Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Why I am an economic agnostic


The age-old quest of humans for knowledge extends into prehistorical time. This quest has been driven by the desire to understand subjective experience and objective phenomena in terms of causes.

Early humans explained causation in terms of what we would now call the supernatural, which which at least some of them apparently claimed to experience through what we would regard as non-ordinary cognition and would write to imagination or affect. This stage of development is regarded as predominantly mythological, Greek mythos meaning story or narrative.

Around the time Greek philosophy began to develop with Thales of Miletus c. 624 BC – c. 546 BCE, we can see a transition from supernatural explanation to natural explanation. At first this was proto-scientific in the sense that the causes where physical. Thales is reported to have said that all things are of water, for example, Anaximines opined air, and Heraclitus, fire. This line of thinking soon developed into more elaborate metaphysical explanations, such as the abstract apeiron (indefinite, infinite, boundless, unlimited) of Anaximander, nous (intelligence) of Anaxagoras, and the one of Parmenides.

The metaphysical aspect expanded to included psychological and apriori factors, both of which are subjective. Socrates, his student Plato and and Plato's student Aristotle, who are the foremost shapers of Western thought, knew of their predecessors and built on their work. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle way of thinking and mode of expression is quite comfortable to us millennia later, whereas earlier thought seems quite remote in time. There is a perceptible maturing of the transition to abstract, "rational" expression at this point in time, which Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age.

No really significant change in the mode of approach occurred until the emergence of science the the time of the Renaissance. So it is possible to see a progression from mythological explanation, to philosophical explanation, to scientific explanation, as did Auguste Comte.

The difference between philosophy and science is that philosophy rests largely on imputing metaphysical and psychological causation that are non-physical, subjective or apriori. Consequently, assertions based on this methodological approach cannot be test empirically, while science requires testable hypotheses that can be falsified empirically. So a great divide began to appear.

The second great transition took place in the shift to scientific explanation, which regarded subjective factors as being nearly in the same category as the supernatural. The natural sciences made this transition due to the objective nature of the phenomena they deal with.

Social science is still struggling with the transition because the human element is both objective (behavior) and subjective (cognitive-volitional-affective). Economics is one of the social sciences, therefore subject to reflexivity of consciousness, future uncertainty, and "animal spirits" as Keynes called the affective aspect of consciousness.

Moreover, insofar as it is a policy science, economics is heavily value-laden and normative. For instance, capitalism is only one possible approach to economics based on promoting one factor of production over others. It is based on a particular, some would say
peculiar, ideological construction that predominantly values capital — financially as investment and non-financially as capital goods — as the scarcest factor of production and the most vital to economic growth.

Therefore, doing economics involves avoiding many traps. As Keynes pointed out in a letter to Roy Harrod,
...the art of thinking in terms of models is a difficult--largely because it is an unaccustomed--practice. The pseudo-analogy with the physical sciences leads directly counter to the habit of mind which is most important for an economist proper to acquire.
I also want to emphasise strongly the point about economics being a moral science. I mentioned before that it deals with introspection and with values. [3] I might have added that it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One has to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous in the same way that the material of the other sciences, in spite of its complexity, is constant and homogeneous. It is as though the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple's motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth.
In another letter to Harrod, Keynes wrote,
It seems to me that economics is a branch of logic, a way of thinking; and that you do not repel sufficiently firmly attempts à la Schultz to turn it into a pseudo-natural-science.
What is desired in scientific explanation is inclusive and compatible models among the various disciplines that comprehensively account for observable phenomena in terms of physical causes, which makes prediction not only possible but secured in scientific laws.

What this means is creating scientific theories formalized in terms of models that relate independent variables as causes and dependent variables as effects. The theoretical explanation also needs to show why the direction of causality is as claimed.

Simple models in the social sciences can be useful in moving in that direction and away from aprioris, but there are several problems to be surmounted. Without an operational account, the direction of causality may be reversed, or correlation may be mistaken for causality for instance. Nor is it simple to distinguish sufficient, necessary, and necessary and sufficient conditions in complex matters.

Moreover, hypotheses derived from simple models are difficult to formulate and test definitively in order to arrive at laws since the models are too simplistic to take into account the plethora of relevant data.

In addition, designing experiments can be difficult in the social sciences, with not only complex data but also ethic considerations in experimental design.

