Epistemology Literature Review

Earlier this month, Jonah asked me for sources that could give him a better understanding of the epistemological debates in economics.  I assembled for him a rough literature review, but first I confirmed that I had the right idea of what he was looking for:  

Preliminarily, now, just thinking aloud, it seems to me (these are totally my own thoughts) that there are four main epistemological views.  There is, of course, rationalism, which says that there is some knowledge conveyed by the structure of the human mind, such as the concepts of causality and time.  Praxeology is the extreme branch of this view, asserting that some knowledge is conveyed by being human, such as the concepts of purpose and scarcity.  This is apriorism, I guess, knowledge before experience.  Thomas Aquinas is the first major thinker with this view, and of course Mises is the father of praxeology.  The second view is empiricism/positivism, which says that all knowledge of reality must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience.  The extreme branch of this view is historicism, which says that we can only verify knowledge as true for this particular time; there’s no use establishing general scientific principles since we don’t know whether the patterns we detect through experience will continue in the future.  This is apostiorism, knowledge after experience.  The first major thinkers with this view were probably Hume and Locke.  Then we have the more philosophical views: materialism and idealism.  Materialism seems on the surface to be ultra-positivist, in that it seems ultra-scientific.  What we know is determined by the circumstances and composition of our brains and the influences upon them.  Our actions are determined in the same way.  This is true, to some degree.  However, this view is actually kind of mystical.  It strips human beings of any sense of purposeful action, but mistakenly attributes a sense of purpose to the particles that make us up (the interactions in our brain “direct” us in the ways they “choose”).  The extreme branch of this view makes this mysticism explicit: dialectical materialism, developed by Hegel and adopted by Marx, says that the material forces of reality are directing us toward an end chosen by those forces with the inexorableness of laws of nature.  Finally, there’s idealism, which says that there are pure forms of knowledge that we attempt to approximate through knowledge we gain through experience.  So, there is an objective sense of the concept of “tree” that we attempt to create through our experience with various trees.  Sometimes these pure forms of knowledge are built into the human mind, and sometimes they live outside of us, depending on the thinker.  The first major thinker with this view was obviously Plato (forms outside the mind), and then later Kant maybe (forms inside the mind, a priori).  The inverse of this view, which I kind of lump in with idealism, is relativism, or polylogism, which says that there is no objective knowledge/truth, and that our knowledge necessarily is determined by who we are; all knowledge is subject to interpretation, and there’s no way of deciding whose interpretation is right.  I lump this in with idealism because I think it low-key implies that there is an ideal truth, which we can never discover or agree upon.

This is the kind of stuff you’re looking for, right?

After receiving confirmation, I constructed a longer and more thorough treatment of epistemology, which I am sharing here in the hopes that it might help someone else interested in these topics.

This is my amateur literature review of epistemology in economics.

So, I fear that I began this search the wrong way, by looking through for the epistemological discussions contained within larger works.  So, for example, considering the British Classical School, I identified the major methodological debate as between Nassau Senior, in the first 40 pages of his An Outline of the Science of Political Economy, and John Stuart Mill, mostly in his A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive.  (Senior was the rationalist, Mill the positivist.)  Also, J.E. Cairnes had a middle-of-the-line approach at the beginning of his The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy.  Normally, I don’t like middle-of-the-line approaches, but considering the arguments on both sides, I kind of respect Cairnes’ position, especially for the time.  Then we have J.B. Say, predecessor of the French Physiocrats, who has a good discussion of the nature of economic knowledge in the introduction of his A Treatise on Political Economy.  Also, there was a debate between some Italian economists after the subjectivist revolution (I don’t know what school to associate them with; they lived before the neoclassical synthesis, but their thinking is pretty neoclassical), Vilfredo Pareto (one of the greats) and Benedetto Croce, starting with an article by Croce that I think was originally an introduction to one of Pareto’s books, with some reply articles from Pareto going back and forth with Croce.  Pareto’s were called “On the Economic Phenomenon” and Croce’s were called “On the Economic Principle.”  Pareto was the positivist (at least that was the position he was defending...much of his theory was rationalist, I feel), and Croce was the rationalist.  I wasn’t going to go as far back as the Spanish Scholastics, although it may be worth noting that they were the first to apply the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (rationalism) to economic problems (although economics proper was not born until Cantillon a couple centuries later).  However, in writing my last email to you where I was just playing around with the ideas of epistemology, I realized that focusing on the major epistemological views and citing the supporting economists was probably a better approach than going through a bunch of economists and identifying their epistemological leanings, because this approach would probably be less likely to lose you in a bunch of irrelevant economics.  However, this is a difficult approach, because most thinkers don’t fit in single boxes.  Take the labels with a grain of salt.

