Vichy Army:Um, 99% of economics you see in a University beyond intro micro is bogus and ridiculous nonsense.
Can anyone name one other academic field (that, as a consensus, is taken seriously) where "99%" of it is "bogus and ridiculous nonsense"?
"I'm not a fan of Murray Rothbard." -- David D. Friedman
The only science that I believe isn't flawed is golf management. And everyone loves it.
http://www.hhdev.psu.edu/rptm/pgm/
John Ess: It appears you are now being intentionally dense and aggressive[...]
It appears you are now being intentionally dense and aggressive[...]
Well, I'm not, but, I can't prove whether I am being honest or not, so whatever.
John Ess: [...]that you apply to all sciences.
[...]that you apply to all sciences.
I am talking about studying markets and studying language, not "all sciences".
John Ess: [...]Austrian[...]
[...]Austrian[...]
Again, I am talking about Ludwig von Mises, not Austrian School economics in general.
John Ess: [...]due to some Austrian dogmatism on your part[...]
[...]due to some Austrian dogmatism on your part[...]
I have posted a lot of stuff about the foundation of economics. It isn't dogmatism.
John Ess: I was addressing your response 'linguistics' to the question of which sciences are bogus or ridiculous nonsense. And your assertion that syntax is one of these[...] Both of which are false.
I was addressing your response 'linguistics' to the question of which sciences are bogus or ridiculous nonsense. And your assertion that syntax is one of these[...] Both of which are false.
I didn't say anything about syntax or "bogus or ridiculous nonsense". Wasn't that Vichy?
John Ess: [...]because of a flawed methodology[.]
[...]because of a flawed methodology[.]
Yeah, I still think that they use a flawed methodology. But aren't you not able to talk about that?
John Ess: You are not informed about this topic.
You are not informed about this topic.
Where did you get that idea? You barely responded to any of my arguments or questions.
John Ess: So we'll drop it.
So we'll drop it.
Are you taking my advice?
John Ess: I am not going to write a dissertation devoting chapters to definitions[...]
I am not going to write a dissertation devoting chapters to definitions[...]
Is that because you can't give the definitions? It wouldn't take up much space.
John Ess: [...]all the books are out there for people who can use google. I pointed you towards two books.
[...]all the books are out there for people who can use google. I pointed you towards two books.
Can you post the parts where they directly answer my questions?
If I wrote it more than a few weeks ago, I probably hate it by now.
John Ess: I, Ryan: It appears you are now being intentionally dense and aggressive due to some Austrian dogmatism on your part that you apply to all sciences. I was addressing your response 'linguistics' to the question of which sciences are bogus or ridiculous nonsense. And your assertion that syntax is one of these, because of a flawed methodology and useless conclusions. Both of which are false. You are not informed about this topic. So we'll drop it. I am not going to write a dissertation devoting chapters to definitions; all the books are out there for people who can use google. I pointed you towards two books.
I, Ryan:
It appears you are now being intentionally dense and aggressive due to some Austrian dogmatism on your part that you apply to all sciences.
I was addressing your response 'linguistics' to the question of which sciences are bogus or ridiculous nonsense. And your assertion that syntax is one of these, because of a flawed methodology and useless conclusions. Both of which are false.
You are not informed about this topic. So we'll drop it. I am not going to write a dissertation devoting chapters to definitions; all the books are out there for people who can use google. I pointed you towards two books.
By the way, I didn't even show why the categories that I was talking about were confused. I just stated that, which might be why you think I am being dogmatic. Well, I meant to do that. I wanted to kick start my critique by getting you to try to give your definitions of them. I wanted to see how you would define them, so I could show you what I think is wrong with them, and how I would define them, or whether I even think they are necessary at all. But I need you to give your definitions first, so I have a target. I don't want to try to dig up the definitions from somebody else, because they might not be anything like what you think they should be. There are a lot of variations, but I think that the problems with them are the same.
I think that the problem with linguistics is that they use confused language, because they don't understand where those things come from. I don't have a problem with observing languages and then talking about what people say or don't say. I have a problem basically with the language that they use when they are talking about it. They don't have a good vocabulary, because they don't recognize where the vocabulary should come from. Notice that Ludwig von Mises started out his economic theory with a bunch of definitions based on the "action axiom" or whatever you want to call it. He wasn't getting the idea of money from observing other people, but from observing himself.
