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This website is now just an archive.
Please visit http://virgilstorr.org/ to access Dr. Virgil Storr's research and CV.
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Distinction or Dichotomy
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Rethinking the Line between Thymology and Praxeology (with Don Lavoie)
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Paper presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association (November 17-19, 2001; Tampa, Florida).
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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reexamine critically Ludwig Mises’ attempt to separate the psychological aspects of understanding (thymology) from the “science of action” (praxeology). There are, we contend, legitimate distinctions between theory on the one hand, and on the other, psychology or history. But, there is no need to dichotomize them from one another in the way Mises sometimes did. Why, then, did Mises think it necessary to insulate praxeology, his science of human action, from thymology, that is, attempts to understand concrete human purposes in their specific contexts? In his debates over methodology Mises was primarily concerned with defending the scientific status of the body of work known as classical political economy. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Carl Menger, and others have contributed importantly to the way we understand our world, but the philosophies of science of Mises’ day seemed to leave no room for these accomplishments. Mises saw economics as surrounded by three hostile of view he called Positivist, Historicist, and Polylogistic. He thought it was necessary to sharply demarcate economics away from thymology and from history, from the whole realm of verstehen, in order to permit it to be legitimated as a Science. He rejected the positivists’ critique of historical knowledge, defending verstehen as the method proper to the human sciences, and thymology as a legitimate cognitive activity, but he struggled to make praxeology separate from both. He rejected the historicists, in turn, because they left no room for general theoretical knowledge of the kind economics has produced. Praxeology, for Mises, is a “formal” system, depending only on logic. Unless one rejects logic itself, as in Polylogistic positions where different logics are said to apply to different races or classes, one is persuaded to accept praxeological steps of reasoning by their logic. If geometry is a science, Mises argued, then praxeology must be one too. In his context Mises was forced to find some kind of legitimated scientific status for economics, and he found it in the strictly logical character of economic reasoning. Demarcating this logical aspect of theoretical economics from more scientifically dubious elements in applied economics (such as thymological issues) made sense in its day. In our context today, however, where philosophers of science reject the modernistic standards of what it takes to be accorded the rank of “science,” it makes more sense to abandon demarcation efforts of this kind. Praxeology would be stronger, as a scholarly research program, if it would abandon the efforts to “purify” itself, to separate itself from the realm of concrete historical understandings, and instead would embrace the fact that economics belongs within the human sciences.
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virgil storr, ph.d.
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
3301 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 450, Arlington, VA 22201
(703)993-8127; fax: (703) 993-4935
vstorr@gmu.edu
Last Updated: June 2010
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