So, I’m just going to work through the framework I sketched out on Saturday night.  First, though, I thought it’d be good to briefly comment on epistemology generally, because it’s a weird subject, and I don’t want to assume knowledge on your part that you don’t yet have.  I think the dictionary definition of epistemology is “theory of knowledge.”  Whatever that means.  Epistemology is the field of philosophy that attempt to answer the question “How do we know that we know what we know?”  It attempts to determine what the criteria for finding and knowing and using Truth must be.  (My own contribution to this field is the question “What is the purpose of knowledge?”  By focusing on the fact that the search for, acquisition, and use of all knowledge is conducted with purpose, to effect some change in the world, I’ve argued that objective Truth with a capital “T” isn’t actually as important as other prominent philosophers have believed.  Instead, the pertinent question is “Does it work?” and, if the answer is affirmative, then the knowledge may be considered valid.  This makes intuitive sense, too: the more some knowledge works, the more likely it is to be true.)  But the idea of epistemology is just as important as its theories.  The central idea of epistemology is that there do exist certain foundational principles to which we may cling as we seek to enlarge and enhance our collective body of knowledge.  Moreover, epistemology is a social concept.  It is based on the assumption that these foundational principles are discoverable and that we can use them as common ground to find agreement with other human beings.  Robinson Crusoe need not justify his beliefs to anyone; the existence of a field of epistemology, of justification, is a testament to the social nature of man and the social nature of science.  Therefore, towards the end of this email I will be referencing some works that question the existence of any foundational principles.  I kind of assign them to categories within epistemology because they self-contradict themselves into being epistemological (the very fact that they are presenting an argument is a tacit admission that they believe in possible agreement from their fellows, and this agreement must be based on something).  However, the views they present could accurately be classified as anti-epistemological or epistemology-hostile.  

For a discussion of epistemology generally, a good-ole college textbook is probably a good place to start.  I recommend Robert Audi’s Epistemology.  I’ve never read it, but the accompanying anthology by Huemer, Contemporary Readings, is very good (substantive and unbiased).  

I tried to include some explanation of some of the important and common terms in epistemology in my last email.  Some that I didn’t include that I think you mentioned during our meeting are induction and deduction, and synthetic and analytic propositions.  Deduction is the process of reasoning from a general principle to more specific conclusions.  Formal (and informal) logic is deductive reasoning: If X, then Y, because Z.  Deduction is a rationalist tool, because the rationalists start with inherent knowledge, like the concept of causality, and then deduce other knowledge from these big concepts, combined with experiential data.  Induction is the opposite, it is the formulation of general principles from specific observations.  This is the tool of the empiricists.  They observe a phenomenon, determine a pattern, and then develop a theory to explain the phenomenon.  Of course, the rationalists would say that all knowledge is deductive, because of the mental category of causation.  Synthetic propositions are true if they accurately describe the state of the world.  So, “grass is green” is a synthetic proposition, and is confirmed by experience.  Analytic propositions are true if they accurately describe the meaning of a concept.  So, “the bachelor was single” is an analytic proposition because we can confirm its validity just by thinking about the meaning of the words used.  Synthetic propositions are associated with the empiricists and it is maintained that new knowledge, in the form of synthetic propositions, can only be gained through experience of the outside world.  It is maintained that analytic propositions provide no new information; what knowledge they convey was already contained within the meaning of the word they’re describing.  They’re essentially tautologies.  Therefore, the positivists do admit the power of reason to solve a problem without empirical data, but only if the answer is already implied in the problem.  However, one should note that the Pythagorean Theorem is an analytic proposition, because it’s implied in the concept of a right triangle.  However, it seems silly to claim that this analytic statement is not a contribution, new knowledge, simply because it is analytic.  After all, humanity grappled without it for millennia, and we employ it today to great advantage.  (Also, a proposition is a truth-claim.)

Finally, a quick disclaimer.  I’m an economist, not a philosopher.  And, you know, I’m younger than your average college graduate.  So, my knowledge of these issues and the literature discussing them is necessarily limited.  I can only recommend what I know, and I don’t know much.  A Google Search may reveal some glaring omissions or contradictions...sue me (unsuccessfully, thanks to this disclaimer).  Also, this is essentially a free-write, so it may seem a little disorganized and sloppy.  My apologies.  

Rationalism

The rationalists, following Kant, teach that experience provides only the raw material out of which the mind forms knowledge.  All knowledge, therefore, is conditioned by the structure of the human mind, categories that precede any data of experience.  The categories, the mental equipment that allows the individual to think, are a priori, and all reasoning presupposes their existence.  They cannot be observed; our knowledge of them is based on prior understanding.  The fundamental feature of a priori knowledge is that we cannot truly comprehend its negation.  For example, time.  We cannot understand a situation where we are somehow not in the present, or where the minute that last passed is yet to come.  Causality, too.  To observe phenomenon, to consult a great multitude of data, even through time, reveals no relationships between phenomenon.  The idea that one thing could cause another is a concept without which we could not understand the world, could not survive without.  But one cannot observe and note causal relations without already understanding what causality is.  Similarly, one cannot learn the definition of a word without already understanding the concept of a definition.  It is the position of the rationalists that the human mind provides us with broad conceptual tools through which we can come to understand the world, and that these categories of thinking contribute to our knowledge by allowing us to understand and use the empirical data we observe.

