> [Mises] therefore posits an intuitively obvious but > hitherto unnoticed science. You will pardon me if I remain a skeptic. So do I. But I have a question. Mises called his praxeology (which I believed he used to call "sociology" earlier on) a "Wissenschaft" in German, an a "science" in English. Did he mistranslate? The German word "Wissenschaft" means "academic discipline" or "scholarly endeavor" rather than "science." Germans speak of Rechtswissenschaft ("legal science"), Ingenieurswisschenschaft ("engineering science") and Strukturwissenschaft ("structural science," i.e. math, logic). In English, you can't do that. That's why Caltech's advertising slogan is "the world's best playground for math, science, and engineering," and not "the world's best playground for science" -- if they chose the latter, the mathematicians and the engineers would feel left out. The difference between "science" and "Wissenschaft" seems relevant to me here, because it seems that you could make a case that Misesian economics is a Wissenschaft but not a science. Or in other words, it is a scholarly endeavor, but like math and unlike physics, it is not a self-consciously empirical, Popperian scholarly endeavor. Jaap Weel