Recently, I read through the book Economic Science and the Austrian Method, as part of the home study course. However, as a novice to the subject, I had some difficulties understanding exactly what Hoppe is refering to when he mentions "time-invariantly operating causes". Here's an example from the book: “The idea of causality that there are constant, time-invariantly operating causes, which allow one to project past observations, regarding the relation of events into the future, is something (as empiricism since Hume has noticed) which has no observational basis whatsover” I’m not quite sure what this is trying to say. Can anyone help me out here? Thanks!
My guess is that there he's trying to say that when you get right down to it we don't know why things happen, but context would help.
Yeah it's difficult to say without further context, but it sounds like he might be laying the groundwork for identifying the concept of causality as a priori knowledge...? That is, we don't discover empirically that causal relationships exist, because the concept of causality is itself implied in searching for a causal relationship between two events or objects.
Sorry, that was a bad example. It's probably more appropriate to quote the first time he uses in the book.
I think he might be trying to say that when a person is put in the exact same circumstances during different times in their life they won't necessarily actin the same manner. This means that human action is time variable.
'' The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.'' Stephen Hawking
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, it will hurt and swell up. You see this happening time after time. You reach the conclusion that hammer on thumb is a cause every single time of hurt and swelling.
But, who says that you are right. Maybe in the past hammer whacks produce pain and swelling, but starting tomorrow, hammer whacks on thumbs will make you float in the air, with no ill effects to your thumb.
The answer is that you are "assuming" that hammer causes pain and swelling is time invariant, meaning just as it was a cause of pain and swelling in the past, so it will continue to be a cause of the same things in the future.
And Hume points out that you cannot have picked this up from experience, the concept and the idea that there exist time inavirant operating causes. [Not sure why he says that]. I imagine he concludes that it must be something in our genes that make us think like that. {That what happened yesterday as a result of A will happen again today as a result of A].
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@ OP
It just means that laws governing physical and social reality do not change over time. It is not the case that the second law of thermodyamics, or the pythagorean theorem, ot the law of marginal utility do apply only now but then something totally different applies in the future. The universe is deterministic, not chaotic and unpredictable.
Hoppe is talking about the Problem of Induction. With a few, plausible assumptions, I believe the problem of induction has been solved. Most people are not aware of the work that has been done in this area because it's generally considered to be relevant to computers only but it actually has much larger epistemological consequences with some mild assumptions about the structure of the physical world.
Clayton -
Yes, this is correctt. Time-invariant means that it does not vary with time. This is why the real word we can have such a field as engineering, We assume that a given casue will always have the same result. If a rubber ball is thrown to the level ground it will always bounce up.
However, to make such a statement, we always include all the assumptions being made. I know you can all imagine an instance when, because of unusual conditions, the ball does not bounce up.
So when we write a real-world formula that describes the result of the cause, in addition to those assumptions, time is almost always included. After all, effects always take time, even if a very small amount. And when I say real world, I mean the one you and I are living in. Not the world that the string and particle physicists and the astrophysicsts live in.
I conjecture that Hume's view that you cannot have picked this up from experience would be because personal experience is typiclly sequential. In a such a sequence each event is typically judged uniquily. To seperate out common causes and common results requires an analysis of many similar cause and effect events that probably did not occur to any single person. Of course a simple event like bouncing a ball would be understood by anyone. Not too may people would jump off a roof and not expect to hit the ground hard. But free market economic causes and effects are not simple events.