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Pat, I would say that in, for example, Ludwig Mises' talk of 
what he calls "the action axiom", in Mises picture of the natural 
sciences, and in his general picture of economics as an apriori 
deductive science you find all sorts of elements of the broad sort of 
intellectual picture brought with the formalist conception of  
logic, language, knowledge, and mathematics.  What distinguishes 
Mises is an odd mix of the old Kant picture and more recent formalist 
conceptions.  Of course, Ludwig Mises picture was known to a great 
number of Vienna researchers.  Of course, as many are aware, Richard 
Mises, Ludwig Mises brother, ran the famous Vienna seminar in 
mathematics.  Mises view was also widely known among socialists and 
Marxist, as Mises had participated in Bohm-Bawerk's important 
seminar, in which a number of the most influential socialists and 
Marxists also participated.  More generally, the picture of knowledge 
and understanding advanced by Menger and Bohm-Bawerk was at the core 
of widely known research efforts in the theory of knowledge and under- 
standing, a central part of the mix of the ideas of Weber, Brentano, 
Mach, Helmhotz, Neurath, Husserl and others that competed and played off 
one another regardless of special science, i.e. semantics, value theory, 
theory of history, mathematics, social science, epistemology, etc. 
Some of this interanimation is well capture in Nancy Cartwright, et als, 
new book _Otto Neurath_, Cambridge:  Cambridge U. Press.  As just one 
example of these cross currents, karl Popper as a very young man was 
familiar with the work of Bohm-Bawerk and Menger, and many of his innovations 
in the theory of the advance of knowledge reflect insights first found in 
the work of Menger and Bohm-Bawerk -- later Popper influenced Friedman 
in the Spring of 1947 at the first Mont Pelerin meeting, just prior to the 
first effort by Friedman at work on his famous essay on the logican 
logical and knowledge status of economics -- a work which itself may have 
been inspired in part (as had Hutchison's 1938 book) in reaction to 
Mises synthetic aprior defense of economics and a liberal social order  
(just as Hayek's work in the same area was largely inspired in reaction to 
Mises).  Furthermore, members of Mises seminar participated also in 
Schlick's seminar in logic, semantics, and epistemology, as well as in 
Hayek's seminar in the broad areas of philosophy and culture.  Through these 
links ideas in the phenomenology of Husserl, the logic of Frege, Russell, 
and Wittgenstein, and the theory of knowledge of Schlick, Wittgenstein, 
Mach, Carnap, and Neurath cross fertilized.  Schumpeter's early embrace of 
both Mach, Menger and Walras seems also to have been widely known -- 
especially through Schumpeter's concept of 'methodological individualism', 
a notion debated by later logicians and philosophers like Popper, etc., 
also in part, as a result of Hayek's later influential contribution to the 
conversation on this topic. 
 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
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http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm 
 
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