For some reason, my last post got truncated. Here it is again, in its full.
[I cut it by mistake -- I thought it was the beginning of a previous message. Please forgive me. While I'm here, let me remind everyone to exercise a little self-censorship: you may carry on conversations off-list and long emails are less likely to be read carefully.
HB]
Dear Mohammad,
It seems to me that the bulk of your post deals
not with economics per se, but with philosophy
and physics. Now, you may be that you are right
about all of this, but if you are, then the
philosophers and physicists are all wrong, or, as
you term it, "superstitious." Further, among
philosophers and physicists, these are matters of
settled opinion, not often controverted. Again,
you may be right to controvert them, but it seems
to me that it requires stronger arguments than
what you have offered. And your disagreements
with the philosophers starts with the very title of your post.
Mohammad Gani wrote:
>----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
>
>The Final Authority: Logic
But logic isn't the final authority. Logic deals
only with the formal validity of statements, not
their material truth. It deals with syntax and
nothing else. A statement may be formally valid
and materially false. We assume that what is
formally invalid will also be materially false,
but this only provides falsification, not
verification. Logic is a necessary condition for
a statement to be true, but not a sufficient one.
Therefore, it cannot be the "final authority."
Not to belabor what is a well-known point, but
the statement, "All men are blue, Socrates is a
man; therefore, Socrates is blue" is logically
valid and materially false, or at least only true
for the Blue-Man Group. Logic, therefore, is not
a "final authority" (if we are to be logical about it).
>John C. M?daille wrote:
>?Now, Mises may be right in all of this, but he
>is methodologically wrong. He does not offer
>this as a conclusion of the science of
>psychology, but as a "self-evident" principle.
>And even that would not have been so bad had he
>offered some discussion of what determines a
>?self-evident" axiom. But he does not. He offers
>on his own authority only. This is not science, but the essence of ideology.?
>Well, I guess it is worthwhile to talk a bit
>about what is self-evident, why the self-evident
>is the starting point of science, and whether a
>proper scientist can offer his own authority only.
>1. Something is self-evident if anybody looking for evidence finds it.
But that would make all statements self-evident,
since we assume that anybody making a statement
(unless it is a conscious lie) has found, or
believes that he has found, "evidence" for it.
This is not what a self-evident statement means
in philosophy. A self evident statement is one
which is not reducible to any other statement and
in which, once the terms are grasped, the truth
is immediately seen. Such statements deal with
formal relations only. They have a form similar
to "If A > B, and B > C, then A > C." Once we
have grasped the terms we see the truth, and in a
fairly incontrovertible way. I think you have
carried subjectivism too far, since every
statement qualifies as self-evident by your
description and real discussion would be impossible.
> If economics must begin from a conclusion of
> psychology, which science should be the mother
> to generate the premise for psychology, and
> where would it ultimately regress to?
That is certainly a legitimate question, but the
truth is that all sciences exist in a
hierarchical relationship with each other.
Biology is dependent on chemistry, chemistry on
physics, physics on mathematics. The point of
science is not to collect a random array of
truths, but to arrange them in their proper
order. What you are trying to do is to take
economics out of the scientific hierarchy and
make it "stand-alone." But to do that is to make it occult and non-scientific.
>The proper question is: what is so unique that a
>separate science of economics is warranted? (The
>answer: exchange is the unique event that no
>science other than economics can explain. To a
>psychologist, exchange is totally unintelligible.
I'm sorry, but exchange is basic to all the
sciences. Would you deny the existence of a heat
exchanger in your furnace? Would you call an
economist to fix it? Economics deals with certain
types of exchanges, those human exchanges aimed
at the material provisioning of society.
> Was there ever a psychologists who could
> explain why one produces what he does not wish
> to consume, and consumes what he does not
> bother to produce? Will it ever be able to
> explain why nearly everybody is eager to give
> up real goods for money, but rarely willing to undertake real goods in bar
> ter for real goods?)
>2. Bertrand Russell wrote: ?My desire and wish
>is that the things I start with should be so
>obvious that you wonder why I spend my time
>stating them. This is what I aim at because the
>point of philosophy is to start with something
>so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to
>end with something so paradoxical that no one
>will believe it.? (Russell 1918, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, p-53)
>Mises wrote a long discourse on human action,
>and the bulk of the treatise tries to show the
>obvious, because the fatal sin of the
>superstitious masses is that they refuse to see the obvious.
