Recently I've been reading Long's Praxeological Investigations: Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action. It's quite interesting, and dovetails with a lot of my thoughts on Wittgenstein, and also points out paralells between Mises, Wittgenstein. Frege and Husserl tha I hadn't really considered before. All of these are some of my favourite philosophers (though I would put their views in a more doxastic-Aristotilian framework that makes somewhat stronger claims about the ontology and epistemology of material realism), and it is quite fascinating to see long tie them together.
In essence his argument seems to be that these philosophers all held that polylogism and psychologism are conceptually invalid, and that because of the nature of logic as being something specific (anything conducted otherwise than p or -p would not count as logic) counters out both 'metalogic' and various epistemic attacks on apriorism in the social sciences.
Has anyone read this or any of Long's other works on the subject? Any thoughts?
“Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.” - Benito Mussolini"Toute nation a le gouvernemente qu'il mérite." - Joseph de Maistre
someone gave you one star without any comments? what a jerk.
I don't know what she's talking about, and I gave her 5 stars. That about makes up for it? :P
@Liberté
I took this quote from footnote 10. Whats your thoughts on it?
"Prychitko’s judgment arguably betrays a misunderstanding of the epistemic status Mises claims for his a priori insights. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out: “[T]he claim of having produced an a priori true proposition does not imply a claim of being infallible. No one is, and rationalism has never said anything to the contrary. Rationalism merely argues that the process of validating or falsifying a statement claiming to be true a priori is categorically different from that of validating or falsifying what is commonly referred to as an empirical proposition. … Revisions of mathematical arguments are themselves a priori. They only show that an argument thought to be a priori true is not.” (DER, p. 208.) “It seems to be of great importance to first rid oneself of the notion that aprioristic knowledge has anything to do with ‘innate ideas’ or with ‘intuitive’ knowledge which would not have to be discovered somehow or learned. Innate or not, intuitive or not; these are questions that concern the psychology of knowledge. In comparison, epistemology is concerned exclusively with the question of the validity of knowledge and of how to ascertain validity – and, to be sure, the problem of aprioristic knowledge is solely an epistemological one.” (TSC, p. 108.)"
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah
I agree with both; for one that the a priori status of a proposition does not garauntee its felicity for two reasons: that the position it occupies may be false, i.e. what it refers to in a system may not be the actual point in the system it belongs. Take, for example, Game Theory's 'rationality' contra Misesian 'rationality', the two can perhaps both be elaborated on a priori while the former will produce perverse results in Praxeology due to assumptions that do not hold (ever). On the other hand it is also possible to hold a proposition about a thing the knowledge of which would be an a priori science but to fail to make a correct induction (or more precisely, to fail to make an induction at all) and thus generate a false but nonetheless a priori claim. The latter could be said to apply, for example, to Platonic metaphysics.
I'm glad Long is writing something like this, he is a jolly guy.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'm not really an Austrian, but it is reassuring to know good work is still being done by Austrians. Wittgenstein is someone who I think could mesh well with Mises/Rothbard. On the other hand, I can't believe that a Kuhn/Hayek synthesis hasn't been attempted. Personally, I think constructive empiricism is a better methodology of economics, but I'll read through this paper over the next couple of days.
"I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course." -Anthony de Jasay
Recently I've been reading Long's Praxeological Investigations: Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action. It's quite interesting, and dovetails with a lot of my thoughts on Wittgenstein, and also points out paralells between Mises, Wittgenstein. Frege and Husserl tha I hadn't really considered before. All of these are some of my favourite philosophers (though I would put their views in a more doxastic-Aristotilian framework that makes somewhat stronger claims about the ontology and epistemology of material realism), and it is quite fascinating to see long tie them together. In essence his argument seems to be that these philosophers all held that polylogism and psychologism are conceptually invalid, and that because of the nature of logic as being something specific (anything conducted otherwise than p or -p would not count as logic) counters out both 'metalogic' and various epistemic attacks on apriorism in the social sciences. Has anyone read this or any of Long's other works on the subject? Any thoughts?
let's do some logic.
where p = this guy, and many other posters, drop vocab words and thinkers' names in the same way people who live in LA drop names when they visit their relatives in Wisconsin (oh yeah, it's no big deal to see bruce, demi, and ashton out just walking around. uh huh, that reminds me of this time that robert downy jr stepped on my foot in a starbucks). that is to say...catch phrases are used to take the place of substance, disguising inarticulate thoughts with the veneer of academic authority.
where q = I'm dumb.
here are the possibilities of this situation.
pq / -p.q / p-q / -p.-q
my money is on the first or the third possibility.
the more somone knows about a subject, the less they hide behind esoteric phrases. think of Rothbard's writing (or most Austrian's writings, for that matter). their works are filled with language which perfectly captures their wonderfully robust thoughts in simple terms. as these men know their subjects as well as they can be known, they can relate their thoughts in a manner that would not exclude even the most un-lettered of individuals. people who do this (like liberte) are just compensating.
Jackson, if the third option is true, then when said person is asked to elaborate they will be unable to do so. Shouldn't you ask them to elaborate before calling them "dumb"?
I've seen his elaborations...they are even worse.
I think liberte is a female...
Constitutional LAWL: I think liberte is a female.
I think liberte is a female.
Nice avatar.
If I wrote it more than a few weeks ago, I probably hate it by now.