Brian Gladish has picked up the importance of Barry Smith’s work on “fallibillistic apriorism” (conjectural knowledge) and the way that this has corrects the unhelpful form of dogmatic apriorism that some of the Austrians picked up from von Mises.
With Smith’s introduction of fallibilism into Mises’s system, some of the distance between it and Karl Popper’s concept of conjectural knowledge was reduced. This reconciliation has been visible in a number of efforts that attempt to bring Mises’s approach into the methodological housing of Popper and other philosophers of science, notably Imre Lakatos.3 More on that in another post; but, at this moment we have another issue to address — Mises’s claim that economics, and its encompassing science, praxeology, are new sciences unconnected with previous knowledge. This claim did not sit well with those who believe all knowledge to be connected and do not have an anthropocentric view of the universe.
Taking up Brian’s comment, it took me years to see the significance of Smith’s work, I must have scanned his paper in the volume on Menger that Bruce Caldwell edited because years ago I wrote a summary of Jack Birner’s paper in that volume.
On a tangent to this is the way that Talcott Parsons was practically on the same page as Popper and von Mises when he wrote “The Structure of Social Action” in 1937 but then he lost his way. This paper describes the strange trajectory of a very busy and ambitious scholar who started with Parsons and ended up with “deep culture theory” which incorporates just about every school of social thought wtih the exception of CR and Austrian economics.
What Rafe doesn’t mention is that he brought Barry Smith’s paper to my attention, after I had read it without realizing its significance. It’s not easy sorting the wheat from the chaff (or even the great wheat from the good wheat), and I’m happy to have someone around to help.