Samuel Bostaph wrote: > Psychologists attempt to explain all the > aspects of our thinking or not thinking. They > attempt to identify principles of thought. Then we would seem to agree that "principles of thought" come from psychology, not economics. Economists must accept the conclusions of the higher sciences in this regard. When they attempt to displace the higher sciences, economics becomes not science, but ideology. > > Those of us who choose to think rationally Is there someone on the planet who claims to think non-rationally? I suspect that the term "rational" in that sentence is a code-word for a particular system of rationalizations. > attempt understanding so that whatever goals > we set for ourselves have a decent prospect > of achievement, given that we think we know > what principles of action to apply in our > attempt to achieve them.Think about the meaning > of the word "choice. Why would anyone ever > state that "men always make choices based on > maximum utility to oneself." I haven't the > slightest idea what that means or why you made > that statement as if it was implied > in anything I said or Mise wrote. Mises simply > said that individuals have ends that they seek to achieve. I attributed the statement neither to you nor to Mises. I merely offered it as a possible "principle of thought" to show that it must be judged by psychologists, not economists. And in the real world, this is what actually happens; in attempting to motivate people, through advertising for example, we call upon psychology, not economics. But since you bring up the question of Mises, Mises was claiming a lot more then that people act for ends (which is a mere tautology, since "ends" are a part of the definition of action), but that he knew, in each and every case, just what those ends are. And he makes this claim over and over again. For example: "In this sense every action is to be qualified as selfish. The man who gives alms to hungry children does it, either because he values his own satisfaction expected from this gift higher than any other satisfaction he could buy by spending this amount of money, or because he hopes to be rewarded in the beyond." (HA 735) "What a man does is always aimed at an improvement of his own state of satisfaction. In this sense ?and in no other ?we are free to use the term selfishness and to emphasize that action is necessarily always selfish." (HA 242) Mises is so sure of this principle, that he can assert that it excludes any other possible principle of action: "Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another [People] cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiment but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society and to substitute peaceful collaboration to enmity and conflict." (HA 168-9) 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. For in ideology, the controlling "idea" is elevated to a position beyond any questioning and everything that conflicts with the "idea" is ruled out a priori. The question is rarely whether or not the "idea" is "true"; it generally is. The question is whether the "truth" has displaced all other truths. People certainly act for self-interest, but is it impossible for them to act in any other way? And this further begs the question of what constitutes either "self" or "interest," and without being specific about these, it is difficult to give any scientific meaning to the proposition. Human motivations are dense and complex, and normally obscure, even to the actor. To believe that they can be resolved to a simple, "self-evident" principle is problematic at best, unscientific at worst. John C. M?daille