I will just end by noting that part of the problem we face in interpreting Mises is that Mises hismelf was not always clear, and was probably confused about basic epistemological concepts, as his critic Hans Albert has noted:

“Mises gives a Kantian answer to the question of how the a priori character of praxeological knowledge and its apodictic certainty is to be explained. This knowledge apparently can be reduced to the logical structure of the human mind which is supposed to be the basis for thought and action. ... On the one hand he seems to suggest that he is introducing with his principle of action a synthetic a priori proposition, as he ascribes informational content to the principle. On the other hand, he declares the question of whether the respective propositions are synthetic or analytic to be purely verbal and therefore uninteresting. This seems to show that he was not aware of the connection between analyticity and informational vacuity. He permanently compares his allegedly a priori knowledge with logical and mathematical knowledge and gives such a description of the respective propositions and their mode of derivation that one comes to suspect them to be analytic. He confounds the analytical character of propositions with the logical character of the relationships between propositions in a deduction. But the fact that particular propositions are deducible from particular sets of premises does not render them analytic. For instance, in physics propositions from geometry get an empirical interpretation, and, interpreted in this way, they are synthetic. But propositions which are the result of the ‘logical unfolding’ of certain concepts contain no information. They are analytic not because they are derived, but because they follow from definitions which do not carry information themselves. When Mises tells us that the concept of money already implies all theorems of the theory of money, the alleged certainty of the basis of this derivation does not help him to establish a nonvacuous economic theory. The theory of money as he envisages it here would be without informational content and could not be used to explain anything.” (Albert 1999: 131–132).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert, H. 1999. Between Social Science, Religion and Politics: Essays in Critical Rationalism. Rodopi, Amsterdam.

Mises, Ludwig von. 1962. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method. Van Nostrand, Princeton, N.J.

Mises, L. von. 2008. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The Scholar’s Edition. Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.

Hoppe’s Caricature of Empiricism

In all its befuddled glory:

“I would like to challenge the very starting point of the empiricists’ philosophy. There are several conclusive refutations of empiricism. I will show the empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge to be plainly false and self-contradictory. That will then lead us to developing the Austrian position on theory, history, and forecasting.

This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.

Let us first assume it is analytical. According to the empiricist doctrine, however, an analytical proposition is nothing but scribbles on paper, hot air, entirely void of any meaningful content. It says nothing about anything real. And hence one would have to conclude that empiricism could not even say and mean what it seems to say and mean. Yet if, on the other hand, it says and means what we thought it did all along, then it does inform us about something real. As a matter of fact, it informs us about the fundamental structure of reality. It says that there is nothing in reality that can be known to be one way or another prior to future experiences which may confirm or disconfirm our hypothesis.

And if this meaningful proposition is taken to be analytical, that is, as a statement that does not allow any falsification and whose truth can be established by an analysis of its terms alone, one has no less than a glaring contradiction at hand. Empiricism itself would prove to be nothing but self-defeating nonsense.

So perhaps we should choose the other available option and declare the fundamental empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge an empirical statement. But then the empiricist position would no longer carry any weight whatsoever. For if this were done, it would have to be admitted that the proposition – as an empirical one – might well be wrong and that one would be entitled to hear on the basis of what criterion one would have to decide whether or not it was. More decisively, as an empirical proposition, right or wrong, it could only state a historical fact, something like ‘all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical.’ The statement would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones. Indeed, if empiricism's central claim were declared an empirical proposition, empiricism would cease altogether to be an epistemology, a logic of science, and would be no more than a completely arbitrary verbal convention of calling certain arbitrary ways of dealing with certain statements certain arbitrary names. Empiricism would be a position void of any justification.” (Hoppe 2007: 33–34).

It would be difficult to pack so many non sequiturs and straw man arguments into so few paragraphs, but it is quite an achievement.

First, Hoppe conflates logical positivism, Popper’s Critical Rationalism, and other empiricist traditions. For instance, the (1) logical positivist verifiability criterion for meaningfulness is conflated with (2) Popper’s falsifiability criterion for scientific knowledge.

Secondly, Hoppe imputes to all his empiricist opponents a certain view of the logical positivists called the verifiability criterion for meaningfulness, but can’t even get that view right, and produces a garbled statement of it.

The logical positivists did not say that an analytic a priori statement is “scribbles on paper, hot air, entirely void of any meaningful content” or “self-defeating nonsense” at all. They said that of metaphysical propositions that were neither analytic a priori nor synthetic a posteriori, and that could not in principle be verified.