I still believe that the best work in the area of rationalist economics is Mises’, and his best work in this area is found in his book The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.  Most relevant are chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8.  Now, Mises, while well-versed in all of the various philosophical debates, approached philosophy as an economist.  That is, he created an epistemological theory that was designed to support his economic theory, rather than creating an economic theory in accord with his epistemological beliefs.  This approach certainly seems suspect, but he did such a magnificent job defending the basic principles of his theory.  Human beings act.  They behave purposefully.  To deny this is to confirm it.  And from this fundamental, a priori axiom, we can deduce much of the corpus of economic theory.  It all flows from itself, which makes it very convincing.  Reading the Bible is, I imagine, difficult for a true believer, since so much of the Bible contradicts itself.  Human Action, on the other hand, is very difficult to criticize on its own terms.  Still, there are some problems with his edifice.  For example, he assigns to time preference the status of a praxeological category, and I think that’s a mistake, a mistake that indicates that he’s a little sloppy in applying axiomatic labels to his postulates.  Regardless, in economics, this is the strongest position of the a priori rationalists.  And, in the book I cite, he has very strong discussions of the broader rationalist position, that some knowledge is conveyed just by the structure of the human mind, for example the concepts of time and causality.  

The more respected version is Lionel Robbins’, presented in the second half of his well-regarded work, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.  He was a student of Mises’, but he’s not considered a member of the Austrian school.  This whole essay is a treasure, but Chapters 4 and 5 are the most pertinent to you, as well as perhaps the last page.  From other realms in economics come Frank Knight’s “What Is Truth in Economics?” and Hollis & Nell’s Rational Economic Man.  Hollis & Nell believe that the primary concept on which economics rests is “reproduction of the economic system” rather than “human action.”  Knight doesn’t go too deep, but, as the forefather of the Chicago School, which became majorly positivist, his position carries some special significance.

For discussions/defenses of rationalism outside of economics, see the absolutely brilliant book (series of lectures) by Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis, especially chapters 1, 2, 3, 10, and 11.  Also, Paul Lorenzen, along with some other (German) authors (the Erlangen School), have argued that a priori propositions are necessary not only for economics and human sciences, but also for the empirical natural sciences, fashioning a body of such presuppositions known as protophysics.  See Normative Logic and Ethics, with the discussion of protophysics mostly between pages 55 and 65 (it’s a really short book).  Am I allowed to comment here?  I commented for Mises, so I guess so.  I think that these protophysical principles are so broadly empirical, so as to exist before any methodologically-sophisticated reasoning.  However, I do not think that they are a priori in the sense of being built into the structure of the human mind.  I have a similar view of the recent advances in economics of trying to classify more economic propositions as true a priori.  

Positivism

Empiricism (positivism) states that all of our knowledge comes from observations and that these observations can be interrelated so as to explain phenomena.  However, these observations and the relations between them can only ever be true hypothetically.  Additionally, prediction is what counts in science, science does not deal with normative questions, and introspection is subjective and worthless.  The fundamental assumption of empiricism is that all knowledge regarding reality (empirical knowledge) must be verifiable or at least falsifiable by experience.  In other words, nothing about reality can be known a priori; all a priori statements are simply analytic propositions, true by convention.  

Positivism was founded by Auguste Comte in The Course in Positive Philosophy, applied to the social sciences in A General View of Positivism.  The seminal position in positivist economics is Milton Friedman’s article “The Methodology of Positive Economics.”  I’m pretty sure that essay was published as part of a larger book, Essays in Positive Economics, but I’ve never read the whole thing.  The real standard-bearer, though, is Mark Blaug, and he has a very good book entitled The Methodology of Economics.  Most of the book presents empirical justifications for the main tenets of economic theory, but the beginning of the book discusses the history of positivism and then the history of economic methodology, both demonstrating a mastery of the literature.  Another prominent positivist is Terrence Hutchison; he’s got a book, The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory, but I’d recommend an article of his, “Some Themes From Investigations into Methods.”  Hutchison is what Machlup called an “ultra-empiricist,” but I actually think this lends some ethos to Hutchison’s position.  So, I like Hutchison’s positive theory, but his criticisms are usually in a sneering fashion, and that puts me off a bit.

Positivism has a fairly long and esteemed history, but I think the individual most responsible for setting it on a solid foundation was Karl Popper (even though he didn’t consider himself a positivist; positivists focused on verification, whereas Popper focused on falsification as the criterion for valid knowledge).  I guess the main book to look to for Popper’s theory would be The Logic of Scientific Discovery, but I actually like Conjectures and Refutations better.  They both cover much of the same ground.  Conjectures is such a treasure, very good thinking and discussions of many philosophical issues throughout, but I’d especially recommend chapters 3, 9, 10, 12, and 20.  

Two other mentions: first, one of the founders of this view was John Locke.  His Essay on Human Understanding might be worth taking a look at, just because it would provide some powerful citations (better to cite someone everyone knows).  The other is Hubert Blalock’s Causal Inferences in Non-Experimental Research.  This book was a big step forward for sociology and its ilk, by providing a positivist method of explaining causality in human affairs.  I find it unconvincing, to be honest, and it never became popular, but I think it plugs a hole in the positivist paradigm.  Given the time constraints you face, I’m not really recommending this one; just making you aware of it for the future.