So we might say that economics provides frameworks for thinking about issues but not definitive solutions for running firms or formulating economic policy. However, referring to guidelines is often wiser than trusting to ideology, naive common sense, or bare intuition.

Belief is not knowledge. Many religious people think that faith makes them knowers instead of believers, when truth be told, they are in reality agnostics who refuse to admit it.

Neither are opinions knowledge, nor do stipulated assumptions yield anything other than deductive conclusions based on what is postulated.

Economists should admit their limitations where appropriate. I don't oppose the direction anyone takes. I do oppose theologizing it and making it dogma in the face of heterodox opposition — and heterodox opposition is mounting.

As a philosopher, my concern is not with developing economic models but looking at what economists and others say and do (context), and pointing out illogic. One of the most often committed logical fallacies is exceeding the bounds of an argument's conclusion in drawing implications from it. Another is using terms inconsistently.

But as far as the direction economists might take to improve their discipline — to paraphrase Friedman, the task of economists is to distinguish good economics from bad economics — heterodox schools are proposing new directions. Some call for building on the mainstream approach and others for a new paradigm.

Economics combines philosophical and scientific elements and this dichotomy needs to be acknowledge more, with less puffery about certainty and less propagandizing about what is essentially ideology as though it were scientific knowledge when it patently is not. Let's get some perspective here, which what many heterodox economists are attempting to do.

29 comments:

paul meli said...

Are you accepting members to your club?

If so I'm signing up.

jrbarch said...

Hi Tom - Would you consider super-naturalism, naturalism, metaphysics, rationalism, the physical and human sciences, religion etc. as paths leading back to some center; or leading away to distant goals or the same goal; or just billiard balls flying around randomly, reacting to each other on some table?

Set against an Infinite backdrop, the Universe(s) are just recycled dust. If matter/energy conversion is considered it doesn't stop there.

What do you make of our little story, our little human drama? What makes us significant?

Should we be coming and going on the face of this earth, forever asking: who am I; why am I here; what am I meant to be doing; what will happen to me? Living in uncertainty.

Or should we just get caught up, busy in the play?

I think something inside of us wants to know.

Tom Hickey said...

After a long time investigating the basic questions, "Who am I, really?" and "What's going on here anyway?" the conclusion I have come to from an integration of spiritual practice, life experience, and rational inquiry is that that is more to life than meets the eye, and that the most reliable guides to in studying the whole in terms of key fundamentals is perennial wisdom as the testimony of mystics and the teaching of masters and prophets, sages, saints, and seers, who claim to be operating on supernormal levels of conscious awareness. I have concluded that this is not only highly plausible but it also provides the most coherent explanation. However, it takes teasing out because there is a lot of noise obscuring the signal. My view is set forth at http://www.corespirituality.com/ in the content and links.

Tom Hickey said...

To answer the specific question, "Would you consider super-naturalism, naturalism, metaphysics, rationalism, the physical and human sciences, religion etc. as paths leading back to some center; or leading away to distant goals or the same goal; or just billiard balls flying around randomly, reacting to each other on some table?"

Progress toward realizing unity comes through traversing the path of duality, which involves exploring opposites.

So no exploration of any alternative is wasted, but rather every experience is utilized in ways unbeknownst to most on the way to freedom from opposites, just as evolution got us physically to this point without our realizing it.

This realization of physical evolution only dawned quite recently in terms of human existence on earth, in which human history is itself only a blip on the time line. The realization of non-physical evolution is still relatively unknown in the West, where knowledge of perennial wisdom is yet dim and to the degree known, regarded either as superstitious by materialists or as heretical by most followers of the great Western religions.

Speaking of religious mythology, Here is an explication by Meher Baba about the role of opposites in terms of the creation myth of Genesis and the evolution of consciousness from unconscious unity, through consciousness of duality, to conscious unity — talking snake and all.

Carlos said...

If you spend too much time thinking about the why and wherefore of human existence you will start believing in God as an exit path to retain your sanity.

Most Human behaviour is pretty predictable, but we don't observe the results of our own behaviour too closely. We are creatures of habit. Oh yes.... I do make the same mistakes over and over.

jrbarch said...

