Question

a) What is Praxeology?

b) What is the fundamental axiom of praxeology and what does it mean to employ a means-ends framework?

c) What does it mean to say praxeology is not empirical?

Answer 1

Praxeology Is the deductive study of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflexive behavior like sneezing and inaniate behavior. According to its theorists, with the action axiom as the starting point, it is possible to draw conclusions about human behavior that are both objective and universal. For example, the notion that humans engage in acts of choice implies that they have preferences, and this must be true for anyone who exhibits intentional behavior.

Or in other way

Praxeology is the scientific study of human action, which is purposeful behavior. A human acts whenever he or she uses means to achieve an end that he or she subjectively values. Human action is thus teleological or intentional; a person acts for a reason. Not all human behavior is action in the praxeological sense: purely reflexive or unconscious bodily movements (such as coughing when exposed to tear gas) are not examples of action. Praxeology starts from the undeniable axiom that human beings exist and act, and then logically deduces implications of this fact. These deduced propositions are true a priori; there is no need to test them in the way that a physicist might test a proposed "law" of Nature. So long as a praxeological statement has been derived correctly, it must necessarily contain as much truth as the original axioms.

For example, when we throw a ball, we do not reason that it is guided in a teleological way by some mystical spirit or "prime mover." Instead we use the laws of mechanics and causality to examine the position, velocity, and forces acting on the ball, in order to predict the future position and velocity of the ball.

On the other hand, one does not reason that there is some sort of direct, causal relation between traffic lights turning green and bodies beginning to cross the road. These are individuals acting with purpose crossing the road, who, only when the lights turn green, reason that it is safe to cross and then proceed to do so. The reckless individual who is late for work may rush across the road regardless of what the traffic lights show.

The discipline was founded by Auguste Comte but currently, the most common use of the term is in connection with the Austrian School economists who follow Ludwig von Mises.

Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact. In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act. This structure is built on the fundamental axiom of action, and has a few subsidiary axioms, such as that individuals vary and that human beings regard leisure as a valuable good. Any skeptic about deducing from such a simple base an entire system of economics, I refer to Mises's Human Action. Furthermore, since praxeology begins with a true axiom, A, all the propositions that can be deduced from this axiom must also be true. For if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.

The fact that people act necessarily implies that the means employed are scarce in relation to the desired ends; for, if all means were not scarce but superabundant, the ends would already have been attained, and there would be no need for action. Stated another way, resources that are superabundant no longer function as means, because they are no longer objects of action. Thus, air is indispensable to life and hence to the attainment of goals; however, air being superabundant is not an object of action and therefore cannot be considered a means, but rather what Mises called a "general condition of human welfare." Where air is not superabundant, it may become an object of action, for example, where cool air is desired and warm air is transformed through air conditioning. Even with the absurdly unlikely advent of Eden (or what a few years ago was considered in some quarters to be an imminent "postscarcity" world), in which all desires could be fulfilled instantaneously, there would still be at least one scarce means: the individual's time, each unit of which if allocated to one purpose is necessarily not allocated to some other goal.

Such are some of the immediate implications of the axiom of action. We arrived at them by deducing the logical implications of the existing fact of human action, and hence deduced true conclusions from a true axiom. Apart from the fact that these conclusions cannot be "tested" by historical or statistical means, there is no need to test them since their truth has already been established. Historical fact enters into these conclusions only by determining which branch of the theory is applicable in any particular case. Thus, for Crusoe and Friday on their desert island, the praxeological theory of money is only of academic, rather than of currently applicable, interest. A fuller analysis of the relationship between theory and history in the praxeological framework will be considered below.

It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods of formalizing a system of economic analysis, that they expressly assume strict independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and authority if this hypothesis is disallowed: whereas, in ordinary discourse, where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are doing and what the words mean, we can keep "at the back of our heads" the necessary reserves and qualifications and the adjustments which we have to make later on, in a way in which we cannot keep complicated partial differentials "at the back" of several pages of algebra which assume that they all vanish. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

Human Action, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises attempts to establish economics not as an empirical science, or a mathematical theory, but as a synthetic a priori endeavor he calls praxeology. Praxeology is supposed to be a study of the consequences of a single axiom called the Action Axiom, which states roughly that "Humans act." or "Human behavior is purposeful behavior."

My question is, have there been any critiques of Mises' praxeological theory? There have no doubt been critiques of his views from an economic perspective, and there have probably been plenty of people criticizing Mises for not taking empirical observations into account in his economic models. But has anyone seriously examined whether praxeology is a viable and rigorous synthetic a priori theory, and whether we can really make substantive conclusions from such a meager axiom as "Humans act."?

I would also like to know whether anyone has made an attempt to render praxeological reasoning in symbolic form. Previous theories that were claimed to be synthetic a priori later came to be regarded as analytic. Kant thought that Euclidean geometry was synthetic, but then the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and the advent of rigorous formalizations of Euclid's axioms by Tarski and Hilbert led most philosophers to conclude that it was analytic. Similarly, Kant dubbed arithmetic synthetic, but then Frege made a compelling case that it was analytic by providing logical foundations to the subject (with the help of Peano's axiomatization of arithmetic). So an attempt to write out symbolically the reasoning of Mises (and his successors like Rothbard) might either reveal that it's totally incoherent or lacking in rigor, or it might remove the synthetic quality