At 09:29 AM 6/11/2008, Pat Gunning wrote: >Mises's goal was to provide a framework for >dealing with phenomena thathad previously not >been clearly identified as distinct from >otherphenomena. That phenomena is interaction among distinctly human actors. I was so astounded when I came across these sentences, that I didn't quite know what to do. The first reaction is to make a flip or satirical reply, "Right, no one else has ever commented on human relations." But that would not only be unprofitable, it would be uncharitable. For surely, Pat cannot mean what this sentence says. Pat, like everyone else, knows what everyone else knows. Namely that, aside from treatises on pure mathematics and natural philosophy, every single word ever written in every single language has for its subject the relation of man to man, man to woman, man to society, and man to god, and commonly all of these together. There are no other topics. Every play, poem, prayer, parable, psalm, sutra, story, history, speech, argument, article and joke has only these topics and no other. Every learned tome and every learned treatise in every learned journal--pure mathematics and pure physics aside--have these for their subjects. I have a little learning, and read somewhat more than most, and yet in all my education and all my reading, I cannot think of a single exception to this rule. And I very much suspect that you can't either. But if you know of an exception, please bring it to my attention, because I would certainly like to see this strange and wonderful object. Strange it will be, somewhat like (and I can only imagine here) the opening lines of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. Since you cannot mean what you said, you can only mean something different (there's an axiom for you), and not merely different, but darker. You can only mean (correct me if I am wrong) that it has not been handled to your satisfaction, and more, that you have discovered a way of handling it to everybody's satisfaction, or at least to everybody who will be admitted to the company of "reasonable men." This is a darker claim indeed. It is a claim to have what the post-moderns would call a "meta-narrative," one capable of sitting in judgment on all the other narratives. It is a quasi-religious claim to have accessed the springs of human action. Some in Chicago would do this by reducing man to a cypher, and the Austrians by reducing him to axioms. But it always turns out that the meta-narratives cannot even be applied successfully to the narratives of their own lives, much less everybody else's. All the rest of the literature whispers to Chicago and Austria alike, "I am not a cypher, you cannot reduce me to an axiom. Neither prison can hold me." Now, it may be (I fully admit the possibility) that you are right and the rest of literature is wrong. However, this does involve a strange conundrum, on that cannot escape the attention of even the most ardent Austrian. Mises claims, on the one hand, originality for his Praxeology. But he also claims, on the other hand, that: The a priori sciences-logic, mathematics, and praxeology?aim at a knowledge unconditionally valid for all beings endowed with the logical structure of the human mind. (HA 57) In other words, this praxeology which nobody ever noticed before has the same epistemological status as does logic and mathematics. He therefore posits an intuitively obvious but hitherto unnoticed science. You will pardon me if I remain a skeptic. John C. M?daille