On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology
Section 3
This will suffice here as an explanation of Mises' answer regarding the quest for the foundations of economics.
I shall now turn to my second goal, the explanation of why and how praxeology also provides the foundation for epistemology.
Mises had been aware of this, and he was convinced of the great importance of this insight for
rationalist philosophy. Yet Mises did not treat the matter in a systematic fashion. There are no more
than a few brief remarks concerning this problem interspersed throughout his massive body of
writing. Thus, in the following, I must try to break new ground. I shall begin my explanation
by introducing a second a priori axiom and clarifying its relation to the axiom of action.
Such an understanding is the key to solving our problem. The second axiom is the so-called a
priori of argumentation, which states that humans are capable of argumentation and hence know the
meaning of truth and validity. As in the case of the action axiom, this knowledge is not derived
from observation. There is only verbal behavior to be observed, and prior reflective cognition
is required in order to interpret such behavior as meaningful arguments. And the validity of the
axiom, like that of the action axiom, is indisputable. It is impossible to deny that one can argue,
as the very denial would itself be an argument. In fact, one could not even silently say to oneself,
I cannot argue without thereby contradicting oneself. One cannot argue that one cannot argue,
nor can one dispute knowing what it means to make a truth or validity claim without implicitly
claiming the negation of this proposition to be true. It is not difficult to detect that both
a priori axioms of action and argumentation are intimately related. On the one hand, actions are
are more fundamental than argumentations with whose existence the idea of validity emerges,
as argumentation is only a subclass of action.
On the other hand, to recognize what has just been recognized regarding action and argumentation
and their relation to each other requires argumentation, and so in this sense, argumentation
must be considered more fundamental than action.
Without argumentation, nothing could be said to be known about action.
But then, as it is an argumentation that the insight is revealed that while it might not
be known to be so prior to any argumentation, in fact, the possibility of argumentation
presupposes action in that validity claims can only be explicitly discussed in the course
of an argumentation if the individuals doing so already know what it means to act and to
to have knowledge implied in action, both the meaning of action in general and argumentation in particular must be thought of as logically necessary interwoven strands of a priori knowledge.
What this insight into the interrelation between the a priori of action and the a priori of argumentation suggests is the following.
Traditionally, the task of epistemology has been conceived of as that of formulating what can be known to be true a priori and also what can be known a priori not to be the subject of a priori knowledge.
Recognizing, as we have just done, that knowledge claims are raised and decided upon in the course of argumentation, and that this is undeniably so,
So, one can now reconstruct the task of epistemology more precisely as that of formulating those propositions which are argumentatively indisputable, in that their truth is already implied in the very fact of making one's argument, and so cannot be denied argumentatively, and to delineate the range of such a priori knowledge from the realm of propositions whose validity cannot be established in this way but require additional contingent information
for their validation, or that cannot be validated at all, and so are mere metaphysical statements in the pejorative sense of the term metaphysical.
Yet what is implied in the very fact of arguing? It is to this question that our insight into the inextricable interconnection between the a priori of argumentation and that of action provides an answer.
On a very general level, it cannot be denied argumentatively that argumentation presupposes action, and that arguments and the knowledge embodied in them are those of actors.
And more specifically, it cannot then be denied that knowledge itself is a category of action,
that the structure of knowledge must be constrained by the peculiar function which knowledge fulfills within the framework of action categories,
and that the existence of such structural constraints can never be disproved by any knowledge whatsoever.
It is in this sense that the insights contained in praxeology must be regarded as providing the foundations of epistemology.
Knowledge is a category quite distinct from those that I have explained earlier, from ends and means.
The ends which we strive to attain through our actions and the means which we employ in order to do so are both scarce values.
The values attached to our goals are subject to consumption, and are exterminated and destroyed in consumption, and thus must forever be produced anew.
And the means employed must be economized too. Not so, however, with respect to knowledge, regardless of whether one considers it a means or an end in itself.