So the logical positivists did clearly think that mathematics and other valid analytic a priori statements had meaningful, cognitive content, although this content did not assert anything necessarily true about the real world. Moreover, Popper’s falsifiability criterion for scientific knowledge does not state that metaphysical propositions have no meaningful cognitive content, but only that they are not scientific statements.

And the fact is that the strict verifiability criterion for meaningfulness was quickly weakened and abandoned, and the type of empiricism defended in modern analytic philosophy has long since ceased to make any such extreme claims.

Then we have this:

“This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.”

And the answer is: that empiricist statement about epistemology is synthetic a posteriori.

But, when Hoppe considers this possibility, he commits a bizarre non sequitur:

“So perhaps we should choose the other available option and declare the fundamental empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge an empirical statement. But then the empiricist position would no longer carry any weight whatsoever. For if this were done, it would have to be admitted that the proposition – as an empirical one – might well be wrong and that one would be entitled to hear on the basis of what criterion one would have to decide whether or not it was. More decisively, as an empirical proposition, right or wrong, it could only state a historical fact, something like ‘all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical.’ The statement would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones. Indeed, if empiricism’s central claim were declared an empirical proposition, empiricism would cease altogether to be an epistemology, a logic of science, and would be no more than a completely arbitrary verbal convention of calling certain arbitrary ways of dealing with certain statements certain arbitrary names. Empiricism would be a position void of any justification.” (Hoppe 2007: 34).

According to Hoppe, just because the statement that

“Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge”

is synthetic a posteriori, then the “empiricist position” can “no longer carry any weight whatsoever,” and empiricism “would cease altogether to be an epistemology.”

Indeed, the defence of the original epistemological principle is empirical and its truth is only probable or highly probable, but the lack of certainty produces no such epistemological crisis for empiricism, for the reason that it never aimed at absolute necessary truth in the first place, as Hoppe demands. Our best scientific theories do not have apodictic truth, nor does the inductive method yield absolute certainty, yet modern science is incredibly successful.

The rejection of dogmatism and the willingness to regard any scientific theory as capable of revision or falsification are what give modern scientific epistemology its great strength.

But if we adopted the same type of argument used by Hoppe, then we must conclude that modern science must “no longer carry any weight whatsoever” and “would cease altogether to be an epistemology.”

Secondly, the legitimate response of an empiricist to a Rationalist that “all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical” can be defended as true. Hoppe’s point here carries no weight.

We need only look at the way Kant’s original synthetic a priori knowledge, such as Euclidean geometry, necessary and deterministic causation, or certain laws of logic have either been refuted by modern science or seriously questioned.

Hoppe’s next statement that the empiricist’s classification of knowledge “would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones” is also a non sequitur, since, on the contrary, it is a defensible starting point for analysing all statements and all future statements and determining whether they could possibly provide synthetic truth but be known a priori. If, for example, some Rationalist asserts that statement x is a synthetic a priori truth, but we discover that the real world produces overwhelming empirical evidence against the proposition, then it is the Rationalist who is faced with an epistemological crisis.

And of course Hoppe seems totally unaware of recent developments in analytic epistemology, such as the Kripkean necessary a posteriori or (more controversially) the contingent a priori, which expand the range of epistemological types of knowledge, but which are of no comfort to the traditional Rationalist.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 2007. Economic Science and the Austrian Method. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn. Ala.

Mises versus the Vienna Circle

The untenable nature of Mises’s economic apriorism was noticed by the logical positivists, and is described in a recent study of Lionel Robbins:

“The Vienna Circle took a hard line on epistemology, and on the demarcation between mathematics and science on the one hand and non-science (or metaphysics) on the other. The propositions of logic and mathematics are necessarily true, true by definition of the terms and hence tautologous ... . They are analytic a priori in Kant’s terminology. All other propositions may be true or false, and if such propositions are to be scientific they must be capable of confirmation or refutation by empirical facts. Such propositions are synthetic a posteriori statements. The implication is that there can be no synthetic a priori statements in a science, because such statements are neither analytic nor verifiable. Haberler, Hutchison, Kaufmann and all spotted that Mises’s conception of economics ran into the problem that insofar as it was purely analytical and hence a priori true, it could not also be an empirical science.” (Howson 2011: 272).