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So, rationalism and positivism are the two views really debated in economics (except for the occasional salvos from fringe thinkers, or English Department types who think they know what they’re talking about but don’t), because they’re the two scientific views (that is, they’re concerned more with methodology than the actual knowledge).  As a result, my familiarity with the literature of the other two main views, idealism and determinism, which are concerned more with what knowledge is, are even more curtailed than the above.  So, broad strokes:

Determinism

I think I called this materialism in my last email.  It’s kind of a derivative of positivism, in that it seems ultra-scientific (there is nothing more than what there is), and it seems to flow from positivism’s basic postulates.  I grouped relativism under idealism in my last email, but it might better belong under determinism.  In short, determinism is a denial of knowledge, a denial of the ability to know Truth.  We are what we are, shaped by our environments, and we can never escape that reality to know whether we’ve been correctly shaped or not.  To a point, this view is correct: we are products of our biology and our experience.  But, this view attributes agency to these forces which shape us, and that seems less reasonable.  Locke, who I mentioned above, talks about human beings as “blank slates,” ready to be “written upon” by experience.  But this implies that there are forces who are writing.  Modern day New Atheists make the same mistake.  Consider Sam Harris’ book on Free Will, which concludes that we are actually “controlled” by our brain chemistry.  But it’s not really control.  We may not have free will (a debateable point, depending on your philosophical view), but then surely our brain chemistry does not have free will.  Scanning the philosophy section of my book collection...Hobbes does the same thing, in Leviathan.  We’re merely a product of our “inner motions.”  Like, hopefully you can see what I’m saying, about the claims of the determinists being based on convincing data, but then they slip over into the actual determinism.  Any scientist who thinks that science and/or society is constantly progressing, building toward something, is a determinist.  Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showed that this is not how science grows.  Also, religious people are determinists.  Believers in fate.  Marxists.  The world is going somewhere, doing something, and we’re just caught up in it, and we can’t see the course of the river while we’re being carried by the current, and we can’t escape to really know anything real.  

Except, of course, for those who do somehow see the course of the river.  Hegel (you may be confused if you google Hegel’s name, because he’s associated with something called German idealism, which is a name I use for my last major view, in the tradition of Kant; German idealism and Kantian idealism are not the same), in most of his work, resembles a positivist.  But then he starts talking about the course of history, and insinuates that we’re actually going somewhere (although he doesn’t spell it out clearly).  But his followers do spell it out, or believe, rather, that he has spelled it out.  The greatest of the left-Hegelians is Marx, and Marx believed that the “material productive forces” were carrying society inexorably toward communism.  He didn’t bother to describe how things would work under communism, for fear of being ridiculed like the Utopian Socialists (read Fourier sometime), but he didn’t need to, because no matter what we were gonna end up communist.  See Marx’s letter “Society and Economy in History” and Engel’s “Letters on Historical Materialism.”  There are also discussions of this view of history in “The Communist Manifesto,” his philosophical manuscripts of 1844, and in the introduction of his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  The right-Hegelians also embraced a sense of destiny from their dear-teacher.  I haven’t read too deeply into the philosophical foundations of Nazism and fascism, but their belief in a Reich that would last a thousand years was inspired by Hegelian-based determinism.  See Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, for example.  (I don’t recommend any of Hegel’s work because it’s very conceptual and difficult to wrap your head around.  Its significance lies with its influence, not its actual ideas.  However, if you want to try, read his Phenomenology of Spirit.)  All that I say about Hegel is even truer and clearer with Comte: the founder of positive science believed in a social evolution that was carrying us to a better world.  He developed a theory of historical stages of society, similar to Marx.

Now, the discussion above might be a little confusing, partially because of the inherent subtleties, and partially because I’m trying to fit very nuanced philosophies into four easy-to-understand boxes.  Determinism starts with positivism/empiricism, but then pushes it further, denying our ability to really know anything, since everything we know is dependent on what the universe chooses to show us.  However, because it’s nearly impossible to explain the world without some reference to some kind of purpose, and because human beings are merely products of their environments and chemical make-up, “moist robots,” we cannot have purpose, so the necessary purpose is attributed to atoms or other forces of nature or gods or the universe or history itself, which somehow work their will through us, by revealing what they want us to know and forcing us to act as they wish us to act.  But, if we can really never know anything, then we can’t know that we don’t know; we can’t argue for determinism successfully.  And the way we get out of this trap is the methodological tool of the determinists: revelation.  Nature’s Geist revealed this determinist truth to the determinist writers.  They were gifted with this insight into the fact that we’re merely droplets in a current.  But, if we’re getting revelations, we might as well make them interesting.  So not only does Geist gift us a glance of the river, it lets us see the course of the river.  Hence, Marx may say with confidence what the future holds, because the material productive forces have determined it to be so and revealed their plan to him.

Idealism

Just like determinism flowed from positivism, idealism flows from rationalism.  Rationalism teaches that there is some knowledge, some foundational concepts, which are built into the structure of the human mind.  The more concepts that exist in this way, the closer we get to idealism.  So, again, it’s about taking one method and tipping much farther towards its extreme end.  Much of philosophy is concerned with finding pure concepts, like What is Justice? or What is the Good?  But, idealism is even more than that.  As Plato conceived of his “ideal forms” in The Republic (he begins the discussion about halfway through the book...my copy is currently on loan, so I don’t have specific chapter numbers for you), there is a pure concept of horse, and tree, as well as justice.  What we experience in our daily lives is akin to shadows on a cave wall, weak approximations of their true form.  The task of the philosopher is to discern the true forms.  In Plato’s philosophy, these forms exist outside of ourselves, and we have to attempt to approximate an understanding of them through many experiences and thorough philosophizing.  