Of course, the acquisition of knowledge requires scarce means, at least one's body and time.
Time. Yet once knowledge is acquired, it is no longer scarce. It can neither be consumed,
nor are the services that it can render as a means subject to depletion. Once there,
it is an inexhaustible resource, and incorporates an everlasting value, provided that it is
not simply forgotten. Yet knowledge is not a free good in the same sense that air under
normal circumstances is a free good. Instead, it is a category of action. It is not only
be a mental ingredient of each and every action, quite unlike air. But more importantly, knowledge
and not air is subject to validation, which is to say that it must prove to fulfill a
positive function for an actor within the invariant constraints of the categorical framework
of actions. It is the task of epistemology to clarify what these constraints are and
and what one can thus know about the structure of knowledge as such.
While such recognition of the praxeological constraints on the structure of knowledge
might not immediately strike one as in itself of great significance,
it does have some highly important implications.
For one thing, in light of this insight, one recurring difficulty of rationalist philosophy finds an answer.
It has been a common quarrel with rationalism in the Leibniz-Kant tradition
That it seemed to imply some sort of idealism. Realizing that a priori true propositions could not possibly be derived from observations, rationalism answered the question how a priori knowledge could then be possible by adopting the model of an active mind, as opposed to the empiricist model of a passive mirror-like mind in the tradition of Locke and Hume.
According to rationalist philosophy, a priori true propositions had their foundation in the operation of principles of thinking which one could not possibly conceive of as operating otherwise.
They were grounded in categories of an active mind.
Now, as empiricists were only too eager to point out, the obvious critique of such a position is that if this were indeed the case, it could not be explained why such mental categories should fit reality.
Rather, one would be forced to accept the absurd idealistic assumption
that reality would have to be conceived of as a creation of the mind
in order to claim that a priori knowledge could incorporate any information about the structure of reality.
And clearly, such an assertion seemed to be justified
when faced with programmatic statements of rationalist philosophers, such as the following by Kant.
So far, it has been assumed that our knowledge had to conform to reality.
Instead, it should be assumed that observational reality should conform to our mind.
Recognizing knowledge as being structurally constrained by its role in the framework of action categories
provides the solution to such a complaint.
For as soon as this is realized, all idealistic suggestions of rationalist philosophy disappear,
and an epistemology claiming that a priori true propositions exist becomes a realistic epistemology instead.
Understood as constrained by action categories, the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the
mental on the one hand and the real outside physical world on the other is bridged. So constrained,
a priori knowledge must be as much a mental thing as a reflection of the structure of reality,
since it is only through actions that the mind comes into contact with reality, so to speak.
Acting is a cognitively guided adjustment of a physical body in physical reality, and thus,
There can be no doubt that a priori knowledge, conceived of as an insight into the structural
constraints imposed on knowledge qua knowledge of actors, must indeed correspond to the nature of
things. The realistic character of such knowledge would manifest itself not only in the fact that
one could not think it to be otherwise, but in the fact that one could not undo its truth.
Yet, there are more specific implications involved in recognizing the praxeological
and the Foundations of Epistemology, apart from the general one, that in substituting
the model of the mind of an actor acting by means of a physical body, for the traditional
rationalist model of an active mind a priori knowledge, immediately becomes realistic knowledge.
So realistic indeed, that it can be understood as being literally not undoable.
More specifically, in light of this insight, decisive support is given to those deplorably
by a few rationalist philosophers who, against the empiricist zeitgeist, stubbornly maintain on various philosophical fronts that a priori true propositions about the real world are possible.