If you want to know what I think is wrong with the terms, and whether I know what I am talking about, you will have to start responding to my questions. I am not trying to back you into a corner. I am just trying to develop my argument.
I am here to learn, not to "win" arguments. What about you?
What I mean to say is that I don't know what you're getting at by making the analogy. Because I don't know if you even understand Mises or this issue.
Nor can I be sure if I know what you're getting at -- it seems there is some carry over of some 'axiomatic' truth from Mises which privileges a priori over empiricism. My personal interpretation of Mises seems to find this a misunderstanding of him.
For instance, I don't think he observed things about money by observing merely himself. What would be the difference between this and observing others, except it is more myopic to do the former? If I come up with a moral law based on my own personal preferences, it doesn't make it anymore arbitrary than counting the opinions of the majority of people.
Would Chomsky be able to come up with better theories by observing only the way he himself talks/writes?
John Ess: What I mean to say is that I don't know what you're getting at by making the analogy. Because I don't know if you even understand Mises or this issue. Nor can I be sure if I know what you're getting at -- it seems there is some carry over of some 'axiomatic' truth from Mises which privileges a priori over empiricism. My personal interpretation of Mises seems to find this a misunderstanding of him. For instance, I don't think he observed things about money by observing merely himself. What would be the difference between this and observing others, except it is more myopic to do the former? If I come up with a moral law based on my own personal preferences, it doesn't make it anymore arbitrary than counting the opinions of the majority of people. Would Chomsky be able to come up with better theories by observing only the way he himself talks/writes?
Well, I have to leave for now; I will get back to this tomorrow.
I was talking about Ludwig von Mises, not just Austrian School economics in general. If you can't comment on that, why are you still in this conversation? I am telling you that everything that Ludwig von Mises said about economics applies to linguistics, and that I think that the reason why linguistics is so useless is because they don't follow that. They are making the same methodological mistakes that he said that the mainstream economists of his time were making. If you can't comment on that, you can't be a part of this conversation, because that is what it is about.
I only mean that I think it is irrelevant that people follow Misesian orthodoxy in order to be correct in methodology. I am also not an economist or an expert on Mises, even if I know some of the basics of his works and agree with some of it. I would in no way challenge Mises on his own thinking. And I'm not about to. But it seems you are taking a bit of a overzealous position on Mises and one I don't suspect is exactly correct -- or else his theories probably wouldn't be what they are. Namely that Mises didn't factor in his experience or the history of phenomenon when formulating theories, that he created his own methodology and that he thought other types of economics were irrelevant. Or even that if you believe in Misesian economics that you must believe other types of economics are useless.
I don't even know what "it" is, but I didn't say that.
- You seem to be saying that "it", linguistics, relies only on the history of utterances or on existing languages. When that is false. Though, maybe in some ways it does, but only in the same way 'law of demand' relies on the fact that people demand things or else it would never have been formulated.
Well, that wasn't what I was talking about.
- You seemed to be saying that linguistics should tell people how to use language. Well, second-language acquisition linguistics advises people on how to acquire a new language and how to use to effectively.
I don't think that you put much effort into that paragraph. What are "new things"? What does it mean that "future utterances can transcend all past utterances"? Why does it follow from there that "we can formulate rules"? What are mental rules? Can you give me an example? How do we deduce things about the nature of the brain? Can you give me an example?
- New things = utterances that have never been heard before. You can arrange the finite symbols in a language in order to make an infinite number of expressions. Such as "the cat ran over the dog", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food, in order to get it" and so on possibly to make an infinitely long sentence. But at the same time, it seems to be a fact at any given moment, that languages don't allow certain utterances to make sense. It is a fact that this is a feature of language. A sentence which doesn't fit into one language, either is a nonsense sentence or it must be a sentence in another language. Hence, 'the bite dog man the' is one in the current English vernacular. That this be the case in the future is irrelevant, because the future will have an infinite number of similar sentences that will not work in the English language. The mental rules are the ones that we form in our head to make sense of what things work and what don't. For instance, that subjects go before verbs and objects in most of our sentences, regardless of the words we plug in. In syntax literature, usually this is shown by tree diagrams that show hierarchical relations of various words in different types of phrases. We know something about the brain from this: that humans have the capacity for this type of mental calculation and arrangement of symbols; something unique to humanity.
