The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: The Human Mind Part 3 & 4

In 1962 Ludwig von Mises published his final major work.  “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science” is a look into the very essence of economics and the study of human action.  This extract is part of a series of posts in which HumanAction.co.za is reproducing this classic work, chapter by chapter.

The original online version of this work is published here at Mises.org.

Enjoy this work every step of the way as Mises himself invites us into his world of the logic and essence of human action, and the very foundations of real economics.

Chapter 1: The Human Mind

3. The A Priori

One does not annul the cognitive significance of the a priori by qualifying it as tautological. A tautology must ex definitione be the tautology—restatement—of something said already previously. If we qualify Euclidian geometry as a hierarchical system of tautologies, we may say: The theorem of Pythagoras is tautological as it expresses merely something that is already implied in the definition of a right-angled triangle.

But the question is: How did we get the first—the basic—proposition of which the second—the derived—proposition is merely a tautology? In the case of the various geometries the answers given today are either (a) by an arbitrary choice or (b) on account of its convenience or suitability. Such an answer cannot be given with regard to the category of action.

Neither can we interpret our concept of action as a precipitate of experience. It makes sense to speak of experience in cases in which also something different from what was experienced in concreto could have possibly been expected before the experience. Experience tells us something we did not know before and could not learn but for having had the experience. But the characteristic feature of a priori knowledge is that we cannot think of the truth of its negation or of something that would be at variance with it. What the a priori expresses is necessarily implied in every proposition concerning the issue in question. It is implied in all our thinking and acting.

If we qualify a concept or a proposition as a priori, we want to say: first, that the negation of what it asserts is unthinkable for the human mind and appears to it as nonsense; secondly, that this a priori concept or proposition is necessarily implied in our mental approach to all the problems concerned, i.e., in our thinking and acting concerning these problems.

The a priori categories are the mental equipment by dint of which man is able to think and to experience and thus to acquire knowledge. Their truth or validity cannot be proved or refuted as can those of a posteriori propositions, because they are precisely the instrument that enables us to distinguish what is true or valid from what is not.

What we know is what the nature or structure of our senses and of our mind makes comprehensible to us. We see reality, not as it “is” and may appear to a perfect being, but only as the quality of our mind and of our senses enables us to see it. Radical empiricism and positivism do not want to admit this. As they describe it, reality writes, as experience, its own story upon the white sheets of the human mind. They admit that our senses are imperfect and do not fully and faithfully reflect reality. But they do not examine the power of the mind to produce, out of the material provided by sensation, an undistorted representation of reality. In dealing with the a priori we are dealing with the mental tools that enable us to experience, to learn, to know, and to act. We are dealing with the mind’s power, and this implies that we are dealing with the limits of its power.

We must never forget that our representation of the reality of the universe is conditioned by the structure of our mind as well as of our senses. We cannot preclude the hypothesis that there are features of reality that are hidden to our mental faculties but could be noticed by beings equipped with a more efficient mind and certainly by a perfect being. We must try to become aware of the characteristic features and limitations of our mind in order not to fall prey to the illusion of omniscience.

The positivistic conceit of some of the forerunners of modem positivism manifested itself most blatantly in the dictum: God is a mathematician. How can mortals, equipped with manifestly imperfect senses, claim for their mind the faculty of conceiving the universe in the same way in which the wholly perfect may conceive it? Man cannot analyze essential features of reality without the help provided by the tools of mathematics. But the perfect being?

After all, it is quite supererogatory to waste time upon controversies concerning the a priori. Nobody denies or could deny that no human reasoning and no human search for knowledge could dispense with what these a priori concepts, categories, and propositions tell us. No quibbling can in the least affect the fundamental role played by the category of action for all the problems of the science of man, for praxeology, for economics, and for history.

4. The A Priori Representation of Reality

No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things. The starting point of experimental knowledge is the cognition that an A is uniformly followed by a B. The utilization of this knowledge either for the production of B or for the avoidance of the emergence of B is called action. The primary objective of action is either to bring about B or to prevent its happening.

Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.

To the man anxious to remove by purposive conduct some uneasiness felt, the question occurs: Where, how, and when would it be necessary to interfere in order to obtain a definite result? Cognizance of the relation between a cause and its effect is the first step toward man’s orientation in the world and is the intellectual condition of any successful activity. All attempts to find a satisfactory logical, epistemological, or metaphysical foundation for the category of causality were doomed to fail. All we can say about causality is that it is a priori not only of human thought but also of human action.

Eminent philosophers have tried to elaborate a complete list of the a priori categories, the necessary conditions of experience and thought. One does not belittle these attempts at analysis and systematization if one realizes that any proposed solution leaves a broad margin for the individual thinker’s discretion. There is only one point about which there cannot be any disagreement, viz., that they all can be reduced to the a priori insight into the regularity in the succession of all observable phenomena of the external world. In a universe lacking this regularity there could not be any thinking and nothing could be experienced. For experience is the awareness of identity or the absence of identity in what is perceived; it is the first step toward a classification of events. And the concept of classes would be empty and useless if there were no regularity.

If there were no regularity, it would be impossible to resort to classification and to construct a language. All words signify bundles of regularly connected acts of perception or regular relations among such bundles. This is valid also of the language of physics, which the positivists want to elevate to the rank of a universal language of science. In a world without regularity there would not be any possibility of formulating “protocol sentences.”[7] But even if it could be done, such a “protocol language” could not be the starting point of a science of physics. It would merely express historical facts.

If there were no regularity, nothing could be learned from experience. In proclaiming experience as the main instrument of acquiring knowledge, empiricism implicitly acknowledges the principles of regularity and causality. When the empiricist refers to experience, the meaning is: as A was in the past followed by B, and as we assume that there prevails a regularity in the concatenation and succession of natural events, we expect that A will also in the future be followed by B. Therefore there is a fundamental difference between the meaning of experience in the field of natural events and in the field of human action.

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[7] About the “protocol language,” cf. Carnap, “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft,” Erkenntnis, II (1931), 432-65, and Carnap, “Uber Protokollsätze,” Erkenntnis, III (1932/33), 215-28.