Topic: Praxeology

Quotes

Max Weber, Economy And Society (1968)

• A motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question#
• The line between meaningful action and merely reactive behavior to which no subjective meaning is attached, cannot be sharply drawn empirically. A very considerable part of all sociologically relevant behavior, especially purely traditional behavior, is marginal between the two.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• The term entrepreneur as used by catallactic theory means: acting man exclusively seen from the aspect of the uncertainty inherent in every action.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics (2000)
• Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason.#
• Value judgements are not immutable and therefore a scale of value, which is abstracted from various, necessarily nonsynchronous actions of an individual, may be self-contradictory.#
• It is not a deficiency of the system of aprioristic science that it does not convey to us full cognition of reality. Its concepts and theorems are mental tools opening the approach to a complete grasp of reality; they are, to be sure, not in themselves the totality of factual knowledge about all things.#Quoted in Gabriel Zanotti & Nicolás Cachanosky, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2015)
• 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. #Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)
• The scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals.#

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• All time is perceived by the mind, only by the successive change of its own ideas. Therefore while the perceptions of the mind remain precisely in the same state, there is no perceivable length of time, because no sensible succession at all.#
• Where there is absolutely no preferring or choosing, but a perfect, continuing equilibrium, there is no volition.#
• Choice and preference can no more be in a state of indifference, than motion can be in a state of rest.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Omnipotent Government (1944)

• Human actions consist always in a choice between two goods or two evils which are not deemed equivalent. Where there is perfect equivalence, man stays neutral; and no action results.#

Jan Pavlik, “Austrian Economics and the Problem of Apriorism” (2006)

• According to Kant, to have a priori knowledge does not mean that we possess it before having sensory experience (i.e., as a set of inborn ideas); we find it within experience when we cease to be interested solely in its contents and turn − in the mode of reflection − our attention to its form. Then we find out that any further inter-subjectively valid experience cannot correct the a priori knowledge or even falsify it; it is because the a priori knowledge is a necessary presupposition of any inter-subjectively valid experience.#
• Purposeful action arises when animal instrumental activities (as based on pre-conceptual gestalt relationalisations and confined to what is within the horizon of actual perception) becomes subordinated to language which, as being able to make present what in not present in sensory perception, orients them to the materialisation of something which is originally beyond that horizon.#

Armen Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory” (1950)

• Where foresight is uncertain, “profit maximization” is meaningless as a guide to specifiable action.#
• Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action. . . . [T]he consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action.#

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)

• Almost any two actions can be construed as the same or different, depending upon whether they fall into the same or different subclasses in the background classification of actions.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Theory and History (1957)

• The proposition: man acts, is tantamount to the proposition: man is eager to substitute a state of affairs that suits him better for a state of affairs that suits him less.#Quoted in George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)

George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)

• The continuing existence of action is proof that equilibrium proper is never achieved. It is equally proof that it is constantly being striven for.#
• So long as people are neither completely dull nor completely content, they must necessarily act. To ask whether general equilibrium can ever be achieved is therefore to ponder the exhaustibility of people’s imaginations.#

Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject” (1968)

• The aim-structure of animals or men is not ‘given’, but it develops with the help of some kind of feed-back mechanism out of earlier aims, and out of results which were or were not aimed at.#

F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1968)

• Recognizing an action pattern as one of a class determines merely that it has the same meaning as others of the same class, but not yet what that meaning is. The latter rests on the further pattern of action, or set of rules, which in response to the recognition of a pattern as one of a certain kind the organism imposes upon its own further activities.#

Richard Wagner, Mind, Society, and Human Action (2010)

• Any choice involves embracing one option and rejecting some alternative. To the option chosen we normally ascribe the term value or utility, while to the option rejected we normally ascribe the term cost.#

Frank Knight, The Economic Organization (1934)

• The cost of any alternative (simple or complex) chosen is the alternative that has to be given up; where there is no alternative to a given experience, no choice, there is no economic problem, and cost has no meaning.#Quoted in James Buchanan, Cost and Choice (1969)

James Buchanan, Cost and Choice (1969)

• The individual whose payoff structure is only some proportionate share of that which he might confront under full ownership will tend to take more risks. The reason is obvious. Since the nonpecuniary differential arises only because of the declining marginal utility of income, the fact that the outcome range is lower under proportionate share payoffs than under full responsibility and ownership ensures some lessening of this differential.#
• Cost is relevant to decision, and it must reflect the value of foregone alternatives. A budget, however, reflects the prospective or anticipated revenue and outlay sides of a decision that has been made. It is erroneous to consider such prospective outlays as appear in a budget as costs. The budget must, however, also be distinguished from the account, which measures realized revenues and outlays that result from a particular course of action.#

Debra Satz & John Ferejohn, “Rational Choice and Social Theory” (1994)