Thanks Tom. The quotes I liked the most were:

"When one's own mind is known in its nakedness, this doctrine of seeing-the-mind-naked, this self-liberation, is seen to be exceedingly profound. Seek, therefore, thine own wisdom within thee. It is the vast deep."

"The whole purpose of life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen."

Tom Hickey said...

Andew: "If you spend too much time thinking about the why and wherefore of human existence you will start believing in God as an exit path to retain your sanity."

Yes. This is essentially Freud's view in The Future of an Illusion. However, in a footnote on the first page he acknowledges the objection of his friend, Romain Rolland, that his book ignores the "oceanic feeling" reported by many mystics (including Rolland). Freud responded by saying that this work does not address this and that it lay beyond his scope. Intuitionist philosopher Henri Bergson did adress it, however, in The Two Sources of Religion and Morality.

Anonymous said...

Science "explains" nothing whatsoever, unless by explanation one means elucidating certain quantifiable relationships--the mechanisms, as it were--of phenomena. This is not an explanation, it is a form of description, and a very superficial one at that, hardly exhausting the full nature of phenomena, let alone of the real. The distinction between the Aristotelian and Platonic approaches to the real was clearly elucidated, and a real synthesis achieved, by the Muslim philosophers, such as Ibn Sina and later, Mulla Sadra.

See for example, History of Islamic Phil., ed. SH Nasr and Oliver Leaman, and Moorish Culture in Spain, by Titus Burckhardt. Also, Cosmos and Transcendence, by the mathematician Wolfgang Smith.

Tom Hickey said...

Anonymous: "Science "explains" nothing whatsoever, unless by explanation one means elucidating certain quantifiable relationships--the mechanisms, as it were--of phenomena. This is not an explanation, it is a form of description, and a very superficial one at that, hardly exhausting the full nature of phenomena, let alone of the real."

Scientific explanation (theory) is a general description with hypotheses about causal transmission aka mechanism. Science limits itself to description of physical reality and hypotheses that can be tested empirically, as well as testing those hypotheses experimentally.

Science does that and nothing more than that, for do so would be to go beyond the limits of the scientific method.

Some scientists attempt to say that science proves that there is nothing but physical observables that are at least in principle possible to test empirically. Science says no such thing, and to say it does is to misrepresent the defined scope of science. It is saying that something we cannot know anything about through a particular methodology therefore doesn't exist. That's at illicit logical jump that goes beyond the scope of the argument.

BTW, the Islamic "philosophers" to look at in particular are al-'Arabi (aka ibn 'Arabi) and al-Ghazali, both of whom are recognized as having realized Baqa Billah (abiding in Allah), which is Haqiqat (truth) and Al-Insān al-Kāmil (perfection).

Lisa said...

I think you said in double the number of words what Anonymous said :-)

My understanding (as an specialist in Islamic culture) is that Ibn Arabi pertains to the domain of Tasawwuf (sufism), as does Al-Ghazali, and are not properly construed as philosophers, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) or even Mulla Sadra, who pertained to a particular type of "theosophy" within Persian culture.

Tom Hickey said...

Lisa: "My understanding (as an specialist in Islamic culture) is that Ibn Arabi pertains to the domain of Tasawwuf (sufism), as does Al-Ghazali, and are not properly construed as philosophers, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) or even Mulla Sadra, who pertained to a particular type of "theosophy" within Persian culture."

Yes, that is why I put quotation marks around philosopher in referring to ibn Arabi and Al-Ghazali, whose works resemble philosophy, just as do those of Shankara in the Vedic tradition, as well as the discourses of Buddha. Same with Meher Baba in our time. But these people claim to be speaking from experience or else are acknowledged to be speaking from experience instead of reasoning in the mode of people we now call philosophers.

In ancient times, "philosopher" had a different meaning than it does now, and it would not do to call people like ibn Arabi, Al-Ghazali, Shankara, or Buddha philosophers in the same sense.

Rumi and Hafiz do in poetry what ibn Arabi and Al-Ghazali do in prose, so the are considered poet rather than philosophers. But they are much more than poets in the ordinary sense. Same with Saadi (Sa'di), Shabistari, and Attar.

Kabir is interesting wrt perennial wisdom in that he was a Muslim but his guru was a Hindu, and he is honored by the Sikhs with a place in the Adi Granth. Beneath the superficial difference, the core teaching is the same.