Moreover, in light of the recognition of praxeological constraints on the structure of knowledge, these various rationalist endeavors become systematically integrated into one unified body of rationalist philosophy.
philosophy. Inexplicitly understanding knowledge has displayed an argumentation as a peculiar
category of action. It becomes clear immediately why the perennial rationalist claim that the
laws of logic, beginning here with the most fundamental ones, i.e. of propositional logic
and of junctors, and or if then not, and quanters, there is, all, some, are a priori true propositions
about Reality, and not mere verbal stipulations regarding the transformation rules of arbitrarily
chosen signs, as empiricist formalists would have it, is indeed correct. They are as much
laws of thinking as of reality because they are laws that have their ultimate foundation
in action and could not be undone by any actor. In each and every action, an actor identifies
some specific situation and categorizes it one way rather than another in order to be
It is this which ultimately explains the structure of even the most elementary propositions, like Socrates as a man, consisting of a proper name, or some identifying expression for the naming or identifying of something, and a predicate to assert or deny some specific property of the named or identified object, and which explains the cornerstones of logic, the laws of identity, and contradiction.
And it is this universal feature of action, and choosing, which also explains our understanding of the categories there is, all, and by implication some, as well as and, or if then and not.
One can say, of course, that something can be a and non-a at the same time, or that and means this rather than something else, but one cannot undo the law of contradiction, and one cannot undo the real definition of and,
For simply by virtue of acting with a physical body in physical space, we invariably affirm the law of contradiction, and invariably display our true constructive knowledge of the meaning of and and or.
Similarly, the ultimate reason for arithmetic's being an a priori and yet empirical discipline, as rationalists have always understood it, now also becomes discernible.
The prevailing empiricist-formalist orthodoxy conceives of arithmetic as the manipulation of arbitrarily defined signs according to arbitrarily stipulated transformation rules, and thus is entirely void of any empirical meaning.
For this view, which evidently makes arithmetic nothing but play however skillful it might be, the successful applicability of arithmetic in physics is an intellectual embarrassment.
Indeed, empiricist formalists would have to explain away this fact as simply being a miraculous event.
That it is no miracle, however, becomes apparent once the praxeological, or to use here the terminology of the most notable rationalist philosopher-mathematician Paul Lorentzen and his school, the operative or constructivist character of arithmetic is understood.
should.
Arithmetic and its character as an a priori synthetic intellectual discipline is rooted
in our understanding of repetition, the repetition of action.
More precisely, it rests on our understanding of the meaning of do this and do this again
starting from the present result.
And arithmetic then deals with real things, with constructed or constructively identified
units of something.
It demonstrates what relations are to hold between such units because of the fact that
they are constructed according to the rule of repetition.
As Paul Lorenzen has demonstrated in detail, not all of what presently poses as mathematics
can be constructively founded, and those parts then should of course be recognized for what
they are, epistemologically worthless symbolic games.
But all of the mathematical tools that are actually employed in physics, i.e. the tools
of classical analysis, can be constructively derived.
They are not empirically void symbolisms, but true propositions about reality.
They apply to everything insofar as it consists of one or more distinct units, and insofar
as these units are constructed or identified as units by a procedure of do it again, construct
or identify another unit by repeating the previous operation.
Again, one can say, of course, that 2 plus 2 is sometimes 4, but sometimes 2 or 5 units,
In an observational reality, for lions plus lambs or for rabbits this may even be true,
but in the reality of action, in identifying or constructing those units in repetitive operations,
the truth that 2 plus 2 is never anything but 4 could not possibly be undone.
Further, the old rationalist claims that geometry, that is Euclidean geometry, is a priori and
yet incorporates empirical knowledge about space, becomes supported too in view of our
are insight into the praxeological constraints on knowledge.
Since the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, and in particular, since Einstein's relativistic
theory of gravitation, the prevailing position regarding geometry is once again empiricist
and formalist.
It conceives of geometry as either being part of empirical a posteriori physics, or as being
empirically meaningless formalisms.
Yet the geometry is either mere play or forever subject to empirical testing seems to be irreconcilable
with the fact that Euclidean geometry is the foundation of engineering and construction and that nobody there even thinks of such propositions as only hypothetically true.