Did I say that it was about that?
- Yes, since you seem to believe that linguistics is simply documenting experience of languages. I say to the contrary, it is not about individual languages but Language itself.
Just like people search in vain for exceptions to the law of demand? Such as collectables?
- I am merely describing those who are deemed, like Everett, to be faulty methodologists. And why they try to search for exceptions to the rule. Here Chomsky would be an agreement with you. But maybe not in the same exact way -- I don't know, I am not an economist.
Where does that fit into your response to me? It sounds like it came out of nowhere.
- I'm merely stating that there are other areas of linguistics which are data-driven almost exclusively. You can throw criticism on them, but the 'mental area' you talk of (which is namely Syntax and following the work of chomsky) is a whole other bag.
Nonsense; mysticism. Without observing those natural languages, it is just mysticism to say that those would never be said or written. We wouldn't see anything weird about those pieces of writing if we hadn't had experience of those language, or languages that we consider similar to them, beforehand. Why couldn't they just have "dsuafudsafd" mean something? What is wrong with that? How could we rule it out without referring to history?
- Well, implicit in the knowledge that something is a language is also knowledge of what a language is and is not. Namely that meaning emerges from meaningless symbols. That strings of sounds or symbols can be turned into a word or a sentence. And since no one teaches anyone these things, something has to account for how people understand that symbols stand for something. And part of that is tuning out some strings of sound/symbols as noise. And tuning into others as possibly meaningful. Without having seen a language, we can tell that certain symbols probably mean nothing. When we are native speakers of a language, we can hear completely new sentences and understand it perfectly. And also hear other completely new sentences and know that it is ungrammatical. Language may require experience of language itself and to have a working language, but one does not need experience of any and all strings to know which ones are going to be probably meaningful and which not. We make these judgments all the time.
When did I say that it was history? I said that the fact that nobody says it is history.
The actual utterances are not important. What is important is the fact that in all languages there are some strings that work and others that don't. This is not refutable. Or else there could be no different languages and indeed no possibility for meaning within a language. Again, this is implicit in understanding what language is and in using it.
Which are history. The "rules of English" are history.
- You're confusing the written rules, explicit rules that are taught, with implicit rules which are too numerous to teach. Most people don't have a list of rules, but still use the language. It is not a static thing but each person's mental conception of how their native tongue works. Again, in English -- as in all languages -- the rules can be deduced from the knowledge that some utterances can work at a given period and others cannot. For instance, those that would be semantically nonsensical or when it becomes a totally different language. Something has account for why 'the bite dog man the' doesn't work at this very moment. And why 'como estas?' is Spanish sounding instead of English. If you go to a foreign country and someone is speaking a language you've never heard of, you don't wait around to figure out if they speak your language. You know right away that isn't just an English sentence you've not heard before. That it has other rules, another lexicon, a different syntax, and many things besides.
Then why can some nerds communicate in machine language?
Because "speaking in binary" is only a cipher. It's still English (or whatever language they're encoding) underneath.
All academia is seriously flawed. Get over it. Academics don't get money back on their ideas the way businessmen do. This is just as much true whether the academic is Lew Rockwell or Paul Krugman.
All academia is seriously flawed.
Get over it.
Academics don't get money back on their ideas the way businessmen do. This is just as much true whether the academic is Lew Rockwell or Paul Krugman.
This.
Smart people don't dream of being teachers. It's the people who are left after the talented and competent do else that go into teaching. Subjects like economics don't even have any application outside of teaching. It's just a chain of propaganda. A bunch of people get paid (on someone else's back) to sit around and conjure any figment of the imagination that pleases them. 99% of people in every "discipline", to use an inaccurate word, are like the styrafoam filler in a box of wine glasses. It's the 1% that make all of progress. This is hyperbole, but you get the gist.
Do they dream of working at a patent office?
The admins reserve the right to monopolize cheekyness. So, you'll have to guess.