I stopped doing normal philosophy pretty much after I got involved with perennial wisdom, since it answers virtually all the enduring questions that normal philosophy argues over undecidably. So I turned my attention toward comparative spirituality and perennial wisdom. I have attempted to show that the way of Jesus is different from normative Christianity and a branch of the tree whose trunk is perennial wisdom (testimony and teaching) and whose tap root is core spirituality (super-normal experience).

Argument has to stop somewhere that is either taken as a norm (criterion) or involves a fallacy. Scientific reasoning ends with sense experience as the criterion. Philosophy with self-evidence of first principles. Theology with scripture. And perennial wisdom with super-sensory experience.

People seeking knowledge, and don't want to be skeptics, have to decide on a criterion to accept, without having an absolute criterion available. Materialists stop at logical reasoning that ends in sense experience as publicly available evidence. Philosophers opt for self-evident first principles of some sort, but there is wide disagreement over what is self-evident. Theologians take scripture as authoritative, but there are many scriptures and the meaning of scripture stand in need of interpretation. Perennial wisdom's criterion is super-normal experience, which is personal and immediate.

Those pursuing the path of perennial wisdom take super-sensory experience as their criterion and are guided by those that they believe have realized more comprehensive experience. There are many levels. "In my Father's house, there are many mansions." (John 14:2)

Lisa said...

I have no idea why you thought you needed to deliver this piece of pedantry to me.

Tom Hickey said...

I am happy to hear that you already knew this, Lisa, and have thought it through. Many have no idea of distinctions like this.

Trixie said...

Many have no idea of distinctions like this.

(Raises hand)

And allow me to elaborate. Shocking, I know. But this has become a pet-peeve of mine. People assimilate information in different ways. Ramanan is frequently "irritated" with discussions. Guess what? So am I, especially with the semantic tyranny. At the same time, Lisa thinks Tom is being too "pedantic". Whereas, I consider it a "learning experience".

(Air quotes required). And parenthesis.

But this whole notion that the same 6 people on the internet demand that we all speak in a way that only the same 6 people understand? Well, that "annoys" me. And I very much appreciate anyone who takes the time to educate in a way that may be accessible to all.

John Zelnicker said...

Tom -- Too bad Lisa didn't like your "pedantry". I thought it was a good little essay and I learned something worthwhile from it. I have long believed that the understanding of perennial wisdom is the key to self-knowledge. As I am sure you know, the wisdom of the sages has a long history in Judaism.

And, I am glad you put up a link to your website. Maybe I missed it before, but I will be spending some time there now.

Tom Hickey said...

Thanks, John Z. I think that Lisa thought that I was aiming that at her instead of realizing that what I put up here I assume will be read by a wide audience. So it was addressed to people like you who are interested in this topic.

I see perennial wisdom as playing a similar role in understanding both life's mysteries and the various religions as MMT plays in economics. MMT adds an operational understanding that clarifies confusions. Perennial wisdom does too.

Just as it is impossible to understand economics properly with the operational understanding, so too it is impossible to appreciate the deeper meaning of life and religion without perennial wisdom unless it is one's destiny to connect with a guide that convey the inner meaning in terms of experience. Perennial wisdom is not only an understanding but also a pointer to the experience necessary for genuine understanding.

I have long believed that the understanding of perennial wisdom is the key to self-knowledge. As I am sure you know, the wisdom of the sages has a long history in Judaism.

Yes, as Meher Baba's explanation of the Garden of Eden narrative shows it is a teaching story (midrash) with an inner meaning about spiritual evolution. The Garden of Eden narrative is the culmination of the the equally symbolic narrative of creation that parallels the symbolic narratives of other traditions.

There is a profound difference between the normative religious aspect and the mystical-spiritual aspect. This is true of all the wisdom traditions, including the Hebrew tradition, which, of course, is much more ancient that modern Judaism, just as the Vedic tradition is much more ancient than modern Hinduism.

In ancient times there was a close connection between the religious (cultural) and spiritual (personal), but in modern times that connection has been largely severed — although it is now being rediscovered popularly and also studied academically.

Regarding a universal interpretation of the Jewish mystical tradition, I recommend my friend Daniel Feldman's Qabalah: The Mystical Heritage of the Children of Abraham. While out of print, it's available as a free PDF download at The Work of the Chariot site. Lots of other interesting stuff there too, including translations. If you visit the site, click on the eye that will appear after the Flash graphic loads in order to enter.

