I have been reading Human Action and decided to share some thoughts. Mises is troubling for a critical rationalist. Some of Mises’s proclamations seem adamantly anti-fallibilist, and appear to have been interpreted by many of his followers as such. Here are a couple of examples:
“From the unshakable foundation of the category of human action praxeology and economics proceed step by step by means of discursive reasoning. Precisely defining assumptions and conditions, they construct a system of concepts and draw all the inferences implied by logically unassailable raciocination.”
“Praxeology–and consequently economics too–is a deductive system. It draws its strength from the starting point of its deductions, from the category of action. No economic theorem can be considered sound that is not solidly fastened upon this foundation by an irrefutable chain of reasoning.”
The axioms of human action (as they are misleadingly called, I think) are often, by Austrian professionals and amatuers, said to be apodictic, undoubtable, or self-evident. To deny them is to commit an absurdity. Hans-Hermann Hoppe claims that Mises’s “grand achievements was to prove the existence of true, synthetic a priori propositions.” Robert Murphy describes Mises’s achievement as “[explaining] how it is that economists … can arrive at beliefs … and have confidence in their conclusions.” However, Mises also wrote stuff like this:
“Man is not infallible. He searches for truth–that is, for the most adequate comprehension as far as the structure of his mind and reason makes it accessible to him. Man can never become omniscient. He can never be absolutely certain that his inquiries were not misled and that what he considers as certain truth is not in error. All that man can do is submit all his theories again and again to the most critical reexamination. This means for the economist to trace back all theorems to their unquestionable and certain ultimate basis. The category of human action, and to test by the most careful scrutiny all assumptions and inferences leading from this basis to the theorem under examination. It cannot be contended that his procedure is a guarantee against error. But it is undoubtedly the most effective method of avoiding error.”
And from the chapter “Economics and the Revolt Against Reason”:
“[Utopian authors] drafted schemes for an earthly paradise in which pure reason alone should rule. They failed to realise that what they called absolute reason and manifest truth was the fancy of their own minds. They blithely arrogated to themselves infallibility and often advocated intolerance, the voilent suppression of all dissenters and heretics.”
What is one to make of all this? It seems to me that Mises was a fallibilist. I conjecture that when using terms like “irrefutable” and “unassailable” he is ascribing properties to, in Popperian vernacular, world 3 objects. For example, although we may misidentify sequences of inferences as a proofs, whether a sequence is a proof or not is an objective fact of world 3. A proof is, by definition, infallible. The fallibility arises with our attempts to identify proofs. That Mises accepted the objective reality of world 3, and implicitly assumed its existence in much of his work, is suggested by the first paragrapshs of a section titled “The A Priori and Reality”:
“Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgements. All its implicationss are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them. Hence, according to a popular objection, it cannot add anything to our knowledge.
All geometrical theorems are already implied in the axioms. The concept of a rectangular triangle already implies the theorem of Pythagoras. This theorem of a tautology, its deduction results in an analytic judgement. Nonetheless, nobody would contend that geometry in general and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge. Cognition frompurely deductive reasoning is also creative and opens for our mind access to previously barred spheres. The significant task of aprioristic reasoning is on the one hand to bring into relief all that is implied in the categories, concepts, and premises and, on the other hand, to show what they do not imply. It is its vocation to render manifest and obvious what was hidden and [subjectively] unknown before.”
Perhaps Mises was being somewhat overambitious when tasking aprioristic reasoning with bringing into relief “all that is implied in the categories, concepts, and premises.” Afterall, Newton’s theories logically entail the negation of Einstien’s (and all other alternatives), but to expect anyone to bring all such facts into relief is to expect too much. In any case, Mises is clearly beseaching us to explore the objective logical content of “categories, concepts, and premises” and, in particular, to see how far such an exploration of the categories of human action can take us.
It seems to me that Mises’s apparently dogmatic claims to something like apodictic certainty must be taken with a grain of salt, particularly given his fallibilist sentiments elsewhere. When using such language, I suspect Mises was referring to the objective properties of world 3 objects, rather than advocating a personal or subjective stance toward praxeological concepts or ideas. This view may contradict the more popular reading of Mises, but it may also explain the common criticism of his less sophisticated followers, that they have, in Mises’s own words “arrogated to themselves infallibility and often advocated intolerance, the voilent suppression of all dissenters and heretics.”
