Hoppe’s Ridiculous Attack on the Epistemological Foundation of Moderate Empiricism

I get mercifully few libertarians in the comments sections these days, but I recently got this challenge here.

Patrick asks me to respond to this critique here.

This is a passage from the Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Hoppe 2007: 33–34), and Hoppe is a defender of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge as the epistemological foundation of epistemology and Misesian praxeology.

The proposition that is the epistemological foundation for classical and modern moderate empiricism, as Hoppe notes, is 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.” (Hoppe 2007: 33).

Hoppe notes that this must be defended and classified as either (1) analytic a priori or (2) synthetic a posteriori.

So which one is it? The answer is that it can be rationally and easily defended as a synthetic a posteriori proposition (that is to say, an empirical proposition).

But, according to Hoppe, this somehow leads to this:

“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).

Huh? No longer “carry any weight whatsoever”?

If that were true, then all human natural or social science of any kind based on foundational empirical propositions or assumptions would not “carry any weight whatsoever.” This is nonsense.

The standard ideas we presuppose in either the natural sciences or social sciences (or indeed in everyday common sense) can indeed be justified empirically, by experience, inductive argument and inference to the best explanation (which is just another non-deductive, or inductive form of reasoning) by long debates and arguments in philosophy or in the natural and social sciences too.

At the most basic level, there are all sorts of assumptions that are epistemological foundations of our beliefs and scientific theories (including economics), such as the following:

(1) the real existence of other human minds;

(2) the real existence of an external world of matter and energy that is the causal origin of our sensory data (= an indirect realist ontology);

(3) that the past had real existence (and is not some figment of our imagination);

(4) the existence of a set of physical and chemical laws that have been discovered by the natural sciences that account for the order and nature of the universe;

(5) the view that our earth is about 4.54 billion years old;

(6) the view that all livings things on our earth are the product of a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection (and, if one wants to be technical, also by (i) sexual selection and (ii) artificial selection by humans);

(7) the human mind is the product of the physical activity of the brain, and so on.

And of course we can keep listing such propositions too as we move from natural science to the social sciences.

None of these assumptions can be justified as analytic a priori or as Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge. They are all empirical propositions. Does the admission that they are not 100% certain make science impossible? No.

For example, we have the empirical proposition that:

“the earth and the planets of our solar system revolve around the sun.”

This is an empirical proposition, which is contingent, known a posteriori, and its truth is probabilistic.

That is to say, even though there is an enormous amount of empirical evidence in its favour, it could be that this proposition is wrong, because as a contingent and probabilistic truth, it is not 100% certain and never can be. It’s not impossible that it might be false, though it seems extremely improbable given all we know.

We must always be open to the possibility that new evidence might suddenly emerge that would throw doubt on our belief, even if (again) this seems extremely improbable.

But, at present, we have overwhelming evidence that it is true. The proposition therefore stands as a rational and defensible foundational assumption of any branch of cosmology studying solar systems.

There is no profound epistemological problem with this state of affairs, or with the foundation of the physics of solar systems, because we never said that the empirical propositions were 100% certain, nor do we need them to be, in order to get empirical knowledge whose truth is probabilistic and rationally defensible as true on the current evidence.

We accept the truth of all empirical propositions only as long as the weight of current evidence demonstrates that we have a good or very good case to think they are true. E.g., we have no good reason to doubt that gravity will suddenly stop operating 5 seconds from now, though it’s not impossible that it might for some unknown reason. Is that any reason to jump out of a 100 story building now and expect to float to the ground unharmed?

It is the same, broadly speaking, with the foundational proposition of moderate empiricism.

Our 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.

In essence, there are very good reasons why most analytic philosophers have rejected Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge, as follows:

(1) The paradigmatic type of synthetic a priori knowledge that was Euclidean geometry, when asserted as a universally true theory of space, has been shown to be severely contradicted by the empirical evidence – and this is not what we would expect to find if this theory really was necessarily true and an irrefutable theory of reality.

(2) We can eliminate the problem of virtually all proposed synthetic a priori knowledge by carefully separating pure maths/pure geometry (which is analytic a priori and necessarily true, but not describing reality) from applied maths/applied geometry (which is asserted as true of reality but is synthetic a posteriori and contingent).

For example, most of mathematics can be clearly explained as an analytic a priori system, as derived from pure logic and set theory (Schwartz 2012: 19), as shown by the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead.

(3) From (1) and (2), we can satisfactorily explain proposed synthetic a priori knowledge either as (i) analytic a priori or (ii) synthetic a posteriori, eliminating a complex and unnecessary category.