I also like Leo Shaya's The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (Penguin Books, 1973) for an introductory universal approach. It's back in print (2005) and available at Amazon.

Pete said...

Tom Hickey:

You wrote:

Economists should admit their limitations where appropriate. I don't oppose the direction anyone takes. I do oppose theologizing it and making it dogma in the face of heterodox opposition — and heterodox opposition is mounting.

As a philosopher, my concern is not with developing economic models but looking at what economists and others say and do (context), and pointing out illogic. One of the most often committed logical fallacies is exceeding the bounds of an argument's conclusion in drawing implications from it. Another is using terms inconsistently.

Yet before that you wrote this:

What is desired in scientific explanation is inclusive and compatible models among the various disciplines that comprehensively account for observable phenomena in terms of physical causes, which makes prediction not only possible but secured in scientific laws.

What this means is creating scientific theories formalized in terms of models that relate independent variables as causes and dependent variables as effects. The theoretical explanation also needs to show why the direction of causality is as claimed.

Simple models in the social sciences can be useful in moving in that direction and away from aprioris, but there are several problems to be surmounted. Without an operational account, the direction of causality may be reversed, or correlation may be mistaken for causality for instance. Nor is it simple to distinguish sufficient, necessary, and necessary and sufficient conditions in complex matters.

--------------

There are two contradictions in your argument.

1. If you don't oppose the direction anyone takes, then you cannot possibly insist that everyone take the particular direction that they only endeavor to find scientific predictions based on constant causality, as a requirement for finding the truth of all phenomena. This is because there are those of us who have conclusively shown that however far scientific predictions based on constancy in relations can apply to physics, chemistry and other natural sciences, it cannot apply to knowledge and actions and hence cannot apply to the social sciences. The explanation for this is beyond the scope of this blog, but in short, knowledge and action logically presuppose change, not constancy. As such, and in line with your initial stance, you cannot oppose this direction the way you are opposing it.

2. Similar to the contradiction above, you also cannot possibly insist that everyone "move away from a prioris", as if a priori propositions cannot tell us anything real about empirical reality. This is because there are those of us who have conclusively shown that true synthetic a priori propositions are indeed possible. You cannot say with absolute certainty that true synthetic a priori propositioning is impossible, lest you belie your own thesis and you end up presenting an a priori argument of your own, that presumably we are all supposed to consider as true.

-------------

In your haphazard summary of philosophy that starts more than 2000 years ago, you completely overlooked Rationalist philosophy (which began the enlightenment).

Tom Hickey said...

No problem here as long as economists admit that economics is not a science.

"This is because there are those of us who have conclusively shown that true synthetic a priori propositions are indeed possible."

Like who and on what basis?

"You cannot say with absolute certainty that true synthetic a priori propositioning is impossible, lest you belie your own thesis and you end up presenting an a priori argument of your own, that presumably we are all supposed to consider as true."

Unless "synthetic apriori" is an oxymoron.

Pete said...

Tom Hickey:

No problem here as long as economists admit that economics is not a science.

You mean positivist science. You cannot claim economics is not a science. Doing so is just playing the part of a dictator, who refuses to grant the prestigious title of "science" if he does not personally approve of it.

Science is just using one's mind to learn about reality. Empiricist-positivism does not have a monopoly on this.

What you are doing is not how to protect science from religious infiltration. For you would only be invoking a new religion: the faith that the only valid method for acquiring knowledge about reality is through empiricist-positivism.

EP, in the history of economic thought, is actually a relatively new phenomenon. Prior to around the 1950s, economic science was predominantly not empiricist-positivist.

"This is because there are those of us who have conclusively shown that true synthetic a priori propositions are indeed possible."

Like who and on what basis?

1. Like who? Like Leibniz, Kant and Mises, and many other Rationalist philosophers before and after them. Leibniz is who opened my eyes to the validity of Rationalism by his famous response to Locke's dictum: "There is nothing in the mind that isn't first in the senses", by Leibniz responding with "...except the mind itself." In other words, one cannot know how observations generate knowledge in the mind, unless one knows how the mind itself works. This is where self-reflective knowledge comes in. It's difficult to do, because we're essentially using the tool we have to understand the tool itself, but with assistance from thymology, we can connect how our minds work, with how reality MUST be, on the basis that our minds are one of ACTING persons. It's the action that bridges the gap between mind and external reality.

