Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a video on praxeology. If you are familiar with the line of argument there is no need to sit through it again as he goes through the routine at a nice slow pace. If you are not familiar with the argument this would be a good introduction.
He made a joke at one point and extracted a titter of laughter from the audience. He said that about thirty years ago he became a kind of expert on Popperism but since then he has forgotten practically all of it. Most amusing!
To summarise his serious points.Up to about 1950 the Austrian view on the nature of economic laws was practically universal in the mainstream of economics. Robbins was an English-speaking stalwart. Then Friedman led the way to adopt the positivist or empiricist view which is now universal outside Austrian circles.
The old/Austrian view is that there are true laws that can be known indpendent of evidence, they do not need to be tested and indeed cannot be tested.
The modern view is that the laws are based on experience, need to be constantly tested and are for ever hypothetical. We have no certain knowledge of the world.
The new view is almost entirely attributed to the Vienna Circle of logical positivists and the school of logical empiricism that the central European diaspora established in the US, Britain and NZ.
To make his point about the “Austrian” kind of certain, a priori knowledge (a priori meaning that it is known in advance of experience of the world), he listed a number of statements.
No material thing can be in two places at the same time.
No two objects can occupy the same place at the same time.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
No two straight lines can ever enclose a space.
An object that is coloured green all over cannot also be coloured yellow.
These are supposed to represent a knock-down argument against the people who think that the laws of nature are conjectural. These statements are supposed to demonstrate that there are statements about the world that can be known to be true (certainly true) independent of testing.
My problem is that the statements that he listed do not tell us anything about the way the world works, about the causal regularities in the world or the propensities for systems to behave in certain ways.
Statements about the colour and location of objects are not like statements that try to expain the way the world functions. They do not have any dynamic, explanatory or predictive consequences. Compare them with the laws of supply and demand (indicating the shape of supply and demand curves). These laws (like all causal laws) have huge implications for the way people behave, the way prices are set in the marketplace, what happens when rulers decide to control prices or debase the currency.
I don’t think that Hoppe can establish the point that he was trying to make with statements of the kind listed above.
And the same is true of the “action axiom”. Even when they do start producing statements like the action axiom that come somewhat closer to how the world works, they aways seem to state that as if the fact that they have such a foundation is proof of the truth of everything they allege to derive from that.
Ask them to make the derivations, and I’ve universally found so far nobody does or can. It probably sounded plausible when they first read Mises (if they read Mises) – and I’m sure a lot of it was quite plausible. And after they read it, they go around daring people to disprove the action axiom and when people can’t or aren’t interested in disproving it they feel like they’ve won a victory for the whole damned theoretical edifice.
Forgetting all the steps to getting their and the lock-step logic they think they have, I think there are a couple Austrian points that are very important and insightful. But I simply can’t understand the ones that cling to the praxeology.
Yes I admire Austrian economics, or that part of it which contributes to “good” economics.
However they will never sell the product as long as the a priori method is billed as an essential ingregient.
As you say, the defence of the action axiom is typical. They postulate the axiom and if you try to argue about it they say – “your argument is an action (ha ha) therefor the axiom cannot be refuted”.
Hoppe’s “knock down” arguments are tautologies given the definition of the terms used. Such arguments do not entail that a physical world exists which can be truthfully described by those concepts. For example, the proposition “a straight line is the shortest distance between two points” does not entail that some physical space exists with two points.
Hoppe’s arguments remind me of a paper I once read (criticising Popper) where the author claimed that we can validly induce “all swans are white,” because a swan is defined as a white bird. (Note that such an “induction” is actually a deduction). Although any synthetic proposition can be turned into an analytic proposition by redefining its terms, this does not answer relevant empirical questions
Yes the most concise criticism of Hoppe’s knock down argument is that the statements are tautologies.
Given my admiration of Mises and the work that the Mises Inst is doing to spread his ideas, it is most unfortunate that they allow their standards to drop so low when they turn to criticise Popper. See this post and especially Lee’s comment on the logic of Gordon’s arguments (at the end of the post if you dont want to read right through).
http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/03/08/mises-and-gordon-on-popper/
It is even possible that some of his purely logical statements are in fact violated in the real world. Quantum mechanics and curved space at least suggest that?
If data showed that an increase in the minimum wage resulted in lower unemployment, what would a positivist think?
Taxes and regulations were lower in the 19th century than in the 20th century, and wealth is greater in the 20th century than in the 19th century. How does a positivist determine whether wealth is greater because of higher taxes and regulations or in spite of them?