Quotes from “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action”

By Roderick Long (2001)

• Just as the kinematic diagram does not assert that the machine’s parts really are rigid, but only says that if, and to the extent that, they are rigid, the machine will behave as predicted, so likewise a economic theory does not assert that human beings have any particular aims, but only that if, and to the extent that, they have such-and-such aims, they will behave in certain ways.#
  EconomicsPraxeology
• If I will to have contradictory beliefs or contradictory volitions, that will be rational in the Misesian sense but irrational in, say, the Kantian sense. #
  Praxeology
• No “analytic” use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of “synthetic” uses of that same concept.#
  PhilosophyEpistemology
• The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a separability of concept from application that cannot be sustained.#
  Philosophy
• We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing.#
  EpistemologyPhilosophy
• A mind that “consists of rules” cannot intelligibly be interpreted either as making rules (as though it might have left them unmade), or as having rules imposed on it (as though it might have been free of them).#
  Epistemology

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900)

• Correct judgments and false ones … have causal antecedents and consequences like all mental phenomena. Such natural connections do not, however, interest the logician …. He aims not at a physics, but an ethics of thinking.#
  Epistemology

F.A. Hayek, The Counterrevolution of Science (1955)

• The objects of economic activity cannot be defined in objective terms but only with reference to a human purpose.#
  PraxeologyEconomics

Gottlob Frege, Logic

• Logic is concerned with the laws of truth, not with the laws of holding something to be true, not with the question of how people think, but with the question of how they must think if they are not to miss the truth.#
  Epistemology

Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893)

• If being true is thus independent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.#
  PhilosophyEpistemology

Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations (1918)

• Error and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition. Whether what you take for true is false or true, your so taking it comes about in accordance with psychological laws. A derivation from these laws, an explanation of a mental process that ends in taking something to be true, can never take the place of proving what is taken to be true.#
  Epistemology

Ludwig Von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933)

• We can never identify the want otherwise than in the action. The action is always in accord with the want because we can infer the want only from the action. Whatever anyone says about his own wants is always only discussion and criticism of past and future behavior; the want first becomes manifest in action and only in action.#
  Praxeology

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• Only in one respect can acting be constant: in preferring the more valuable to the less valuable. If the valuations change, acting must change also. #
  Praxeology

Roderick Long, “Passionate Amnesia: Xenophon’s Solution to the Socratic Paradox”

• What makes a choice count as motivated by one motive rather than another has less to do with the motive’s antecedent role in triggering the choice than with its internal role in constituting and specifying that choice.#
  Praxeology

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1274)

• Choice is neither appetite by itself nor deliberation alone, but something composed of these – for just as we say that a living thing is composed of soul and body, yet is neither body by itself nor soul alone, but is both, so it is with choice.#
  Praxeology