Kant is the other big thinker in this line (skipping Aquinas who, in the Summa Contra Gentiles logically “proved” the existence and attributes of “God”).  Kant was a rationalist, but he also had a fetish for absolutes (see the categorical imperative, for example).  He believed that some concepts, like reason and time, were built into our minds.  Categories, he called them.  But he tried to make an exhaustive list of all the categories, and probably got a few of them wrong.  He does this in his book Critique of Pure Reason, but Paul Guyer provides an excellent account of Kant’s philosophy in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge.  

So, like determinism, I’m not very familiar with any modern-day philosophers pushing idealism.  However, like determinism, I see glimpses of the philosophy in so many writers.  Idealism, on the surface, seems ridiculous.  There’s no such thing as an ideal form of horse, right?  But we employ the idea of pure concepts existing outside of ourselves, true forms, so to speak, every day and all the time.  Peace, for example, is something we all (well, except for John McCain) clamor for.  But we’ve never really known peace.  We’re calling for a pure concept with no grounding in experience.  Epistemology itself is based on the belief that there is some objective truth, or at least some right method of acquiring and validating knowledge.  All of science is based on the idea that there is a Way that the world works, and that we can learn this Way.  So, idealism is a real and potent outlook on knowledge, even today.  And, in relation to your project, it’s the theory behind standardized tests.  There’s an Answer, and we determine success based on how close you come to that Answer.

Other

So, I know I said there four main views, but these theories don't fit nicely in any of them.  Another "epistemological" view that I know of is hermeneutics.  This is the view that there is no truth, and that our inquiries are not truly attempts to find truth, but rather are contributions to a grand human conversation.  Truth is replaced by Persuasion as the goal of inquiry; hence, the economics branch of this view is called Rhetoric.  The purpose of rhetoric is to find agreement between parties, not to discover something objective.  We shouldn’t judge, we should adopt the speech of the opposing party and then just seek to find some agreement between us, or simply keep the conversation going until agreement can be reached.  The hermeneutists therefore offer critiques of both rationalists and positivists.  The general theory is presented by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and, as applied to economics, is presented by Donald McCloskey in The Rhetoric of Economics.  Now, it seems to me that presenting this argument, that there is no need to argue because we’re never trying to find the truth, is a self-contradiction.  And the rest of their theory seems pretty easy to contradict, too.  Which makes me take their view not very seriously.  However, it was very influential for a while, and the theory of Rhetoric as the Goal goes back before Socrates, with the Sophists (did you know that only about 20 pages of Sophist writings have survived to the present day?).  

Also, there’s the English Department types.  I realize that this is highly stereotypical, but I call radically unusual views this because, for many decades, after economics had thoroughly demolished the philosophy and economics of Marx, his theories were kept alive and insulated in university English departments.  When new subjects of study emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, such as sociology and later gender studies and the like, the doctrines that had survived in the university English Departments emerged and infected a lot of the new subjects, too, and gained enough strength to again attempt to take-over the established sciences like economics.  I get a little bitter because the English professors didn’t know anything about economics, they just liked the lens that Marxism and other poisonous doctrines provided, and now we live in a world where rationalists (in the broadest sense of the term) have to defend mathematics from charges of “white privilege.”  Anyway, that made me sound biased, but, actually, maybe the feminists have a point.  If all knowledge has a purpose, then perhaps we should be restructuring our sciences and social structures for purposes other than finding truth.  See, for example, the recent article from Sara Giordano, “Those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure.”  The philosophy, I think, is just a mix of relativism and hermeneutics, but the approach and target (content) is somewhat novel.  Very interesting, actually.

Hope this helps.

J21 - The Environment and the Human Mind

Having established in Journal 18 that what we consider to be natural resources are not automatically economic goods, that they are nothing more than arrangements of chemicals until the human mind classifies them as otherwise, I’d like to use this Journal to further elaborate on some of the implications of this fact. If, indeed, man’s material surroundings are simply arrangements of chemical elements, then this is man’s environment, in the broadest sense. But the narrower sense of environment, wherein these arrangements of chemical elements are classified as certain types of objects and entities and determined to be beneficial or detrimental, exists only by virtue of the human mind. That is, the environment, as we think of it, is a product of the human mind. We are the source of meaning in the universe. 

I wanted to, last month, write a journal on the relationship between man and nature. However, I didn’t have time, as the subject was rather vast and the argument in my notes was not nearly as compelling as it should have been. I wanted to explain that man and nature are fundamentally opposed to one another. All of human history can be summed up as a struggle against scarcity. Scarcity imposed by nature. Civilization, therefore, is locked in an eternal battle with nature. As Aldous Huxley described it, nature is “an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered, unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy. One respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting.” However, there is, of course, the counterclaim that man is nature, that man cannot survive without nature, and that there is something in man that responds well to nature. But, through the lens of Mengerian value theory, it can be seen that man and nature are on far more equal footing, for as man is a product of nature, no less is nature a product of man. Nature is man’s enemy because man views it as such, and chooses to fight it.