I can certainly agree that you have given us the
correct form of most of Mises's claims: "This is
obvious" coupled with "I am the only one to see it."
> Here is an example: the superstitious masses
> before Copernicus observed the diurnal motion
> of the earth (the change of day into night into
> day) but never managed to see the obvious
> necessity that the earth must be spinning if it
> is has to undergo day after night after
> day. Everybody except Copernicus was wrong,
> and the authority of the billions and billions
> of people over millions of years who saw the
> sun rising and setting had no merit at all when
> the authority of Copernicus alone was
> sufficient. Why? Well, use some geometry or
> algebra: if a statement is true, it must be
> possible to state it mathematically. You need
> no authority other than that of logic,
> expounded as mathematics. Why? Reality has no
> ability to violate (valid) logic. Mises
> understood this so well that he wanted the term
If this is true, then every physicist who ever
lived or is now living is "superstitious," since
motion in physics is measured relative to the
observer. It is quite proper to speak of the
motion of the sun around the earth. If you pick
up a Sidereal Table, you will see neat lists of
the times for "sunrise" and "sunset," "moonrise"
and "moon set." The people who put these together
are not superstitious; they are scientists. And
they are correct, since the use of a Sidereal
Table is confined to the surface of the earth. At
issue is not the "truth" of a statement like
"sunrise," but its domain. Solar-centric
statements have a wider domain, and therefore
greater truth, but this greater truth does not
negate the lesser truth, and we may safely use
the Sidereal Tables without relying on
"superstition." Furthermore, solar-centrism is
not "self-evident" by any possible meaning of the
term, and particularly not by your definition of
the term. The search for a solar-centric took
more than a millennium to work out, and begins
with Ptolemy himself, who considered a
solar-centric universe, but the system was too
complex to fit the observations. And Copernicus's
system took more epicycles than did the Ptolemaic
system. It wasn't until 200 years later when they
figured out that the movements were not circular
but elliptical. Only then could the troublesome
epi-cycles be removed. And even then, the system
had to wait upon Newton's calculus before it
could be worked out mathematically. To say that
those who couldn't work it out, including very
serious scientists, were "superstitious" strikes
me as a statement of incredible arrogance; it is
a projection on the past of your knowledge (but
not of your experience, unless you have been
outside the solar system and made the
observation) and a condemnation of their
experience based on experiences that you yourself do not have.
> praxeology (logic of practice= logic of
> action) as the name of a science of human
> action. The suffix ?logy? in praxeology has a
> very obvious connotation: it is science
> precisely because it has logic. (Correct logic
> never contradicts facts. If facts contradict an
> argument, the argument is illogical.)
That's not logic. There is nothing in logic
capable of judging "facts"; only of establishing
the formal relations of things presented as
facts. You seem to be using a rather
idiosyncratic definition of "logic." By the way,
the suffix "-ology" does not refer to logic per
se, but to the Greek root "logos," a term often
translated as "word" but more accurately as
"rational account." A rational account includes
logic, but cannot stop there, for reasons given above.
>3. Now, fallacy of authority is that the truth
>of a statement does not in any way depend on who
>stated it. To search for authority is the very
>glare of superstition. No, Mises should by all
>means offer things on his own authority alone.
>His authority is based on his command over logic. Mises had originality.
Again, the dual claim of "originality" and
"obviousness," often coupled with the
condemnation of those who see neither the
originality nor the logic as "superstitious." It
is one of the least attractive features of the
Austrians (who else would have the chutzpah to
name their magazine "Reason"?) And it is not
original. It is warmed-over Benthamism, but
without Bentham's internal coherence. If you
don't read the original sources, you will never realize the connections.
>If he had to rely on the authority of anybody
>else, why would we read Mises instead of the original author cited by him?
>4. It would have been a great day of joy if
>there were people who could read Mises and understand him.
But I have read Human Action. I try to read every
author as a I watch a play: with a willing
suspension of disbelief. Whether Marx or Mises,
Hayek or Keynes, I try my best to go along with
the author. But there were so many unsupported
challenges to settled philosophical opinion, that
the effort was difficult in the extreme. I
What you have given me is a catalog of reason not
to take the Austrians seriously, and indeed to be repelled by the arrogance.
Sorry.
John C. M?daille
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