John Ess: What I mean to say is that I don't know what you're getting at by making the analogy. Because I don't know if you even understand Mises or this issue. [...]Nor can I be sure if I know what you're getting at[...]
[...]Nor can I be sure if I know what you're getting at[...]
Okay, well, in my next few posts, I will try to explain what the foundation of studying markets is in tradition of Ludwig von Mises, and then try to show why we should also use that same foundation to study languages. I didn't ever try to explain the foundation in this thread; I just acted like you should know what it is. But I will now try to make what I am talking about explicit.
John Ess: [...]it seems there is some carry over of some 'axiomatic' truth from Mises which privileges a priori over empiricism. My personal interpretation of Mises seems to find this a misunderstanding of him. For instance, I don't think he observed things about money by observing merely himself. What would be the difference between this and observing others, except it is more myopic to do the former? If I come up with a moral law based on my own personal preferences, it doesn't make it anymore arbitrary than counting the opinions of the majority of people.
[...]it seems there is some carry over of some 'axiomatic' truth from Mises which privileges a priori over empiricism. My personal interpretation of Mises seems to find this a misunderstanding of him.
Okay, money wasn't a good example. But you didn't understand what I meant anyway. I will explain a bit about what I meant in the next section.
John Ess: Would Chomsky be able to come up with better theories by observing only the way he himself talks/writes?
I didn't mean that we should observe us using language in the public world. I didn't even mean that we should observe us using language at all. I meant that to start out and get the vocabulary that we need to talk about this, we need to first observe our private world, just like in economics. We don't find choice, opportunity cost, preference, desire, or anything like those just in the public world; we don't find them just observing other people doing things. We find them in our own private world, and then assume that the movements of other people are caused by a similar private world that they have. But to assume that they have a similar private world means that we first need to know what a private world is, and we can't find that in the public world, where we only find physical movements.
John Ess: I only mean that I think it is irrelevant that people follow Misesian orthodoxy in order to be correct in methodology.
I only mean that I think it is irrelevant that people follow Misesian orthodoxy in order to be correct in methodology.
I didn't mean that we should follow the "Misesian orthodoxy". I just meant that he built the foundation that we should use not only for studying markets, but also for studying languages. I don't think that he saw that his work could be applied to studying languages, but who knows. Either way, he knew that his work could be applied to other things, and I think that one of those things could be language, and I don't think that anyone has figured that out yet.
John Ess: I am also not an economist or an expert on Mises, even if I know some of the basics of his works and agree with some of it. I would in no way challenge Mises on his own thinking. And I'm not about to. But it seems you are taking a bit of a overzealous position on Mises and one I don't suspect is exactly correct[...]
I am also not an economist or an expert on Mises, even if I know some of the basics of his works and agree with some of it. I would in no way challenge Mises on his own thinking. And I'm not about to. But it seems you are taking a bit of a overzealous position on Mises and one I don't suspect is exactly correct[...]
Let's see why you think that.
John Ess: Namely that Mises didn't factor in his experience or the history of phenomenon when formulating theories[...]
Namely that Mises didn't factor in his experience or the history of phenomenon when formulating theories[...]
He didn't look at the history of the public world to build the foundation, which I call "pure praxelogy", but he looked at the history of the public world to build the rest of his system, which I call a kind of "applied praxeology", which in his case was applying praxeology to studying markets, but could also be applying praxeology to studying languages, studying friendship relationships, and so on.
I will explain what the distinction between pure and applied praxeology is a bit later, but that distinction is important, especially because you missing it made my arguments sound a lot more extreme than they really are. I don't have a problem with looking at the history of the public world in terms of what people have said, written, and so on, and explaining what is going on; I just have a problem with the fact that I don't think that linguists have a good vocabulary to even talk about what people have said, written or whatever, simply because they have come up with the distinctions, such as those into nouns and adjectives, into subjects and objects, and so on, in an ad hoc, disjointed way, because they are trying to come up with those distinctions in a similar way to how they are trying to come up with speech patterns and whatever, by looking at people speaking languages, and trying to find regularities. Well, those regularities won't even be there unless you already have a theory; you won't be able to even see anything if you don't already have a theory; so it isn't that they find the regularities and make the distinctions just based on looking at text or speech; what they do is look at the text and speech, and use their unsystematic, commonsense, subconscious theories to find the regularities, but that just results in a bunch of ad hoc, disjointed, and disintegrated distinctions. So I'm not saying that they don't already have theories before they start looking at text and speech, but that their theories are unsystematic, because they haven't managed to make them conscious.