I believe this view of nature comes from the fact that man has imagination. I’m really just thinking of this now, so I don’t have a praxeological explanation of imagination to provide. However, I think that the source of our conflict with nature is our ability to imagine a different life and environment than the one it has provided. Nature has imposed upon us a world of scarcity, one that restricts the life we can live, the life we can imagine. More than that, though, is the fact that man is a rational creature, and acts to escape the limits of scarcity and thus achieve the life he desires. The only way to do this, however, is by warring against nature and thereby changing his environment to better suit himself.

Now, as I explained in my post on the 5Cs, strictly speaking, man does not create. The chemical composition of the Earth, which forms our material surroundings, is roughly fixed. Matter and energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. But if man seeks to create a better life for himself, which, as I explained in my first SDA, is the purpose of all economic action, and he cannot literally create a better world for himself to live in, then he must act by transforming his existing environment. In other words, all economic activity is an attempt to rearrange the chemical elements of man’s surroundings into a pattern that suits him better. Indeed, since all action is an attempt at improvement, it follows that nature, which is the pattern of these material surroundings that has not been changed by man, is the unimproved part of man’s world. Man is at war with nature because it is the nature of man to change the world for his benefit, to adapt his environment to suit his desires, and this tendency puts him into irreconcilable conflict with nature, which has so disappointed man as to require improvement through his action.

Of course, it’s not clear, from the positive analysis above, which side we should root for in this war between man and nature. I will say right now that I, along with Western Civilization, value human life and well-being over nature. But there are some environmentalists with different values. Namely, they believe that the intrinsic value of nature, of animal and plant diversity, of coral reefs, of endangered animals, of rainforests, etc., is more important than one species, humans. They think that human beings, just one of nature’s many products, have no right to go to war with nature. They are willing to sacrifice human life and well-being for the preservation of nature’s intrinsic value. But, again, Menger has demolished the foundations of this view. There are no intrinsic values in nature. Value is a product of the human mind. The favoring of nature over man is, in fact, a man-made value judgment, and the attempts of these environmentalists to protect nature from man is, in fact, an attempt to shape the world into their desired image. 

Action is always man’s way of improving his environment. And man is always acting. It is undeniable that man has a significant impact on the environment and the world. But, without the proper perspective, the Mengerian lens, it may be difficult to realize that this impact is improvement, for man. To live and prosper, man must be able to move himself and his goods from place to place. If a forest and a river hinder his ability to do this, then the removal of some trees and the construction of a bridge are not merely human activities, or changes in the environment, but improvements in man’s environment. They are rearrangements of man’s physical surroundings in a way that makes them more conducive to man’s life and well-being. 

Without the human mind, the world is simply an arrangement of chemical elements. They have no intrinsic value. They have no meaning. It is human beings who imbue them with meaning and value, and it is human beings who transform external nature into a man-made environment born of the internal mind.

On Questioning

For the next few months, the EMC program will be focusing on the development of questioning skills. This is rather important because most of the kids don’t possess these skills and, worse, believe that they don’t need them. Bott, Mrs. Gergen, and I, after a discussion about the real purpose of this program, concluded that this program is not so much about completing a successful research project as about the development of the students’ abilities to learn and think and create. And questioning is vital to that process. Therefore, we’ve decided that one of the main goals of this program is to give the students the questioning skills that they will need to succeed in their studies and in their careers and in their lives. To that end, we’ve been designing a plan for the month of November (and beyond) that should further foster these skills.

Of course, this focus has been low-key in the background of the program the entire time, mostly because questioning is essential for the development of all of the other aspects of this program (most especially the 5Cs). For example, all the way at the end of last year, at the first EMC meeting, we posed the question “Who was the best president?” and observed the kids struggle to recognize the ambiguity of the question. The activity was meant to highlight the skill of critical thinking, but the way to exercise critical thinking in that situation, and in most situations, was to ask some questions about the meaning of the words that we used. In order to answer the question posed, it was necessary to ask more questions. So, the questioning element has always been there, but I fear that it has been underemphasized and therefore flown under the radar of most of the students.

Now, students are not naturally accustomed to question. After 12 years in the public school system, where they’ve been asked to provide correct answers day in and day out for forever, they most likely look immediately for answers, rather than stop to question. Moreover, these particular students have been told for most of their lives that they are smart, that their answers are relatively more correct and correct more frequently. As a result, these kids, when presented with some research topic, immediately begin to formulate an answer to the unspoken (or perhaps imprecisely spoken) question that the topic poses, and then, once an answer has been formed, cling to a belief in its veracity, as it is the creation of an unimpeachable mind. Once they have an answer, and once they think it’s correct, it’s difficult for them to develop that ability to question themselves because they don’t believe that they need to. They believe that they already have the answer, already know what they’re going to do for their project, and therefore no further questioning need occur. This is what we’re going to try to change through this program. 

Easier said than done. Again, this isn’t just about showing kids how to question. It’s about getting them to care about questioning. And getting students to care has been a struggle for all educators everywhere and in all times.

To begin this process, we first had to determine why questions are important. It’s fairly easy to come up with some important uses of questions, but what was so important about these uses? I had to spend some time asking and answering my own set of questions. Why are questions important? Questions do something important. How do questions do this? Questions force us to seek knowledge and use it to form answers. Why do questions do this? Questions force us to stop and respond. It changes the path of our thinking. Why do questions do this? Questions orient us within the real world and remind us that there are views other than our own. 

