Is Austrian Economics Really Based on Aristotle's Philosophy?
Austrian Economics is always claiming a strong connection to the Philosophy of Aristotle. The Austrians main connection to Aristotle is the idea of apriorism. In philosophy apriorism is defined as the philosophical doctrine that there may be genuine knowledge independent of experience. (Click link to see more)
Such thought just serves to further emphasize the anti-science of the so called 'soft sciences' of social 'sciences' and economics. It's even denial of knowledge and reality.
We are taught that because the ancient philosophers were men of leisure (exploiters of slave labor), they did not believe in experiment because they did not want to get their hands dirty. That is untrue, in fact, far from the truth. Read Plato's "Protagoras." When discussing whether and how men know justice, Protagoras says that when the subject at the assembly is shipbuilding, we ask a shipbuilder. But if anyone offers an opinion without experience, no matter how high-born he is, he is shouted down, and if need be, dragged out.
What the ancient Greeks did not have was the scientific method. They also did not have lowercase letters and cursive writing. What I mean is that it took centuries for individuals to discover and formulate the best methods for intellectual discovery. It is not fair to excoriate the ancient Greeks for not knowing what they did not know.
The dichotomy between reason and experience has deep roots, but, really, it came from the so-called "Age of Reason" (1648-1750) when English Empiricism was opposed to Continental Rationalism.
Small-o objectivism was a brief and largely implicit acceptance of what we call "the scientific method" or "rational-empiricism." While it fueled the scientific and economic explosion of the 19th century, small-o objectivism was not widespread in academic philosophy. Instead, positivism was accepted by "everyone", for instance both the individualist Herbert Spencer and the collectivist August Comte.
What we have today, at best, is "strong induction", the positivist claim that nothing is absolutely true. Even Richard Feynman held that science advances by continuously getting ever closer to "truth" but never reaching it. We merely pile on ever more incremental discoveries to validate (or suddenly disprove) what we accepted previously.
The scientific method can be stated as three steps or fourteen (on my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )but, as you note, it does require evidentiary testing of a hypothesis. That hypothesis is not an airy wish, but is, of necessity, an informed observation. That is the first step: to observe a phenomenon.
Finally, again, concepts being derived from perceptions, mathematics is absolutely true, even when we have not discovered the empirical referents. My case in point is "imaginary" numbers. The square root of minus 1 seemed "unreal" to most people, but became very real to electrical engineers.
The same goes for any past time in history...something lefties and progressives do not understand. An example I often use in reference to early industry just not knowing what they were doing to the environment...they had no way of knowing is my point.
Thank you for that 3rd paragraph.
Excellent article that cuts through a lot of muddle with clear and concise language and reasoning. I appreciate your article as both a professional writer and an amateur philosopher.
I caution against reading into Aristotle or anything else from arbitrarily "long ago." If Shakespeare is not warning enough, read from The Canterbury Tales. I spent some time with ancient Greek when I was writing about ancient numismatics. We have a finely-grained, million-word vocabulary, fully 2500 years more developed than ancient Greek.
The word "axios" (A≡IOΣ) meant only "worth; worthy; right and proper." It could also have meant "cheap" (the best price). To them, an "axiom" was a worthy statement that could not be questioned. We have 2500 years of thinking built from that. What we Objectivists call the Law of Identity (A is A) was formulated by Leibniz.
Here is enough of an argument about what Aristotle "really" meant in what was perhaps his finest work of empirical investigation, the embryology of the chick: http://www.jstor.org/stable/637790?se...
As you can see, these classicists split hairs. But it does underscore the fact that we should not read into Aristotle what we want to find there.
I agree with your thesis: The Austrians are not Aristotleans; they are Platonists.
That gets the old brain cells grinding away on a Sunday afternoon.
I often think that the one thing that almost justifies Plato's theory is quantum physics. Our senses cannot comprehend the world of the molecule, the atom, and the sub-atomic particles. We have been able to postulate these "things" and use them to create useful tools for both the benefit and destruction of mankind, but to date we are like a man who rubbed a magic lantern and was asking the genie what wishes he can grant and which he cannot.
What Rand has come up with is a useful tool that if used properly benefits humans as they plod, walk, or jog down the path of life. It deals with what the senses tell the mind and how to apply that knowledge in order to deal with the interaction between nature and mankind. So far, as Newton indicated, we've only taken a few ounces of water from the vast ocean.