John Ess: [...]that he created his own methodology[...]
[...]that he created his own methodology[...]
Well, I didn't say that.
John Ess: [...]he thought other types of economics were irrelevant[...]
[...]he thought other types of economics were irrelevant[...]
Well, I also didn't say that.
John Ess: Or even that if you believe in Misesian economics that you must believe other types of economics are useless.
Or even that if you believe in Misesian economics that you must believe other types of economics are useless.
Well, that is true, but it isn't as extreme as you probably think that it is. Remember, the Austrian School economists often talk about the fact that the mainstream economists might act like Misesian economics is just mysticism, but often follow his methodology anyway. He even said that he wasn't creating a new methodology, but just making explicit what people always thought was what economists were doing. So, yes, if you "believe in" Misesian economics, you have to believe that "other types of economics are useless" at this point, but you don't have to believe that even the majority of mainstream economists operate in one of those "other types of economics".
John Ess: You seem to be saying that "it", linguistics, relies only on the history of utterances or on existing languages. When that is false. Though, maybe in some ways it does, but only in the same way 'law of demand' relies on the fact that people demand things or else it would never have been formulated.
You seem to be saying that "it", linguistics, relies only on the history of utterances or on existing languages. When that is false. Though, maybe in some ways it does, but only in the same way 'law of demand' relies on the fact that people demand things or else it would never have been formulated.
Well, see the last section. I don't even think that it would be possible that linguistics would rely only on "the history of utterances or on existing languages". I just think that it is a confused mess of psuedo-empiricism, like what Ludwig von Mises thought of the mainstream economists. They use a lot of "a priori" stuff, but they use it in a confused way, because they don't understand where it comes from. Maybe linguists don't make the same claims about their methodology that the mainstream economists of his time did, but I still think that they are making the same mistakes. It doesn't refute what I am saying for instance to quote a high profile, mainstream linguist talking about using "a priori" things or anything like that. I am talking about what they do, not what they say that they do.
John Ess: You seemed to be saying that linguistics should tell people how to use language. Well, second-language acquisition linguistics advises people on how to acquire a new language and how to use to effectively.
You seemed to be saying that linguistics should tell people how to use language. Well, second-language acquisition linguistics advises people on how to acquire a new language and how to use to effectively.
No, I was just saying that, if they were to not see natural languages as the ultimate givens, they might try to figure out how to improve our languages, like an engineer would try to improve the design of bridge, because it should be clear that our natural languages are just overcomplicated messes. Their overcomplicated surface hides a magnificant design and regularity that linguists don't ever seem to notice.
John Ess: New things = utterances that have never been heard before. You can arrange the finite symbols in a language in order to make an infinite number of expressions. Such as "the cat ran over the dog", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food, in order to get it" and so on possibly to make an infinitely long sentence. But at the same time, it seems to be a fact at any given moment, that languages don't allow certain utterances to make sense. It is a fact that this is a feature of language. A sentence which doesn't fit into one language, either is a nonsense sentence or it must be a sentence in another language. Hence, 'the bite dog man the' is one in the current English vernacular. That this be the case in the future is irrelevant, because the future will have an infinite number of similar sentences that will not work in the English language. The mental rules are the ones that we form in our head to make sense of what things work and what don't. For instance, that subjects go before verbs and objects in most of our sentences, regardless of the words we plug in. In syntax literature, usually this is shown by tree diagrams that show hierarchical relations of various words in different types of phrases. We know something about the brain from this: that humans have the capacity for this type of mental calculation and arrangement of symbols; something unique to humanity.