If any Kantian or libertarian has any further nor new example of an alleged Kantian synthetic a priori statement, then he or she can make it, and we can scrutinise any and all such proposed propositions and see whether the claim is convincing. I’ve not yet seen any such proposed or credible proposition. For example, the idea that the human action axiom is a synthetic a priori truth collapses like a house of cards when seriously scrutinised.

Ultimately, we can reject synthetic a priori knowledge by inference to the best explanation and Ockham’s razor.

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

Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Further Reading
For anyone interested in understanding why Misesian praxeology and Kantian synthetic a priori epistemology is wrong, see my posts here:

“Mises’ Praxeology: A Critique,” October 1, 2010.
“Limits of the Human Action Axiom,” February 28, 2011.
“Hayek on Mises’ Apriorism,” May 23, 2011.
“Mises and Logic,” August 26, 2011.
“Karl Popper’s View of Mises,” October 2, 2012.
“My Post on Praxeology gets some Attention,” March 7, 2012.
“Mises Flunks Evolution 101,” April 2, 2013.
“What is the Epistemological Status of Praxeology and the Action Axiom?,” July 27, 2013.
“Barrotta’s Kantian Critique of Mises’s Epistemology,” July 28, 2013.
“David Friedman versus Robert Murphy,” August 4, 2013.
“Mises Fails Philosophy of Mathematics 101,” August 30, 2013.
“Bob Murphy All At Sea on Geometry and Economic Epistemology,” August 31, 2013.
“Mises’s Non Sequitur on synthetic a priori Knowledge,” September 2, 2013.
“Tokumaru on Mises’s Epistemology,” September 3, 2013.
“Reply to a ‘Red Herring on Praxeology,’” September 6, 2013.
“Mises versus the Vienna Circle,” September 7, 2013.
“Mises’s Flawed Deduction and Praxeology,” September 8, 2013.
“Hoppe’s Caricature of Empiricism,” September 10, 2013.
“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry,” September 11, 2013.
“Robert Murphy gets Mises’s Epistemology Wrong,” September 13, 2013.
“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry, Part 2,” September 14, 2013.
“Mises on Kant and Praxeology,” September 15, 2013.
“Mises was Confused about the Analytic–Synthetic Distinction,” September 15, 2013.
“What is the Epistemological Status of the Law of Demand?,” September 19, 2013.
“A Simple Question for Austrian Apriorists,” November 20, 2013.
“Mises, Action and Uncertainty,” December 4, 2013.
“Córdoba on Praxeology and Economics,” December 7, 2013.
“Schuller’s Challenge to Misesian Apriorists has never been answered,” December 7, 2013.
“Mises versus Ayer on Analytic Propositions and a priori Reasoning,” March 16, 2014.
“David Gordon on Praxeology and the Austrian Method: A Critique,” March 13, 2014.
“Why Mises’s Praxeological Theories are not Necessarily True of the Real World,” March 15, 2014.
“Mises and Empiricism,” April 17, 2014.
“Mark Blaug was Right on Mises’ Method,” April 30, 2014.
“Why Should we reject the Existence of Synthetic a priori Knowledge?,” May 23, 2014.
“Detlev Schlichter on Mises’ Apriorism,” June 5, 2014.
“Robert Taylor versus David Ramsay Steele on Praxeology,” June 6, 2014.
“John Quiggin on Apriorism in Austrian Economics,” July 28, 2014.
“Hutchison on the History of Hayek’s Views on Economic Methodology,” August 2, 2014.
“Hayek on Prediction in the Social Sciences,” August 6, 2014.
“Are all Facts Theory-Laden?,” December 21, 2014.
“Walter Block’s An Austrian Critique of Mainstream Economics: A Critique on Epistemology,” October 8, 2015.

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John Quiggin on Apriorism in Austrian Economics

John Quiggin has an excellent post here on the apriorist method in Austrian economics:

John Quiggin, “Austrian Economics and Flat Earth Geography,” John Quiggin, July 28th, 2014.

Also posted here:
John Quiggin, “Austrian Economics and Flat Earth Geography,” Out of the Crooked Timber, July 27, 2014.

One minor point here is that John Quiggin says that apriorist praxeology was “also endorsed, in a more qualified fashion, by Hayek.”

Actually, Hayek rejected Mises’ apriorism and adopted a – more or less – Popperian method for economics.

We know this because Hayek said so explicitly in a letter to Terence W. Hutchison dated 15 May, 1983. In this, Hayek stated:

“I had never accepted Mises’ a priorism. .... Certainly 1936 was the time when I first saw my distinctive approach in full clarity – but at the time I felt it that I was merely at last able to say clearly what I had always believed – and to explain gently to Mises why I could not ACCEPT HIS A PRIORISM”. (quoted in Caldwell 2009: 323–324).