2. On what basis you ask? On the basis of irrefutable axioms, such as human action (since refutation of any proposition is itself an action, it follows that one cannot refute the human action axiom without committing a performance contradiction. Hence it is apodictically true and can serve as a foundation for deducing further knowledge).

"You cannot say with absolute certainty that true synthetic a priori propositioning is impossible, lest you belie your own thesis and you end up presenting an a priori argument of your own, that presumably we are all supposed to consider as true."

Unless "synthetic apriori" is an oxymoron.

You also cannot say with absolute certainty that synthetic a priori is an oxymoron, lest you belie your own thesis and you end up presenting an a priori argument of your own that presumably we are all supposed to consider as true.

By the way, "synthetic a priori" is not an oxymoron. A synthetic a priori proposition is simply one in which the predicate is not logically or analytically contained in the subject (synthetic part), and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience (the a priori part).

I suggest you add 18th to 19th century philosophy to your ancient Greek foundation. Humans have discovered a little more in the way of epistemology since 400 BC.

Tom Hickey said...

Wittgenstein established logically in the Tractatus that subjective fields involving norms can never be scientific in the sense of purely descriptive of the world. Normative "science" is an oxymoron. As a policy tool, economics is both normative and descriptive.

The "self-evidence" that Mises claimed is the stipulation of norms from the point of view of logical analysis. Wittgenstein elaborated the logic of this in his later works, especially Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty — although not in relation to Mises in particular.

Tom Hickey said...

Pete: "Like who? Like Leibniz, Kant and Mises"

Right. Mises was simply repeating 18th century ideas in which one accepts the validity of anymore, and which cognitive science shows the error of. Even Hayek broke with Mises over this, accepting Popper's view.

On what basis you ask? On the basis of irrefutable axioms, such as human action (since refutation of any proposition is itself an action, it follows that one cannot refute the human action axiom without committing a performance contradiction. Hence it is apodictically true and can serve as a foundation for deducing further knowledge).


Please read Was Mises a Fallibilist? for an opposing view.

If one understand the meaning of "a priori" (true before experience) and synthetic (additive to knowledge of the external world) then synthetic apriori is an oxymoron unless it can be explained how the mind gets knowledge of the world that is extra-sensory, or one adopts an idealist philosophy.. Kant tried and the verdict is in. His explanation doesn't cut it, as Hegel realized and went on to articulate an idealist position in which mind is essentially knowing itself.

Mises was a Neo-Kantian, in other words, an outlier, and no one that doesn't accept 18ty century thinking is going to buy into the account Mises gave.

I am rather predisposed to rationalism and idealism instead of empiricism and realism, and I credit Kant with making a valiant effort. In doing so, he anticipated psychological discoveries that came much later.

But science is very opposed to admitting any claim of self-evidence that is not analytic apriori for lack of adequate criteria, in reaction to the long setback science had to take in the face of Aristotelianism. Scientists would say that assumptions can serve as starting points of a formal deductive model, but they are only stipulations. If they say anything about the world, then they must be formulated as hypotheses testable wrt experiment.

If Austrian economics wants to set up a competing system then it is welcome to do so, but it is not going to attract many rigorous thinkers and its proponents will be regarded as cranks.

Now if it were to consistently offers correct predictions, then the situation might be different, but it hasn't , and it hasn't because it is too lax logically to pin down. It can come up with an explanation for any outcome in terms of the theory and scientists don't like that.

Tom Hickey said...

Pete: "I suggest you add 18th to 19th century philosophy to your ancient Greek foundation. Humans have discovered a little more in the way of epistemology since 400 BC."

Yes, and we have learned more scientifically, too. See, for instance, Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003).

In a very broad sense, Kant was a precursor of cognitive science, but his endeavor was quite different, and scientists do not accept it as scientific. It was in the tradition of 18th century rationalism, and opposed to empiricism. Kant's end in view was to provide a justification of rationalism against Hume's empiricism, and Kant credited Hume for his own basic insight into logical categories as mental categories. Hegel would turn them into metaphysical categories as well.

