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