In fact, in 1937 Hayek had published an article called “Economics and Knowledge” where he criticised Mises’ apriorism; Hayek also appears to have moved closer to Popperian ideas on methodology in later years:

“I became one of the early readers [sc. of Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung, 1934]. It had just come out a few weeks before …. And to me it was so satisfactory because it confirmed this certain view I had already formed due to an experience very similar to Karl Popper’s. Karl Popper is four or five years my junior; so we did not belong to the same academic generation. But our environment in which we formed our ideas was very much the same. It was very largely dominated by discussion, on the one hand, with Marxists and, on the other hand, with Freudians. Both these groups had one very irritating attribute: they insisted that their theories were, in principle, irrefutable. Their system was so built up that there was no possibility – I remember particularly one occasion when I suddenly began to see how ridiculous it all was when I was arguing with Freudians, and they explained, ‘Oh, well, this is due to the death instinct.’ And I said, ‘But this can’t be due to the [death instinct].’ ‘Oh, then this is due to the life instinct.’ … Well, if you have these two alternatives, of course there’s no way of checking whether the theory is true or not. And that led me, already, to the understanding of what became Popper’s main systematic point: that the test of empirical science was that it could be refuted, and that any system which claimed that it was irrefutable was by definition not scientific. I was not a trained philosopher; I didn’t elaborate this. It was sufficient for me to have recognized this, but when I found this thing explicitly argued and justified in Popper, I just accepted the Popperian philosophy for spelling out what I had always felt. Ever since, I have been moving with Popper.” (Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek, pp. 18–19).

So Hayek lumped in apriorism in economics with Marxism and Freudianism!

It is also clear that Mises disliked Popper and Popper’s approach to epistemology in his seminal book Logik der Forschung (1934; later published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959):

“Popper was familiar with the early [sc. socialist] calculation debate – Polanyi’s seminar discussed it – but not much taken by it. He knew of Mises and his circle, but it is unlikely that he read Mises closely. He strongly disliked subjectivism and libertarianism. He ‘first met Mises early in 1935 in Vienna, owing to his interest in my first book. . . . Both he and I were aware of a strong opposition between our views in the field of the theory of knowledge and methodology. Mises saw me as a dangerous opponent.’” (Hacohen 2000: 478).

So it could not be more clear: Mises saw Popper “as a dangerous opponent”; but Hayek, rejecting apriorism, essentially endorsed Popper’s views on epistemology and method.

Nevertheless, Quiggin’s point that Misesian apriorist praxeology as a method for economics is untenable is right.

Mises needed synthetic a priori knowledge and a type of Kantian epistemology to justify his praxeology, but the arguments for synthetic a priori knowledge are unconvincing and must be rejected. Misesian praxeology does not yield universally and necessarily true empirical statements about economic reality.

Furthermore, not even the human action axiom can be known a priori: it is clearly a synthetic a posteriori proposition.

In addition, the very idea that Mises in Human Action succeeded in deducing all his theories by deductive logic is manifestly untrue, and Misesians and Rothbardians have never answered the challenge of George J. Schuller to set out Human Action in a formal symbolic form in which all axioms, premises, and deductions are shown formally and proven.

Even modern Kantians have rejected Mises’ attempt to ground his praxeology on Kant’s epistemology.

There has also arisen amongst modern Austrians a feeble and ignorant belief that Mises was not really using a synthetic a priori epistemology. This is simply untrue, as I have shown here and here, and even if it were true and praxeology were simply analytic a priori, then it would follow logically that praxeology cannot give necessary truth about the real world.

Further Reading
“Limits of the Human Action Axiom,” February 28, 2011.

“Hayek on Mises’ Apriorism,” May 23, 2011.

“What is the Epistemological Status of Praxeology and the Action Axiom?,” July 27, 2013.

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

“David Friedman versus Robert Murphy,” August 4, 2013.

“Mises Fails Philosophy of Mathematics 101,” August 30, 2013.

“Bob Murphy All At Sea on Geometry and Economic Epistemology,” August 31, 2013.

“Mises’s Non Sequitur on synthetic a priori Knowledge,” September 2, 2013.

“Hoppe’s Caricature of Empiricism,” September 10, 2013.

“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry,” September 11, 2013.

“Robert Murphy gets Mises’s Epistemology Wrong,” September 13, 2013.

“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry, Part 2,” September 14, 2013.

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

“Mises was Confused about the Analytic–Synthetic Distinction,” September 15, 2013.