Recognizing knowledge as praxeologically constrained explains why the empiricist-formalist view is incorrect and why the empirical success of Euclidean geometry is no mere accident.
Spatial knowledge is also included in the meaning of action.
Action is the employment of a physical body in space.
Without acting, there could be no knowledge of spatial relations and no measurement.
Measuring is relating something to a standard.
Without standards, there is no measurement,
and there is no measurement then which could ever falsify the standard.
Evidently, the ultimate standard must be provided by the norms underlying the construction of bodily movements in space,
and the construction of measurement instruments by means of one's body,
Euclidean geometry, as again Paul Lorenzen in particular has explained, is no more and no less than the reconstruction of the ideal norms underlying our construction of such homogeneous basic forms as points, lines, planes, and distances, which are in a more or less perfect but always perfectible way, incorporated or realized in even our most primitive instruments of spatial measurements, such as
has a measuring rod. Naturally, these norms and normative implications cannot be falsified
by the result of any empirical measurement. On the contrary, their cognitive validity
is substantiated by the fact that it is they which make physical measurements in space
possible. Any actual measurement must already presuppose the validity of the norms leading
to the construction of one's measurement standards. It is in this sense that geometry
is an a priori science, and that it must simultaneously be regarded as an empirically meaningful discipline,
because it is not only the very precondition of any empirical spatial description, it is
also the precondition for any active orientation in space.
In view of the recognition of the praxeological character of knowledge, these insights regarding
the nature of logic, arithmetic and geometry become integrated and embedded into a system
of epistemological dualism.
The ultimate justification for this dualist position, i.e. the claim that there are two
realms of intellectual inquiry that can be understood a priori as requiring categorically
distinct methods of treatment and analysis, also lies in the praxeological nature of knowledge.
It explains why we must differentiate between a realm of objects which is categorized causally
and a realm that is categorized teleologically instead.
I have already briefly indicated during my discussion of praxeology that causality is
a category of action.
The idea of causality, that there are constant time invariantly operating causes which allow
one to project past observations regarding the relations of events into the future, is
something, as empiricism since Hume has noted, which has no observational basis whatsoever.
One cannot observe the connecting link between observations.
Even if one could, such an observation would not prove it to be a time-invariant connection.
Instead, the principle of causality must be understood as implied in our understanding
of action as an interference with the observational world, made with the intent of diverting the
natural course of events in order to produce a different preferred state of affairs, i.e.
of making things happen that otherwise would not happen, and thus presupposes the notion
of events which are related to each other through time-invariantly operating causes.
An actor might err with respect to his particular assumptions about which earlier interference
produced which later result, but successful or not, any action, changed or unchanged in
light of its previous success or failure, presupposes that there are constantly connected
events as such, even if no particular cause for any particular event can ever be pre-known
to any actor.
Without such an assumption, it would be impossible to ever categorize two or more observational
experiences as falsifying or confirming each other rather than interpreting them as logically
incommensurable events.
Only because the existence of time-invariantly operating causes as such is already assumed
can one ever encounter particular instances of confirming or disconfirming observational
or can there ever be an actor who can learn anything from past experience by classifying his actions as successful and confirming some previous knowledge or unsuccessful and disconfirming it?
It is simply by virtue of acting and distinguishing between successes and failures that the a priori validity of the principle of causality is established.
Even if one tried, one could not successfully refute its validity.
In so understanding causality as a necessary presupposition of action, it is also immediately implied that its range of applicability must then be delineated a priori from that of the category of teleology.
Indeed, both categories are strictly exclusive and complementary.
Action presupposes a causally structured observational reality, but the reality of action, which
we can understand as requiring such structure, is not itself causally structured.
Instead, it is a reality that must be categorized teleologically as purpose-directed meaningful
behavior.
