2 The Ultimate Given
3 Statistics
4 Free Will
5 Inevitability
CHAPTER 4 Certainty and Uncertainty
1 The Problem of Quantitative Definiteness
2 Certain Knowledge
3 The Uncertainty of the Future
4 Quantification and Understanding in Acting and in History
5 The Precariousness of Forecasting in Human Affairs
6 Economic Prediction and the Trend Doctrine
7 Decision-Making
8 Confirmation and Refutability
9 The Examination of Praxeological Theorems
CHAPTER 5 On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics
1 The Research Fable
2 The Study of Motives
3 Theory and Practice
4 The Pitfalls of Hypostatization
5 On the Rejection of Methodological Individualism
6 The Approach of Macroeconomics
7 Reality and Play
8 Misinterpretation of the Climate of Opinion
9 The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought
10 The Concept of a Perfect System of Government
11 The Behavioral Sciences
CHAPTER 6 Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking
1 The Zoological Approach to Human Problems
2 The Approach of the “Social Sciences”
3 The Approach of Economics
4 A Remark about Legal Terminology
5 The Sovereignty of the Consumers
CHAPTER 7 The Epistemological Roots of Monism
1 The Nonexperimental Character of Monism
2 The Historical Setting of Positivism
3 The Case of the Natural Sciences
4 The Case of the Sciences of Human Action
5 The Fallacies of Positivism
CHAPTER 8 Positivism and the Crisis of Western Civilization
1 The Misinterpretation of the Universe
2 The Misinterpretation of the Human Condition
3 The Cult of Science
4 The Epistemological Support of Totalitarianism
5 The Consequences
Index
Notes
This essay is not a contribution to philosophy. It is merely the exposition of certain ideas that attempts to deal with the theory of knowledge ought to take into full account.
Traditional logic and epistemology have produced, by and large, merely disquisitions on mathematics and the methods of the natural sciences. The philosophers considered physics as the paragon of science and blithely assumed that all knowledge is to be fashioned on its model. They dispensed with biology, satisfying themselves that one day later generations would succeed in reducing the phenomena of life to the operation of elements that can be fully described by physics. They slighted history as “mere literature” and ignored the existence of economics. Positivism, as foreshadowed by Laplace, baptized by Auguste Comte, and resuscitated and systematized by contemporary logical or empirical positivism, is essentially pan-physicalism, a scheme to deny that there is any other method of scientific thinking than that starting from the physicist’s recording of “protocol sentences.” Its materialism encountered opposition only on the part of metaphysicians who freely indulged in the invention of fictitious entities and of arbitrary systems of what they called “philosophy of history.”
This essay proposes to stress the fact that there is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and to describe. There is human action.
It is a fact that up to now nothing has been done to bridge over the gulf that yawns between the natural events in the consummation of which science is unable to find any finality and the conscious acts of men that invariably aim at definite ends. To neglect, in the treatment of human action, reference to the ends aimed at by the actors is no less absurd than were the endeavors to resort to finality in the interpretation of natural phenomena.
It would be a mistake to insinuate that all the errors concerning the epistemological interpretation of the sciences of human action are to be ascribed to the unwarranted adoption of the epistemology of positivism. There were other schools of thought that confused the philosophical treatment of praxeology and history even more seriously than positivism, e.g., historicism. Yet, the following analysis deals first of all with the impact of positivism.1
In order to avoid misinterpretation of the point of view of this essay, it is advisable, even necessary, to stress the fact that it deals with knowledge, science, and reasonable belief and that it refers to metaphysical doctrines only as far as it is necessary to demonstrate in what respects they differ from scientific knowledge. It unreservedly endorses Locke’s principle of “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” The viciousness of positivism is not to be seen in the adoption of this principle, but in the fact that it does not acknowledge any other ways of proving a proposition than those practiced by the experimental natural sciences and qualifies as metaphysical—which, in the positivist jargon, is synonymous with nonsensical—all other methods of rational discourse. To expose the fallaciousness of this fundamental thesis of positivism and to depict its disastrous consequences is the only theme of this essay.
Although full of contempt for all it considers as metaphysics, the epistemology of positivism is itself based upon a definite brand of metaphysics. It is beyond the pale of a rational inquiry to enter into an analysis of any variety of metaphysics, to try to appraise its value or its tenability and to affirm or to reject it. What discursive reasoning can achieve