“Schuller’s Challenge to Misesian Apriorists has never been answered,” December 7, 2013.

“Mises versus Ayer on Analytic Propositions and a priori Reasoning,” March 16, 2014.

“David Gordon on Praxeology and the Austrian Method: A Critique,” March 13, 2014.

“Why Mises’s Praxeological Theories are not Necessarily True of the Real World,” March 15, 2014.

“Mises and Empiricism,” April 17, 2014.

“Why Should we reject the Existence of Synthetic a priori Knowledge?,” May 23, 2014.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caldwell, B. 2009. “A Skirmish in the Popper Wars: Hutchison versus Caldwell on Hayek, Popper, Mises, and methodology,” Journal of Economic Methodology 16.3: 315–324.

Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2000. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York.

Hayek, F. A. 1937. “Economics and Knowledge,” Economica n.s. 4.13: 33–54.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek. Interviewed by Earlene Graver, Axel Leijonhufvud, Leo Rosten, Jack High, James Buchanan, Robert Bork, Thomas Hazlett, Armen A. Alchian, Robert Chitester, Regents of the University of California, 1983.
https://archive.org/details/nobelprizewinnin00haye

Why Should we reject the Existence of Synthetic a priori Knowledge?

In essence, there are three very good reasons why most analytic philosophers have rejected Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge, as follows:

(1) The paradigmatic type of synthetic a priori knowledge that was Euclidean geometry, when asserted as a universally true theory of space, has been shown to be severely contradicted by empirical evidence – and this is not what we would expect to find if this theory really was necessarily true and an irrefutable theory of reality.

(2) We can eliminate the problem of proposed synthetic a priori knowledge by carefully separating pure maths/pure geometry (which is analytic a priori and necessarily true, but not describing reality) from applied maths/applied geometry (which is asserted as true of reality but is synthetic a posteriori and contingent).

For example, most of mathematics can be clearly explained as an analytic a priori system, as derived from pure logic and set theory (Schwartz 2012: 19), as shown by the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead.

(3) From (1) and (2), we can satisfactorily explain proposed synthetic a priori knowledge either as (i) analytic a priori or (ii) synthetic a posteriori, eliminating a complex and unnecessary category.

Ultimately, we can reject synthetic a priori knowledge by inference to the best explanation and Ockham’s razor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Mises’s Non Sequitur on synthetic a priori Knowledge

We can find it here in Mises’s book 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.” (Mises 1962: 5).

The proposition that “there are no synthetic a priori propositions” would appear to be synthetic a posteriori, for one could indeed refute it by successfully demonstrating the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge.

Alternatively, it could be verified by demonstrating empirically that all alleged examples of synthetic a priori knowledge are untenable and can be refuted by empirical evidence. And, in fact, the latter has been the fate of all alleged kinds of synthetic a priori knowledge, such as, for instance, Euclidean geometry.

Even the Kantian idea of necessary, deterministic causation as a universal truth known a priori is untrue given modern quantum physics (Melnick 2006: 229; Anscombe 1993), which now separates the notions of causation and determinism (Weinert 2004: 260).

At most, the strict notion of deterministic, necessary causation is probably true of the macroscopic world – a limited domain – but breaks down at the level of the quantum world. But we only know this a posteriori (empirically), and not as an a priori or a necessary truth.

If this isn’t bad enough Mises then proceeds to shoot himself in the foot, and demonstrates how his own statement above is highly dubious, by admitting that modern science has questioned the synthetic a priori status of Euclidean geometry:

“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).

Come again? The collapse of Euclidean geometry as synthetic a priori knowledge has “[n]o reference at all to the problems of praxeology”? The stupidity of this passage beggars belief.

The issue of whether Euclidean geometry is synthetic a priori knowledge is absolutely of great relevance to the epistemological status of Mises’s praxeology, because Mises needs to prove that synthetic a priori knowledge exists.

But, having assured us that there is good reason to believe in the truth of synthetic a priori knowledge, Mises then immediately seems to concede that Euclidean geometry – the leading paradigm of the synthetic a priori – was not actually synthetic a priori at all, which destroys much of the alleged evidence for the existence of the latter.

Mises’s statement that “[p]resent-day epistemology looks upon [sc. the assumptions of Euclid] … as freely chosen postulates, the starting point of a hypothetical chain of reasoning” seems to be a tacit admission, or veiled reference to, the finding of modern science that Euclidean geometry as a universal theory of space is false.

Without any convincing evidence for the truth of synthetic a priori knowledge, Mises’s whole system of praxeology is left hanging in the air, without foundation, and must come crashing down.

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.

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

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