Pat Gunning wrote:
>John Medaille is one of the latter. He does not
>understand what Mises has in mind when Mises
>posits that the distinctly human mind has a
>logical structure, as per one his earlier posts
>on this list directed at me. If the distinctly
>human being does not have a mind with a logical structure,
I am fairly certain that I never said that the
human mind does not have a logical structure; I
am positive that I said that structure is not as
Mises depicts it. But the real problem is not
Mises's conclusions, but his method. If one is
going to write on the structure of the human
mind, then doesn't write "A Treatise on
Economics" but a treatise on psychology, or
possibly linguistics. There is absolutely nothing
in the training of an economist which gives him
or her license to declaim on these matters. Mises
proposes only a series of pontifications without
logical demonstration; he merely assumes what he
should prove, and so he uses the methods of
ideology rather than science. To the degree that
economics is "self-contained," providing its own
premises rather than deriving them from higher
sciences, then it must be a merely circular
ideology rather than a science. Neither
empiricism nor mathematics is sufficient to make
a study scientific, but rather its connection
with its neighbors in the scientific hierarchy.
> Mises must be wrong in thinking that an
> argument for or against a government policy can
> can be evaluated on the basis of its logical structure.
That's an unjustified leap of logic. While policy
that deals with humans must be in accord with
human nature, that nature admits of an infinite
choice of policies. So while any policy must be
first evaluated in those terms, such an
evaluation does not exhaust the analysis.
> From this standpoint, it is easy for John to
> dismiss Mises as merely another proponent of a
> free market ideology. He should be appreciated,
> in my view, as a value-neutral evaluator of
> arguments favoring market intervention, but that is another story.
Human nature cannot be divorced from human
values. And this is particularly true of
economics, the science of valuations. The opinion
of D. McCloskey is relevant here; you can simply
substitute "praxeology" for the "scientific method":
"Modernism promises knowledge free from doubt,
metaphysics, morals, and personal conviction;
what it delivers merely renames as Scientific
Method the scientist's and especially the
economic scientist's metaphysics, morals, and
personal convictions. It cannot, and should not,
deliver what it promises. Scientific knowledge is
no different from other personal knowledge.
Trying to make it different, instead of simply
better, is the death of science. "
John C. Medaille
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