Of course, one does not have to agree with the logical positivists on their verifiability principle to see that there is still merit in this view.

The logical positivists did much to demonstrate that synthetic a priori knowledge is untenable, and to refute the myths of apriorist Rationalism, of which Mises’s praxeology is an obvious example.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Howson, Susan. 2011. Lionel Robbins. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.

Reply to a “Red Herring on Praxeology”

My recent posts on epistemology and praxeology are criticised here:

“A Red Herring on Praxeology: A Reply to Lord Keynes,” Economic Thought, 6 September, 2013.

Note that the post was written by Mattheus von Guttenberg, not Jonathan Finegold Catalán.

Let us take the major points one by one:

(1) The first point is as follows:

“Lord Keynes tries to undermine Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori by use of empirical evidence. This will not do. The synthetic a priori, as Kant formulates it, is a category of knowledge by which we come to understand synthetic claims (claims about the real world) by means of aprioristic reasoning (logical deduction). Pointing to an empirical event as falsifying or refuting a claim about a methodology misses the mark entirely. Kant’s ideas on the synthetic a priori may well be wrong or mistaken, but one must prove so by means of showing where the logical error lies. It is simply poor philosophy to argue that an empirical event can refute epistemic claims. This is a category mistake. Epistemic claims — claims of how we understand knowledge — are of an altogether different category than claims of knowledge themselves.”

The idea that one cannot refute the claim that some particular knowledge x is synthetic a priori is a bizarre assertion, and entails that modern science did not refute the rationalist claim that Euclidean geometry was a universal theory of space known as necessarily true a priori. Is that what Mattheus von Guttenberg thinks?

Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge is known with necessary truth, and known without appeal to empirical evidence. Yet, as we will see below, it was precisely the collapse of most imagined synthetic a priori knowledge via the empirical evidence from modern science that credibly refuted the existence of this type of knowledge. Other remaining kinds of synthetic a priori knowledge, such as mathematics, have been shown logically to be analytic a priori statements deduced from axioms, and ultimately non-informative in an empirical sense.

(2) The next claim is this:

“In the second place, Kant’s musings on pre-Einsteinian geometry are fascinating, but hardly foundational for the synthetic a priori paradigm.”

On the contrary! Euclidean geometry was the most fundamental kind of knowledge that Rationalists down through the centuries have relied on to support their claim that there was synthetic a priori knowledge.

Euclidean geometry was the very paradigm of alleged synthetic a priori truth (Salmon 2010: 393; Musgrave 1993: 245–246).

(3) Next, we have this:

“Just because Kant did not, or could not, imagine non-Euclidean geometric theorems does not invalidate his notions on the category of the synthetic a priori in general.”

As it happens, the collapse of Euclidean geometry as a universal theory of space known a priori deprived Kant of his major example of alleged synthetic a priori knowledge, but, fundamentally, all of Kant’s alleged synthetic a priori knowledge has also collapsed in the light of modern science and philosophy of mathematics, whether it is Euclidean geometry, time, deterministic causality, mathematics, and so on.

For example, the very belief that we can know a priori that time passes objectively and unidirectionally towards the future is disputed by many physicists on the basis of general relativity, and it is the Eternalist/Block Universe theory of time that is adopted by numerous physicists today. This Eternalist theory actually entails that the perception of the passing of time is an illusion. Although there is a rival theory called Presentism, we cannot know which theory is correct a priori, and the question will be determined empirically.

Moreover, quantum mechanics destroyed the idea of universal deterministic causality known a priori.

Even logical truths like the Law of Excluded Middle, when regarded as universally true a priori, is possibly refuted by quantum mechanics, as Willard Van Orman Quine noted long ago, though he was even more radical in that he denied any strict distinction between even analytic and synthetic truth:

“Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in ... [sc. our web of belief]. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?” (Quine 1951: 40).

(4) Then this passage from Hoppe is quoted:

“Since the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and in particular since Einstein’s relativistic theory of gravitation, the prevailing position regarding geometry is once again empiricist and formalist. It conceives of geometry as either being part of empirical, aposteriori physics, or as being empirically meaningless formalisms. Yet that geometry is either mere play, or forever subject to empirical testing seems to be irreconcilable with the fact that Euclidean geometry is the foundation of engineering and construction, and that nobody there ever thinks of such propositions as only hypothetically true.”

The final sentence in this passage is a non sequitur.