New things = utterances that have never been heard before. You can arrange the finite symbols in a language in order to make an infinite number of expressions. Such as "the cat ran over the dog", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food", "the cat ran over the dog towards the food, in order to get it" and so on possibly to make an infinitely long sentence. But at the same time, it seems to be a fact at any given moment, that languages don't allow certain utterances to make sense. It is a fact that this is a feature of language. A sentence which doesn't fit into one language, either is a nonsense sentence or it must be a sentence in another language. Hence, 'the bite dog man the' is one in the current English vernacular. That this be the case in the future is irrelevant, because the future will have an infinite number of similar sentences that will not work in the English language. The mental rules are the ones that we form in our head to make sense of what things work and what don't. For instance, that subjects go before verbs and objects in most of our sentences, regardless of the words we plug in. In syntax literature, usually this is shown by tree diagrams that show hierarchical relations of various words in different types of phrases. We know something about the brain from this: that humans have the capacity for this type of mental calculation and arrangement of symbols; something unique to humanity.
Okay, well, that is fine, but I don't know where that fits into your response to me.
John Ess: Yes, since you seem to believe that linguistics is simply documenting experience of languages. I say to the contrary, it is not about individual languages but Language itself.
Yes, since you seem to believe that linguistics is simply documenting experience of languages. I say to the contrary, it is not about individual languages but Language itself.
Why are those two things mutually exclusive?
John Ess: Well, implicit in the knowledge that something is a language is also knowledge of what a language is and is not. Namely that meaning emerges from meaningless symbols. That strings of sounds or symbols can be turned into a word or a sentence. And since no one teaches anyone these things, something has to account for how people understand that symbols stand for something. And part of that is tuning out some strings of sound/symbols as noise. And tuning into others as possibly meaningful. Without having seen a language, we can tell that certain symbols probably mean nothing. When we are native speakers of a language, we can hear completely new sentences and understand it perfectly. And also hear other completely new sentences and know that it is ungrammatical. Language may require experience of language itself and to have a working language, but one does not need experience of any and all strings to know which ones are going to be probably meaningful and which not. We make these judgments all the time.
Well, implicit in the knowledge that something is a language is also knowledge of what a language is and is not. Namely that meaning emerges from meaningless symbols. That strings of sounds or symbols can be turned into a word or a sentence. And since no one teaches anyone these things, something has to account for how people understand that symbols stand for something. And part of that is tuning out some strings of sound/symbols as noise. And tuning into others as possibly meaningful. Without having seen a language, we can tell that certain symbols probably mean nothing. When we are native speakers of a language, we can hear completely new sentences and understand it perfectly. And also hear other completely new sentences and know that it is ungrammatical. Language may require experience of language itself and to have a working language, but one does not need experience of any and all strings to know which ones are going to be probably meaningful and which not. We make these judgments all the time.
We learn the formation rules of a language from our experience of people speaking or writing it. The formation rules of a language are finite, but what those formation rules can form are infinite. We don't need somebody to explicitly "teach" us those formation rules, but we can't know them without learning them from somebody using them. I'm not talking about the strings, but the formation rules. We need to experience people using the formation rules to know what strings will or won't be meaningful. Saying that we could just know out of nowhere is just mysticism. Again, if we hadn't had any experience of the formation rules unique to English, why couldn't "suif9fdsuafuds" mean something? What would be wrong with something like that?
John Ess: The actual utterances are not important. What is important is the fact that in all languages there are some strings that work and others that don't. This is not refutable. Or else there could be no different languages and indeed no possibility for meaning within a language. Again, this is implicit in understanding what language is and in using it.
Wait, what? What people say is unimportant?
John Ess: You're confusing the written rules, explicit rules that are taught, with implicit rules which are too numerous to teach. Most people don't have a list of rules, but still use the language. It is not a static thing but each person's mental conception of how their native tongue works. Again, in English -- as in all languages -- the rules can be deduced from the knowledge that some utterances can work at a given period and others cannot. For instance, those that would be semantically nonsensical or when it becomes a totally different language. Something has account for why 'the bite dog man the' doesn't work at this very moment. And why 'como estas?' is Spanish sounding instead of English. If you go to a foreign country and someone is speaking a language you've never heard of, you don't wait around to figure out if they speak your language. You know right away that isn't just an English sentence you've not heard before. That it has other rules, another lexicon, a different syntax, and many things besides.
