Joke Keisen, who has been coming for many years to these conferences, sent you regards to all his friends. He is recovering from a stroke now in Guatemala.
Okay, back at our university, we have been discussing whether Mises' use of a priori and categories are Kantian or Aristotelian.
And there seems to be reason for the assumption that one or the other, since Mises uses Kantian terminology.
But we must not forget that he is answering to the criticism of logical or empirical positivism, which uses the same language also.
So I thought we should look further into this matter.
First, we should define the terms. We find two different meanings for the term a priori.
For Aristotle, the term a priori means without antecedent.
Aristotle mentions in the categories five senses in which one thing can be said to be prior to another.
First, when one thing is older than another.
Second, one thing is said to be prior to another when the sequence of their being cannot be reversed.
For example, when one is prior to two.
The existence of two implies the existence of one, but the existence of one does not imply the existence of two.
Third, prior is used when reference to any order. For example, in a demonstration there is that which is prior and that which is posterior in order.
And fourth, that which is better and more honorable than something else is said to have a natural priority.
And fifth, I will quote from Aristotle in the categories,
For in those things the being of each of which implies that of the other, that which is in any way the cause may reasonably be said to be by nature prior to the effect.
It is plain that there are instances of this. The fact of being a man carries with it the truth that the proposition that he is and the implication is reciprocal.
For if a man is the proposition wherein we allege that he is, is true, and conversely,
if the proposition wherein we allege that he is true, then he is.
The true proposition, however, is in no way the cause of the being of the man, but the
fact of the man being does seem somehow to be the cause of the truth of the proposition,
for the truth of falsity of the proposition depends on the fact of the man being and not
being.
Another important concept for Aristotle is one of basic truth, and I will quote from
posterior analytics.
A basic truth in a demonstration is an immediate proposition.
An immediate proposition is one which has no other proposition prior to it.
Demonstrative knowledge must rest on necessary basic truths.
Not all knowledge is demonstrative.
On the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premises is independent of demonstration.
The necessity of this is obvious, for since we must know the prior premises from which
the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those
truths must be indemonstrable.
Now demonstration must be based on premises prior to and better known than the conclusion,
and the same things cannot simultaneously be both prior and posterior to one another.
So circular demonstration is clearly not possible, in the unqualified sense of demonstration,
But only possible if demonstration be extended to include that another method of argument
would rest on a distinction between truths prior to us and truths without qualification
prior, that is, the method by which induction produces knowledge.
I call the basic truths of every genus those elements in the existence of which cannot
be proved.
But two important aspects of these basic truths are first that they are evident, that means
that evidence of their truth can be shown, and second that although they cannot be proved,
they must be assumed as true in any attempt to disproving them.
Now for Kant, a priori means that which is known independently of sense perception, and
for this reason held to be indubitable, he says.
I quote from The Critique of Pure Reason,
Experiences teach us that a thing is so and so,
but not that it cannot be otherwise.
First then, if we have a proposition which, in being thought,
is thought as necessary, it is an a priori judgment.
Second, if the judgment is thought in such a manner
that no exception is allowed as possible,
it is not derived from experience,
but is valid absolutely a priori.
Necessity and strict universality are thus sure criteria
Now, let's consider the concept of categories.
The categories present the distinction in the nature of reality about which we think,
as well as in our manner of thinking about it.
Aristotle enumerates the kinds of beings found in the different things that are, while Kant's
His interest was in the question of how there comes to be objects of our experience having
these diverse modes of being.
He sustained that in the apprehension of them, we are not merely receptive and passive, but
active.
Our mind relates to one another in various ways, the elements of what is apprehended,
and relation exists only for a mind.
What called this act of relating a function of synthesis?
He wanted to establish what different functions of synthesis are exhibited in the apprehension
and the existence of objects.
The objects in question, he said, are not things by themselves, dinge an sich, existing
out of relation to the perceiving and thinking mind.