Every answer is a proposition. Every proposition is a truth-claim. Every truth-claim is an argument. Therefore, every answer is an argument. These kids, like any researcher, are ultimately presenting an argument through their projects. “Art is important because…”; “Louis CK is funny because…”; Public education is failing students because…”; Dreams foster a sense of empathy because…” At the end of this project, these students don’t need to just present their findings, they have to defend them. And everything we do is designed to help them do this: finding credible sources, clearly outlining their limitations, encouraging clear thinking, using creativity to look at their information in a different way. But this purpose is never explicit. We never tell the kids that they’re in a fight over the truth of their conclusions. 

My argument for the benefit of writing has long been that we cannot completely trust our minds. As long as our thoughts remain ensconced in our brains, they are incomplete. While they are incomplete, we cannot truly understand them or their implications or their flaws. Therefore, we need to write, and thereby draw these thoughts out of our heads and expose them to the harsh light of the real world so that we can examine them in full there. Writing helps us think, and it helps us learn to think, and it helps us to realize the importance of good thinking. My argument for the benefit of questions is similar: we can’t completely trust our minds. Inside of our own heads, our thoughts, our beliefs, our arguments, seem to make sense. They feel so intuitive, since they are, after all, our own. We proceed from one proposition to another, creating long chains of complicated reasoning that seem oh so simple to us. We understand the truth; all that remains is to present our genius to the world. But this isn’t necessarily true. Things that make sense in our heads don’t always make sense in the real world. And this is because a) our logic is imperfect, and b) our knowledge is incomplete. Questions combat these flaws. Questioning is to argument what writing is to thinking. As we are all making arguments, we all require questioning.

Questions force us to stop in our own internal chain of reasoning and respond to some outside thought. Even if we’re coming up with our own questions, we do so from a slightly different perspective than the thought that we’re questioning, usually in response to a recognition of flawed logic or lack of knowledge. But this recognition, and the accompanying questions, come from a consideration of the real world. You believe that your theory of the way the world works is complete and perfect, until you are confronted with phenomena which you cannot explain with your current theory, and then the “doubts,” which are really questions, filter in. Questions are generated by the exposure of your arguments to the outside world. Questions from outside of ourselves are necessarily questions from the outside world. They reveal flaws in our argument that, in the warmth of our own minds, we would never have seen on our own. 

Questions are beneficial, then, because they force us to step outside of ourselves and seek more knowledge, or revise our existing theory, in order to come up with a better answer than the one we’ve been telling ourselves. It makes our argument better. But, more than that, it reminds us that we are, in fact, arguing. There is an outside world, and for our theory to mean anything, it must have applicability in that outside world. Our answers aren’t just for us, they’re for the world and for life and for our lives in the world. They must, therefore, be tested against the world, and be revised if necessary. And finally, they remind us that our propositions are, indeed, arguments, by showing us that there are other views, other answers, out there in the real world, and that we must not only present our own theory, but overcome the theories of others. Unless, of course, we’re wrong, and in seeking to overcome the theories of others we come to learn the truth of our own and the truth of the matter, which is its own benefit. 

Questions force us to confront ourselves, and to confront the world. They remind us that our truth claims are answers to questions, spoken or unspoken, about the world, and that the standard for their validity is external to ourselves. And by doing this, they make our truth claims so much stronger. And this truth claiming is not limited to this research project. Or to school. Or to our professional lives. Everything we say, everything we do, is a claim that what we’re saying or doing is right. Experience will teach us whether we were right. Questions will teach us how to be right.

I’m rather excited by the increased focus on questioning skills, because they are what sets apart sharp kids from mature intellectuals, and this program is more about development of skills than about opportunities for learning. Moreover, this new focus will provide us with greater purpose and mindfulness as we go about continuing to shape and design this class. We want these kids to be the best they can be; questioning skills are vital to achieving that improvement. We must, therefore, commit to developing those skills, although not to the exclusion of all else, and we must make the development of these skills matter to the kids, as well.

J20 - Thinking About Purpose

For the past month or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose. Now, until you realize how dominant that concept has been in my thinking and in my scholarly contributions over the years, you won’t realize how significant it is that this month’s thinking actually deserves comment. But it does. I suppose it started with something of an intellectual crises of faith that I went through a few weeks ago, wherein I found myself asking that age-old question: How do we know that we know what we know? This was in response to Alex’s queries into the subject of free will and his conclusion that we do not, in fact, possess choice and agency as we believe, but are, in fact, merely the outcome of chemical reactions in our brains, influenced by the chemical reactions in our environment. Of course, I’ve dealt with this revelation before, during my own queries into the subject of free will. Still, to challenge Alex’s thinking required challenging my own, and there was indeed a period of time earlier this month wherein I wasn’t sure what I really thought about the subject. I escaped this debilitating self-doubt by clinging to an epistemological principle that I have embraced and contributed to over the years: that knowledge has purpose. Truth with a capital “T” isn’t as important as many philosophers throughout history have believed; what matters is whether the truth we have discovered fulfills its purpose. Often, this purpose requires true and correct knowledge, the more complete the better. But, for questions like the ones I was facing, questions concerning the limitations of the human mind to understand certain knowledge, adherence to the idea that knowledge must be useful was liberating.