• The [traditional] theory of rational choice is most powerful in contexts where choice is limited.#Quoted in Doug North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005)

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Purposive action is therefore rooted in the nature of the mind. . . . As natural beings we are in constant interaction with the world of nature, and co-ordinated with it. It is only in purposive action that the self as personality differentiates itself from the natural elements within and outside itself.#
• Purposefulness is essentially a relational concept since it always presupposes something alien to the purpose that has to be transformed. If such a transformation were not necessary, if the will contained its realization within itself, there would be no formation of purposes.#
• Money is perhaps the clearest expression and demonstration of the fact that man is a ‘tool-making’ animal, which, however, is itself connected with the fact that man is a ‘purposive’ animal.#

Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber (1971)

• It is true that in explaining recurrent patterns of action, the essential subject-matter of all social sciences, we cannot provide such explanation in terms of purposes, as elements of plans, because the purposes pursued by millions of people are of course numbered in millions. But often we are none the less able to provide explanations in terms of the elements common to all these plans, such as norms, institutions, and sometimes institutionalized behaviour, the maximization of profits, or the avoidance of the risk of insolvency. As long as we are able to account for the recurrence of patterns of action in terms of such elements of plans, we are successfully employing the classical method of interpretation.#
• Institutions are very important, but their modus operandi must be examined from a firmly founded praxeological basis rather than taken for granted on the strength of some dubious biological analogy.#
• The method of interpretation (Verstehen) . . . is nothing less than the traditional method of scholarship which scholars have used throughout the ages whenever they were concerned with the interpretation of texts. Whenever one is in doubt about the meaning of a passage one tries to establish what the author ‘meant by it’, i.e. to what ideas he attempted to give expression when he wrote it. . . . It is evidently possible to extend this classical method of scholarship to human acts other than writings.#
• The question we face [in the social sciences] is not whether such [universal] laws exist, but whether those which do (‘All men must eat in order to live’) are of much help in enabling us to understand how social situations change.#
• As regards initial situations, a human situation can never be defined exclusively in observable terms because all human action is also concerned with an unknown and unknowable future. . . . Human action cannot be regarded as mere reaction to stimulus. To understand it we have to understand what image of the future the actors are bearing in their minds.#
• Textual interpretation is the prototype of Verstehen. . . . It will be readily appreciated how little all this has to do with ‘intuition’. The procedure is a rational procedure of discursive study.#
• No ‘explanation’ which has nothing to offer beyond successful prediction of observable events can satisfy the student of action who wishes to understand it.#
• While ‘description of the initial situation’ is a fairly innocuous requirement in nature, where all we have to do is enumerate objects in time and space, for human action this requirement cannot be met because we should have to include something unspecifiable—knowledge! A human situation without specific knowledge makes no sense. It follows that the ‘scientific method’ of the natural sciences will be of little use to the student of action because he is unable to use the testing procedure this method prescribes.#
• The relationship between plan and action is not the simple one of cause and effect, but the complex one of interaction between mental acts and observable events.#

Peter Boettke, “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: Exploring the Weber-Austrian Connection” (1998)

• Since the scientific goal in interpretative sociology (i.e., praxeology) is Verstehen, not prediction and falsifiability, broadening of the concept of rationality to near tautological status does not present the problem it would in alternative concepts of science. #

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.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (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.#
• 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. #

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.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

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.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Philippa Foot, “Free Will as Involving Determinism” (1957)

• Assigning a motive to an action is not bringing it under any law; it is rather saying something about the kind of action it was.#

Augustine, City of God

• For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• Knowledge is a tool of action. Its function is to advise man how to proceed in his endeavors to remove uneasiness.#
• If one eliminates any reference to judgements of value, it is impossible to say anything about the actions of man, i.e., about all the behavior that is not merely the consummation of physiological processes taking place in the human body.#
• This mode of classification [between economic and noneconomic behavior] does not make any sense if we apply it to the behavior of the consumer.#
• Whether or not [acting man] aims at accumulating wealth, he always aims at employing that he owns for those ends which, as he thinks, will satisfy him best.#
• The specific goals that people aim at in action are very different and continually change. But all acting is invariably induced by one motive only, viz., to substitute a state that suits the actor better for the state that would prevail in the absence of his action.#

F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)

• The question of what determines (or what is meant by) purposiveness is in the last instance really the same question as that of what ensures the continued existence of the organism.#

Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)

• If the predictability of the consequences is one of the unavoidable premises of human decisions, it is necessary to conclude that the more general rules render predictable . . . the consequences of individual actions, the more these actions can be called “free” from interference on the part of other people, including the authorities.#

W.H. Hutt, The Theory of Idle Resources (1939)

• A taste as such can hardly be ‘irrational’; but that term can be applied to a choice or preference because it may be based upon a false expectation due to its consequences having been wrongly thought out.#