In other words, the mind can know of them only that they are, not what they are. The
objects in question are objects of experience, and their being is bound up with the being
of experience of them. The perception of an object, according to Kant, involves the relation
of space and time, but what interested him more was the way we conceive the object, the
way we apprehend it as an object, the way we think of it in certain ways. This conception
of an object involves four peculiar relations of things, which can cause categories, and
are its having quality, which can only exist in degrees, its having quantity, its being
a substance, having attributes, permanent through its changing and successive states,
and that its changes should be determined according to laws by its relation to other
substances with which it stood in interaction. And last, that every such object conceived
to exist should be conceived as connected with every other existing object in a way
in a way that knowledge could apprehend and express in the form of necessary inference.
This posed another epistemological problem that I'm not going to address here.
For example, we would never think that a man push a cart in the grocery stores if he could
not conceive a substance to have its attributes and to determine changes in another substance.
We would never have called the movement of the cart necessary if it weren't by the fact
that we think of the different real things in the world so connected that we wouldn't
Aristotle also noted that when we predicate a subject, we recognize it as existing, sometimes
Sometimes as subject with attributes, sometimes as attributes of various kinds, qualities,
quantities, relations, positions in place and time of what things do or have done to
them of their states and situations. Aristotle asks what modes of being we distinguish in
what that which we recognize to be. Kant, on the other hand, asks what are the modes
of synthetics or of synthesis, sorry, on the part of our mind through which the objects
are apprehended by us and the sort of objects they are. Kant thinks that there can be no
There are no objects known to us except through the mind's activity in relating according to certain principles, which he calls categories, and that corresponds mainly with Aristotle's.
Mainly to be, according to Aristotle, is not possible. What is must be in a particular way and is being thereby fall under one or other the kind of predicates or categories, which he enumerated.
According to Kant, an object cannot be an object of experience and therefore cannot exist in the world of our experience except through being perceived and thought in the forms of perception and conception involved in every predicate through which an object is known, the forms of the sensibility, space and time, and the categories of the understanding.
The a priori conditions of the possibility of objects of experience in general are the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience.
Now, I maintain that the categories above cited are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience.
Just as space and time are the conditions of intuition for the same experiences,
There are fundamental concepts at which we think objects in general for appearances, and have therefore a priori objective validity.
Now, Hume's position in Kantian language is that all judgments are either synthetical, a posteriori judgment about matters of fact, therefore never universal and necessary, or analytical judgments about what he called relations of ideas, therefore not related to reality.
Kant wanted to show that there are judgments of the synthetical a priori type,
judgments that are both instructive, like synthetical a posteriori,
matters-of-fact judgments, and universal and necessary, like analytical judgments,
but this would imply that induction is valid. I want you to remember this.
Kant thought that Aristotle logic furnished a complete and exhaustive table of all possible
types of judgment. From this list, he drew up a corresponding list of pure a priori concepts
A table of categories that correspond exactly with a table of types of judgment can establish
four classes of category, dose of quality, quantity, relation and modality.
Now I want to draw your attention to the category of relation which covers the three relations
of substance and attribute, cause and effect and interaction.
Now let's consider Mises' discourse.
He begins with basic truths that provide information about reality and that are necessarily true.
Then by deduction he builds his theory, therefore the importance of establishing the validity
of synthetic a priori propositions.
That for Mises means a proposition that is necessarily true and not a tautology.
I will quote from the ultimate foundation of economic science an essay on method.
The starting point of all praxeological thinking is not arbitrarily chosen axioms, but a self-evident
proposition, fully, clearly and necessarily present in every human mind.
The starting point of praxeology is a self-evident truth, the cognition of the fact that there
is such a thing as a consciously aiming at ends.
The truth of this cognition is a self-evident and indispensable for the human mind as it
is the distinction between A and non-A.
And 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.
Second, that it is a priori concept or proposition is necessarily implied in our mental approach
to all the problems concerned, in our thinking and acting concerning these problems.
Their truth or validity cannot be proved or refuted as can those of posteriori propositions,
Because they are precisely the instruments that enable us to distinguish what is true or valid from what is not.
This is clearly Aristotle's concept of basic truth, an immediate proposition, and therefore one that has no other proposition prior to it, but it is a query.
