I recently watched the movie Earth over the weekend. It's a Disney film that shows nature in its true character. It occurs to me that while much of the time animals are acting on instinct always going in a herd from one place to another they also have similar traits to humans. Mammals at least care for their youth. They'll raise their young. They'll try not to separate themselves from each other. They'll go around with each other and make decisions about when to stop for water and when not to stop for water. They may not be able to communicate in our language, or tell jokes that we know of... but... they know how to attract mates... and they seem to know how to live in something like a society. Animals may not exactly be rational. But do they act purposefully too? Perhaps a lot of it is instinct- but couldn't we say that animals act purposefully as well?
I don't think this would disprove the idea of human action as proposed by Ludwig Von Mises. Of course humans have the ability to act rational. Most animals don't. Rationality and logic are two main traits that have helped humans evolve as we have over the past few millennial. If anything I think that if animals acted purposeful as opposed to just acting on instinct- it would give more credence to his theory on human action, and, would be even more of a blow to the people who believe that we are like animals and animals act on instincts so we must act on instincts too.
I just wanted to know what other people here thought. Do animals act purposefully too, or, is it just instinct, or what?
To say that all animals act on instinct is a big leap. Each animal group has their own set of customs or traditions that they do for mating that each group has done for hundreds to thousands of years. I wouldn't say they just do this out of instinct, I believe they know they have a purpose. Animals act purposely to stay alive. All things will.
Then again I don't study animals and I could be completely wrong...
Well, the thing is that we know Man to act rationally most of the time. We know that man is an evolved animal. Hence, we must infer that some animals must act rationally some of the time. Either that, or we leave a BIG evolution gap between Man and primate, a gap that cannot be otherwise bridged than by assuming Humans to be some sort of hybrid alien-monkey race.
Like a man, an animal cannot practically be described as an automaton. It possesses a brain that is much too complex for us to describe with deterministic physics equations. But I think praxeology can describe its behavior. Therefore, I would say animals act purposefully.
Note that chimps are capable of producing higher order goods (e.g. construction of tools) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_chimps.html and are capable of market exchanges http://www.livescience.com/culture/090612-hn-trade.html. They also demonstrate ethics http://www.animalsrighttolifewebsite.com/Chimp%20morality.htm.
Edit: the act of squirrel stowing away food for later use indicates planning and time preference. The act of a bird dropping a shell from a great height to smash it seems purposeful to me and in this case the act of transporting the shell is a factor in the production of food.
In some ways Praxeology it itself is a theory of mind because it has to depend on a function of purpose as what defines an action versus an instinct. In this case, I suppose that Mises was thinking in line that an 'action' in terms of instinct is more rightly a reaction, whereas an action in his view was something ordered by one's thoughts and intents. Thus, separating reactive consciousness from 'active' consciousness. That would mean that consciousness would have to fall into either category as its primary attribute (not necessarily excluding the attributes as perfectly separate on their own) for a given entity. So, yes, I think some animals, including Man, are under the scope of Praxeology.
"The power of liberty going forward is in decentralization. Not in leaders, but in decentralized activism. In a market process." -- liberty student