Praxeological bad logic: Beginnings
Praxeology is, according to its supporters, the science of human action that uses deductive logic to reach its conclusions. According the most far-reaching claim of some of its adherents, praxeology permits a wide array of conclusions, in economics and other fields, from just a simple premise: that people act. (Some allow for certain other self-evident premises.) If this strikes you as nonsense, I agree. My sense of praxeology is that it consists largely of invalid arguments, forming a system that can fairly be described as crackpot.
Now, many praxeologists are not imbeciles, except in the sense that people who are generally capable of reason can be situationally imbecilic when seeking to promote an ideology. As a result, the bad logic of praxeology is not the kind that can be determined invalid at a glance. Rather, like bad arguments for the existence of God, praxeological arguments are frequently bad in sophisticated ways that are not immediately evident.
There is, of course, an easy way to see whether an argument follows the laws of logic: formalize it. Praxeologists tend to be pretty resistant to this. This makes it reasonable for those who value their time (and as praxeologists point out, everybody values their time) to ignore the entire enterprise.
As I am interested in libertarianism and in reason, I will not ignore praxeology, but I will rather do (or at least start doing) what some libertarian nudniks on the internet insist is necessary to understand praxeology: read two books totaling about 2500 pages. I anticipate finding numerous reasoning errors in these books, Mises’ Human Action and Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State. My goal is to write these up in order to expose more clearly the errors of reasoning in the main praxeological texts.
Human Action: The first bad argument
I am starting by going through Human Action. I’m using the scholar’s edition that I found here. I anticipate supplementing my reading with this study guide, which looks pretty good.
The book begins with a lot of methodology talk, which I found pretty tedious and sometimes veridissimilar (= “having the appearance of falsity”) but relatively free of logically objectionable arguments. His methodological approach looks basically correct to me.
The first instance of bad praxeological reasoning that I detected occurs on page 77 of the edition I’m using (page 114 in the PDF file). Mises is speaking of what he calls “Marxian polylogism”, which according to Mises “asserts that the logical structure of mind is different with the members of various social classes,” kind of like how Nazi “racial polylogism” separated good, Aryan science from bad, Jewish science. Mises attributes Marxian polylogism to Marxism generally and, without any references, to Marx and Engels particularly, explaining that Marx’s strategy for dealing with the fact that the 19th century economists proved conclusively that socialism could never work was to deny the validity of the economists’ logic based on their class background.
Whether Mises is correct on this historical issue, or so clownishly bad faith and delusional that the name “Mises Caucus” starts to make sense, is beside the point, since here we are just exploring the validity of arguments.
In a section that he titled “The Praxeological Aspect of Polylogism,” Mises makes an argument concerning ideology, as the term is defined by Marxists (again, there is no reference, so we are taking Mises’ word for it). Mises’ Marxists define ideology as
a doctrine which, although erroneous from the point of view of the correct logic of the proletarians, is beneficial to the selfish interests of the class which has developed it.
In other words, it is a doctrine that is false but useful to those who espouse it. Mises then argues that there can be no such thing as an ideology. Mises writes:
For the sake of argument we may admit that every effort to attain truth is motivated by considerations of its practical utilization for the attainment of some end. But this does not answer the question why an “ideological” — i.e., a false — theory should render better service than a correct one. The fact that the practical application of a theory results in the outcome predicted on the basis of this theory is universally considered a confirmation of its correctness. It is paradoxical to assert that a vicious theory is from any point of view more useful than a correct one.
Men use firearms. In order to improve these weapons they developed the science of ballistics. But, of course, precisely because they were eager to hunt game and to kill one another, a correct ballistics. A merely “ideological” ballistics would not have been of any use.
Clearly, Mises believes that an ideological theory can never be more useful than a correct one. It seems to me that his argument is as follows :
- The correctness of a theory is established by the accuracy of its predictions. Therefore,
- An ideological (and therefore incorrect) theory cannot be more useful than a correct one.
This is logically invalid, as the conclusion does not follow from the premise, which says nothing about usefulness. The following would be valid:
- A correct theory always makes accurate predictions.
- An incorrect theory makes at least one inaccurate prediction.
- A theory that makes always makes accurate predictions is always more useful, to any individual, than a theory that does not always make accurate predictions.
- Every ideological theory is incorrect. Therefore,
- A correct theory is always more useful, to any individual, than an ideological theory.
Of course, any Marxist who fits Mises’ description would dispute the premise in 3. Mises’ ballistics example is persuasive as to ballistics, and we can grant its truth for the sake of argument, but it would not be persuasive when one’s emotions are bound up in a theory, such as happens in ideologically-infused social sciences like politics or economics, or informal reasoning about one’s personal life and relationships.
It is easy to imagine the benefit to an oppressive agent of the state of believing that they are not oppressive, to a parasitic capitalist of believing that she is not a parasite, and to me of believing that my wife left me because she is a treacherous, ungrateful whore. In each of these cases, the correct theory is much less flattering to the believer than the ideology, resulting in psychological payoffs to the ideology that may make it preferable to the truth. Mises’ error is arguing from an example to the universal.
This is not the meat of the book; it’s still the throat-clearing that precedes Mises’ substantive arguments about economics. But it’s a good example of the kind of careless reasoning that I have come to associate with praxeology. So for now, it’s Mises 0, Logic 1.