My unusually strong concern with the idea of purpose continued into deliberations on the content of a law review article that I’m currently writing about the influence judicial decisions have had on the attitude towards climate change. As law is a relatively new area for me, I’ve been tempted to incorporate a lot of outside subject matter into my paper, to bolster what I don’t know with more of what I do know. In fact, my writing does this almost automatically, often devolving into an economic analysis or philosophical critique of some legal doctrine, rather than sticking to law. To avoid this, I’ve had to employ a purpose litmus-test for the material I want to include. What is the purpose of my article? What is the purpose of this information? Does the purpose of this information contribute to the purpose of the article? If the answer is not clearly affirmative, then the information should not be included. 

More pressingly, I’ve been obsessing over the idea of purpose in the EMC2 program. First and foremost, as I’ve struggled in my relationships with a number of my students, I’ve been questioning my purpose as coordinator. But the answer to this question is necessarily wrapped up in the purpose of the EMC2 program. And, reflecting upon that question, I realized that we had probably lost sight of its original purpose. Moreover, it seemed to me that we had lost any overarching purpose. So, it was suddenly necessary to rediscover the original motivation for starting the EMC2 program, decide whether that should still be our focus, and then commit to running the program purposefully for the rest of the year. But, even once that issue was resolved, the question of my own purpose within the program still remains. And, as the year continues and many of the issues I had with my students at the beginning of the year continue, this question becomes all the more pressing. 

Finally, and most relevant to this journal, I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this project. Originally, I meant for this project to just be an example for the students this year, since we were changing the program a little bit and I wanted to have something to point to when explaining what we wanted from the students. To that end, it was supposed to be done by the end of the summer. Unfortunately, I ended up working three jobs and training for a marathon this summer, and was unable to get anywhere close to a finished product. However, I decided to continue working through the school year, and it now serves a somewhat different purpose. This project is a sign of good faith to the students, and a gauge for us coordinators. I continue to work on this project so that I can honestly tell the kids that I’m not asking them to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself. Moreover, as this program continues to evolve, it’s important for the coordinators to know whether we’re asking too much of our students, or too little, and to learn what’s useful and when it’s useful and what struggles arise in the course of a research project as we’ve conceived of it. The topic of this project was also purposeful, for two reasons. First, the environment is an issue that many libertarians continue to struggle with. It’s such a big issue, climate change; it seems like something that must be handled by a powerful entity like the government. So, I wanted this project to help set some libertarian positions on environmentalism on stronger ground. Second, this project is centered around a question, a radically original question, a question that forces one to stop and reconsider one’s once-solid views. “Is climate change really a bad thing?” This is the type of question that I want my students to discover and struggle with, because these are the questions that are actually worth asking. Year after year, the social sciences spit out study after study which are essentially just regressions of new data on a host of random topics. How many of them are actually changing the world or even just provoking real, meaningful thought? Big questions, like the purpose of school, the nature of childhood, the existence of free will, the effects of humor, the role of prices, the idea of climate change: these are questions that force the students to really think, to question everything they think they know about a topic, and motivate them to create something that will change the world. 

Of course, for this project to accomplish its purpose, I have to treat it like a real project. And one of the essential elements of a research project is its answer to the question “So What?” Now, I guess that I’ve been assuming that my so-what has been self-evident. Climate change will most likely have a tremendous impact on the lives of human beings and on all that they’ve built; it may be the most important problem facing humanity in this age. People live in a state of fear and bitterness as a result of climate change. The debate over what to do about it, and who to blame, contributes to the startling level of tension and animosity existing between members of our society. The magnitude of the issue seemingly justifies massive government involvement in addressing the problem, which brings with it its own set of serious issues. Now, this project is a creative attempt to solve this problem of climate change. The goal of this project is not to solve climate change by presenting a method of stopping or reversing climate change, but to solve climate change by changing people’s view of climate change. The goal of this project is to get people to see climate change as an economic opportunity, not an overwhelming threat. It seems like a cop-out, a non-solution. “Oh, you have a problem? Have you tried not thinking of it as a problem?” But, this project is an attempt to justify the view of climate change as an economic opportunity. And, the project seeks to show how, once our perspective has changed, many of the problems caused by climate change really can be resolved more economically and more successfully. Therefore, this project is a suggestion for the beginning of a solution to one of humanity’s biggest problems today.

Unfortunately, I don’t know that I’ve made that clear, because the other day Bott asked me what I was selling and, when I replied with “an idea for a better way of approaching the problem of climate change,” he said that he couldn’t see it. Apparently, my “so what” isn’t apparent, yet. This is a huge problem, one that must be fixed quickly. Without a “so what,” there’s no reason for my audience and stakeholders to keep reading and listen to what I have to say. I have to make it clear what this project does and how important it is. 

The theme of this month, as far as my research goes, has been the human mind. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the human mind, for my project, for Alex’s project, and during my intellectual crisis. But I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about purpose. And purpose is what this project needs, more than an elaboration on the role of the mind in economics. The purpose of my SDA this month (and every month) is to show progress, but also to embody my “so what.” As far as I’m concerned, this “so what” focus is the main focus for this upcoming SDA, and if a discussion of the human mind must be omitted or pushed aside, so be it. Hopefully, I can show what exactly it is that I’m selling, and, even better, convince my stakeholders that it’s worth buying. The purpose of this SDA, then, is to communicate the purpose of this project.