In fact, one can neither deny nor undo the view that there are two categorically different
Realms of Phenomena, since such attempts would have to presuppose causally related events
qua actions that take place within observational reality, as well as the existence of intentionally
rather than causally related phenomena in order to interpret such observational events
as meaning to deny something.
Neither a causal nor a teleological momism could be justified without running into an
and Open Contradiction. Physically stating either position and claiming to say something
meaningful in so doing, the case is in fact made for an indisputable complementarity of
both a realm of causal and teleological phenomena. Everything which is not an action must necessarily
be categorized causally. There is nothing to be known a priori about this range of phenomena
except that it is structured causally, and that it is structured according to the categories
of Propositional Logic, Arithmetic and Geometry.
Everything else there is to know about this range of phenomena must be derived from contingent
observations and thus represents a posteriori knowledge.
In particular, all knowledge about two or more specific observational events being causally
related is not a posteriori knowledge.
Obviously the range of phenomena described in this way coincides, more or less, with
what is usually considered to be the field of the empirical natural sciences.
In contrast, everything that is an action must be categorized teleologically.
This realm of phenomena is constrained by the laws of logic and arithmetic, too, but
it is not constrained by the laws of geometry as incorporated in our instruments of measuring
spatially extending objects, because actions do not exist apart from subjective interpretations
of observable things, and so they must be identified by reflective understanding rather
rather than spatial measurements, nor are actions causally connected events, but events
that are connected meaningfully within a categorical framework of means and ends.
One cannot know a priori what the specific values, choices, and costs of some actor are
or will be.
This would fall entirely into the province of empirical a posteriori knowledge.
In fact, which particular action an actor is going to undertake would depend on his
is knowledge regarding the observational reality and or the reality of other actors' actions,
and it would be manifestly impossible to conceive of such states of knowledge as predictable
on the basis of time invariantly operating causes. A knowing actor cannot predict his
future knowledge before he has actually acquired it, and he demonstrates, simply by virtue
of distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful predictions, that he must conceive of himself
as capable of learning from unknown experiences in as yet unknown ways.
Thus, knowledge regarding the particular course of actions is only a posteriori, and since
such knowledge would have to include the actor's own knowledge as a necessary ingredient of
every action whose every change can have an influence on a particular action being chosen,
teleological knowledge must also necessarily be reconstructive or historical knowledge.
It would only provide ex post explanations, which would have no systematic bearing on the
prediction of future actions, because in principle future states of knowledge could never be
predicted on the basis of constantly operating empirical causes.
Obviously, such a delineation of a branch of a posteriori and reconstructive science
of action fits the usual description of such disciplines as history and sociology.
What is known to be true a priori regarding the field of action, and what would then have
One way we would have to constrain any historical or sociological explanation is this.
For one thing, any such explanation, which essentially would have to reconstruct an actor's knowledge,
would invariably have to be a reconstruction in terms of knowledge of ends and means,
of choices and costs, of profits and losses, and so on.
And secondly, since these are evidently the categories of praxeology as conceived of by Mises,
Any such explanation must also be constrained by the laws of praxeology, and since these laws are, as I have already explained, a priori laws, they must also operate as logical constraints on any future course of action.
They are valid independent of any specific state of knowledge that an actor might have acquired,
simply by virtue of the fact that whatever this state might be, it must be described in terms of action categories.
And as referring to actions as such, the laws of praxeology must then be coextensive
with all the predictive knowledge there can be in the field of the science of action.
In fact, ignoring for the moment that the status of geometry as an a priori science
When science was ultimately grounded in our understanding of action,
and insofar, praxeology would have to be regarded as the more fundamental cognitive discipline,
the peculiar role of praxeology proper within the entire system of epistemology
can be understood as somewhat analogous to that of geometry.
Praxeology is for the field of action,
while Euclidean geometry is for the field of observations, non-actions.
As the geometry incorporated in our measuring instruments
constrains the spatial structure of observational reality,
so praxeology constrains the range of things
that can possibly be experienced in the field of actions.