Why Kant Was Not A Cognitive Scientist

In my view, the rationalist, empiricist and Kantian synthesis set the stage for subsequent developments, which separated broadly into Husserl's phenomenological approach, the positivist approach of Logical Positivism (Vienna Circle), and Wittgenstein's approach to analytic philosophy. These influences were basically philosophical, and philosophy changed dramatically with the introduction of information science.

Now a new interdisciplinary called "consciousness studies" is emerging to integrate these different strands. What the outcome will be remains to be seen, but there is little indication to me that it will be rationalist, empiricist, or Kantian, since the world has moved on from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Anonymous said...

Frithjof Schuon, in his essay, "Rationalism, Real and Apparent," in the book, "Logic and Transcendence," has a devastating critique of Kantianism.

Pete said...

Tom Hickey:

Right. Mises was simply repeating 18th century ideas in which one accepts the validity of anymore

You mean nobody? Fallacy ad populum.

and which cognitive science shows the error of.

Cognitive science has not refuted Rationalism. It presupposes it.

Even Hayek broke with Mises over this, accepting Popper's view.

Pooper's view is internally inconsistent. His epistemological pronouncement belies his own thesis concerning the foundation of knowledge.

In my view, the rationalist, empiricist and Kantian synthesis set the stage for subsequent developments, which separated broadly into Husserl's phenomenological approach, the positivist approach of Logical Positivism (Vienna Circle), and Wittgenstein's approach to analytic philosophy. These influences were basically philosophical, and philosophy changed dramatically with the introduction of information science.

Neither Husserl, the Vienna School, nor Wittgenstein succeeded in refuting 20th century praxeology as the only valid epistemology for humans.

In fact, now that you mentioned him, Wittgenstein was quite partial to praxeological thought in economics:

http://mises.org/journals/scholar/long.pdf

Now a new interdisciplinary called "consciousness studies" is emerging to integrate these different strands. What the outcome will be remains to be seen, but there is little indication to me that it will be rationalist, empiricist, or Kantian, since the world has moved on from the 17th and 18th centuries.

The world has not actually moved on from praxeology. It never left it. Philosophers have only been maintaining it, consciously or not, in their investigations. What Mises discovered, the logic of action, will be true however far into the future there will be action. It is true for even alien actors.

I doubt very much "consciousness studying", which is an action, will ever refute action.

Pete said...

No, that wasn't a typo.

Tom Hickey said...

Pete, Mises argument and Rothbard's reasoning, and neoliberals as well, is based on the assumption of a natural order, including natural law and natural rights. It's basically John Locke's version of Aristotle, which was rejected by Hume and all empiricists since, which includes virtually scientists.

Everyone current with state of the art knowledge rejects the philosophical conception of natural order based on self-evidence in favor of evolutionary science, which replaced it.

A major reason tht mainstream economics fails is due to this, as evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson showed in Evolution Begins to Occupy Center Stage in Economic Debates and his thirteen part Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms series at Science Blogs. Roger Erickson writes from this angle here at MNE. putting MNE on the cutting edge in this respect.

Jean Paul Sartre advanced a philosophy of radical freedom in Being and Nothingness in the i940's, but later did an about face in The Critique of Dialectal Reason.

About the only significant group of contermporary philosophers embracing the natural order assumption today are Thomistic philosopher that follow AquinasThe remaining Thomists are mostly conservative Catholics following traditional Church teaching. The rest are people that still think that arguments based on self-evidence work.

The other people that embrace natural order are people that aren't trained philosophers and haven't dug into the debate. Usually, they don't know much about either the logical objections raised by contemporary philosopher and they aren't well educated in the relevant science either. The people who are generally embrace natural order either due to religious or ideological reasons.

Tom Hickey said...

, and people that aren't trained philosophers and haven't dug into the debate.

Read the article and disagree with it. BTW, I qualify as a Wittgenstein scholar, having done my PhD dissertation on Wittenstein, so my view is not semi-informed.

Pete said...

Tom Hickey:

Evolution hasn't replaced natural order. Evolution IS a natural order.

Most trained philosophers of today are ill-equipped to deal with rationalist objections to their beliefs, what with the influx of ancient relativism and skepticism making a reappearance.

Tom Hickey said...

PeteP: "Evolution IS a natural order

Sounds like a definition to me, right out of the 18th century, too.