And it is self-evident, which, remember, means that evidence of its truth can be shown.
And second, that although it cannot be proved, it must be assumed as true in any attempt to disprove it.
And so it is. Because as a matter of fact, any attempt to deny the truth of the proposition that states that human action is teleological defeats itself by merely trying.
To the attack of the logical positivist, Mises responded and I quote,
The essence of logical positivism is to deny the cognitive value of a priori knowledge by pointing out that all a priori propositions are merely analytic.
They do not provide any information, but are merely verbal or tautological asserting that
has already been implied in the definition and premises.
Only experience can lead to synthetic propositions.
There is an obvious objection against this doctrine.
That is, that this proposition and there are no synthetic a priori propositions is in itself,
as the present writer thinks, false, synthetic a priori propositions, for it can manifest
not established by experience.
And it is true.
But there is still something else.
What one predicates from the subject in a proposition that is conceived as a tautology
is not about the concept, but about the material of the proposition, about the word.
For example, in the definition man is a rational animal, when we consider it as a tautology,
what one means is that the word man signifies or is equivalent to the word rational animal.
It really does not say anything about the real referent of the concept, that is, of
the real existing man.
If the same proposition is not considered as a tautology, then it becomes in Kantian terminology
a synthetic proposition.
It actually states that the referent is an entity that belongs to a class of entities
called animals, and that it can be distinguished from the other entities in the same class
by the fact that it is rational.
The classification is ordered by the context of our knowledge, and as Aristotle remarked,
the entity is much more than what we can predicate of it.
The attributes chosen for the classification are not metaphysical but epistemologically
essential.
If, for instance, we were in the position of Gulliver and discovered the Hennons, we
would have to redefine man as the rational primate and the Hennon as the rational equine.
Besides, the predicate and the subjects are not equivalent as in a tautology.
The subject's distribution is universal and the predicate's is particular.
So the conversion should be accidental, not simple.
Man is a rational animal, can only be converted to some rational animal is man.
To the question of an independent reality, Mises made the following observation.
The much discussed question whether physical objects can or cannot be conceived as existing
independently of the mind is vain.
For thousands of years, the mind of physicians did not perceive germs and did not divine
their existence, but the success or failure of their endeavors to preserve their patients'
health and lives depend on the way germs influence or did not influence the functioning of the
patient's bodily organs.
The germs were real because they conditioned the outcome of events either by interfering
or not interfering, either by being present or by being absent from the field.
Mises emphasized that the a priori categories are not innate ideas, and I will quote,
The a priori categories are not innate ideas. What the normal healthy child inherits from
his parents are not any categories, ideas or concepts, but a human mind that has the
capacity to learn and to conceive ideas, the capacity to make its beard behave as a human
and Being, that is to act. This is the most anti-Cantean statement if there ever was one
in Mises' discourse. But to be fair, in another paragraph, his statement is very Cantean.
I quote,
The a priori categories are the mental equipment by which man is able to think and to experience
and thus to acquire knowledge. What we know is what the nature of a structure of our senses
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 enable us to see.
I want to examine the concept of induction.
That according to Aristotle is the means to infer basic truths, and according to the logical
positivist is impossible.
Induction relies on causality.
I will quote Mises again.
The plight of empiricisms consists precisely in the failure to explain satisfactorily how
it is possible to infer from absurd facts something concerning the facts yet unobserved.
All human knowledge concerning the universal presupposes rests upon the regularity and
succession and concatenation of the observable events.
It would be vain to search for a cruel if there were no regularity.
Inductive inference is conclusion from premises that invariably include the fundamentals
of reposition regularity.
The very category of a concept of action comprehends the concept of means and ends, of preferring
and putting aside, of valuing, of success and failure, of profit and loss, of costs,
and no action could be devised and ventured upon without definite ideas about the relation
of cost and effect, teleology presupposed causality.
So I will conclude now, because I ran out of time, but I was almost finished, that I think
there is enough evidence that Mises' arguments don't depend on the Kantian system, but they
depend on Aristotle, although he accepts some of the Kantian postulates, and we can find
He says 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. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much.