You're confusing the written rules, explicit rules that are taught, with implicit rules which are too numerous to teach. Most people don't have a list of rules, but still use the language. It is not a static thing but each person's mental conception of how their native tongue works. Again, in English -- as in all languages -- the rules can be deduced from the knowledge that some utterances can work at a given period and others cannot. For instance, those that would be semantically nonsensical or when it becomes a totally different language. Something has account for why 'the bite dog man the' doesn't work at this very moment. And why 'como estas?' is Spanish sounding instead of English. If you go to a foreign country and someone is speaking a language you've never heard of, you don't wait around to figure out if they speak your language. You know right away that isn't just an English sentence you've not heard before. That it has other rules, another lexicon, a different syntax, and many things besides.
I can assure you that I'm not. The "rules of English" are what set English apart from the other languages. There might be a lot of things about using English that aren't history, but what sets it apart from the other languages is just history.
I. Ryan: Well, I have to leave for now; I will get back to this tomorrow.
We start out in economics with the idea of volition. We observe our own private worlds, come up with that idea, and then try to unpack it into its components. We need the idea of cause and effect for the idea of volition, because we can't try to achieve anything unless we have an idea of what to do to bring that about. We need the idea of beliefs, because it isn't just that causes and effects exist in the world; it is that we have a belief of the causes and effects that exist in the world. We need the idea of desire, because that is what drives our volition. We get the idea of means and ends from adding the ideas of cause and effect, beliefs, and desires together. And so on.
I didn't try to make that very exact; I just wanted to give you an idea of what is going on. I call that "pure praxeology". It is just the logic or mathematics of volition. We start out with the idea of volition, which we find in our own private worlds, unpack it into its components, and build a vocabulary that we will have to use to make sense of things in the public world. The fact that I can form of the idea of volition in my own private world is a matter of fact, to use the vocabulary of David Hume; whether it exists or not is a matter of fact, and it wouldn't be absurd to say from a third person, god-like point of view that it just isn't there. But what makes it "a priori" is that, if I am talking to you, you can't deny that you have volition, because you will be using your volition to deny that you have volition, and would be caught up in the absurdity of trying to deny trying. So, though that just comes into play in arguments and communication, it is pretty useful, because you can show anyone reasonable that it is a permissable starting point.
We start out with the idea of volition and break it into its components. We get causes and effects, beliefs, knowledge, means and ends, desires, wants, preferences, opportunity costs, pyschic losses, psychic profits, value scales, exchange, choice, satisfaction, gratification, and so on. A lot of those things overlap, and some of them are pretty ambiguous, but it is up to us to unpack the idea of volition into its components in a useful, efficient, unambiguous, and correct way, so we can have a good vocabulary to use for talking about market conditions. We need a good vocabulary before we can talk about market conditions in an effective way.
The mainstream economists of his time used categories like causes and effects, means and ends, desires, choice, and so on, but they just didn't make their investigations explicit. Ludwig von Mises knew that you had to start out by examining your own private world to come up with a good vocabulary to talk about market conditions, and knew that you got that from your idea of your own volition, so he was in a position to try to make the vocabulary that he used systematic, but the mainstream economists of his time didn't know that, and weren't in that position, so what they did was, though they used the same sort of vocabulary, they didn't get it from systematic investigation into the nature of their private world; they just got it from their "commonsense". They didn't not use his method; they just replaced what could be systematic and scientific investigation with unsystematic and unscientific intuitions about things.
I think that we should start out in the same sort of way to study language. I think that we have to start out by observing our own private worlds to create the vocabulary that we need to talk about languages. And I think that most of the terms that linguists use, such as nouns, adjectives, tense, grammatical voice, prepositions, and so on are just unsystematic and confused ways of referring to things, because they are just using their commonsense intuition to come up with the terms.
(I will try to give an example in a bit.)
I. Ryan: (I will try to give an example in a bit.)
Okay, here is an example where I define the distinction between nouns and adjectives.
I. Ryan: I will try to explain what the foundation of studying markets is in tradition of Ludwig von Mises, and then try to show why we should also use that same foundation to study languages.
I will try to explain what the foundation of studying markets is in tradition of Ludwig von Mises, and then try to show why we should also use that same foundation to study languages.
Here is a concise post about the analogy.