Yes, Euclidean geometry is a highly useful system in a limited domain. But how can we justify that it is useful in this limited domain? The answer is: empirically.

We have a great deal of empirical evidence over a long time that Euclidean geometry is useful in a certain domain. Yet its truth as a physical theory of space in that domain is only ever extremely probable and known a posteriori.

Contrary to Hoppe, that fact that “nobody [sc. in engineering and construction] … ever thinks of such propositions as only hypothetically true” is irrelevant! Hoppe has committed a crude informal logical fallacy called the appeal to (invalid) authority (and it may also imply an equally fallacious argumentum ad populum). People who work in engineering and construction most probably do not understand the evidence and arguments from modern science and philosophy of science, so their opinion on this question cannot prove Hoppe’s point, because they are invalid authority. (And even our belief in the probable truth of modern scientific theories ultimately does not come from any consensus of scientists, but from the strength of the arguments and evidence for, and the empirical testing and predictive power of, scientific theories.)

In modern philosophy of science, all scientific theories and geometries (asserted as true theories of real space) are only ever highly probable, fallible, but not certain. Even the scientific theory that the earth revolves around the sun is ultimately an extremely probable theory that has been confirmed by a vast amount of evidence, but could in theory be false.

For example, can we know a priori that Euclidean geometry is a necessarily true theory of all space in our universe? That is what the advocate of classical synthetic a priori knowledge is claiming, and yet the belief that Euclidean geometry was a universally true theory known a priori is precisely what was discredited when general relativity and non-Euclidean geometry received overwhelming empirical support.

(5) Furthermore, as a matter of fact, von Guttenberg’s claim that I only think that there are two forms of knowledge – analytic a priori or synthetic a posteriori – is false, since I happen to think that Kripke’s necessary a posteriori knowledge is a defensible third type (though I find Kripke’s concept of the contingent a priori unconvincing). But Kripkean necessary a posteriori propositions are epistemologically different from synthetic a priori ones, and seem of little value to modern Rationalists, since they apply to identity statements using proper names, definite descriptions, or scientific statements of the essence of natural kind terms, and are also only known by empirical evidence (that is, a posteriori).

(6) Finally, von Guttenberg offers these remarks on causality:

“Even making empirical observations requires that the observer understand a causal framework, simply in order to make sense of his observations. The understanding of causality is thus inherent and irrefutable within every action. This renders causality to the status of the synthetic a priori and—that every event is interconnected with other events and causes—is both true logically, because every action demonstrates the actor must know this, and it also gives us usable and important information about the real world.”

No, making empirical observations presupposes some metaphysical assumptions, such as the validity of induction, the universality of the laws of nature in space and time, the existence of an external world, and so on.

But these are not known a priori: they are defended with probable inductive arguments (some better than others), and the justification of these metaphysical assumptions is not certain: modern science has long since abandoned apodictic certainty, or any belief that mere human intuition gives necessary truth.

Take causality: the Kantian idea of necessary, deterministic causation as a universal truth known a priori is untrue given the idea of probable but not necessary causation in modern quantum physics (Melnick 2006: 229; Anscombe 1993), which now also separates the notions of causation and determinism (Weinert 2004: 260).

An even more shocking possibility can be given. Kant apparently thought that the principle of the uniformity of nature was a synthetic a priori statement. But a few years ago some remarkable evidence was reported that the “fine structure constant” (or what is called “alpha”) – a fundamental law of nature – may not be constant throughout the universe:

“Laws of Physics Vary Throughout the Universe, New Study Suggests,” Sciencedaily.com, 9 September, 2010.

Michael Brooks, “Laws of Physics may change across the Universe,” New Scientist, 8 September 2010.

If even fundamental laws of nature as established by modern science can be empirically falsifiable, there is little hope for the rest of Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anscombe, G. E. M. 1993. “Causality and Determination,” in Ernest Sosa and Michael Tooley (eds.), Causation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Melnick, Arthur. 2006. “Kant’s Proof of Substance and Causation,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 203–237.

Musgrave, Alan. 1993. Common Sense, Science and Scepticism: Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Quine, W. V. 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60: 20–43.

Salmon, W. C. 2010. “Geometry,” in Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup (eds.), A Companion to Epistemology (2nd edn.). Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK and Malden, MA. 393–395.

Weinert, Friedel. 2004. The Scientist as Philosopher: Philosophical Consequences of Great Scientific Discoveries. Springer, Berlin and London.