Non-acting men form an empty set.
A non-acting man that reacts solely by reflex is unconceivable. To choose not to think is an action. To choose not to move is an action. To attempt to resemble in some way plantlife is an action.

There is nothing wrong with your argument, I’m pointing out that it is vacuous. It is a noninteresting statement on the empty set.

What on earth are you people rabbitting on about.? You would never get the plumbing done if the plumber went about things in this way. Arbitraily bringing out the microscope for every little proposition until it comes time to put your own ideas forward. Tch Tch. And total suckers for the endless silliness of the bulk of the philosophers?!!!!!!!!!!! You know for some of us this sort of stuff is really really old hat.

Public policy is actually an incredibly prosaic subject as I think Mises pointed out somewhere. In other words its just like plumbing or brick-layiing. At least in terms of the initial methodology. And you build up your various assumptions in a commonsense sort of way.

Leftism can be seen as a secular/religious cult. Now what happens when these cultists invade philosophy. They have to develop certain schools of thought which undermine sensible thinking or how can they hope to get their idiotic ideas off the ground?

Look at the posts of CMB and Unisous. The poor buggers can’t even lay down the simplist and soundest building block imagineable!!!!!

OK. So if a Man is dead, asleep, Joed out in front of the tube, and so forth perhaps there is some quibbling as to whether he is acting or not. But if the proposition that ‘Man Acts” is not a solid one from which one can first explore barter and then trace the development of money and then on to more complex economic thinking……….

If these philosophy boffins cannot even get THAT right then what good are they for?

And if you followed these people round you would find that their excessive pickiness (stripped of the jargon that’s all it is) is something they just pull out of the bag for the purposes of obstruction. Because not only could they not get the plumbing done using this methodology. They couldn’t so much as comb their hair, put their pants on, and make it to work on time.

Most of this advanced high-powered quibbling will likely fall away if we fully work through the insights of Venn Diagrams and Fuzzy Logic.

Whereas the proposition that “Man Acts” is about as close to an Axiom as one can get, in general looking at these things from a Venn Diagram/Fuzzy Logic perspective would have us downgrading most axioms to near-axioms. And most allegedly empty sets into sets with not a whole lot in them relatively speaking.

If we take this perspective we find that we can deep-six a great deal of this under-graduate philosophy-boffin mucking about.

Traditional logic tends to lend itself to a sort of “digital brain disorder”. Because it emphasises True/False Yes/No On/off. A is A type of thinking. And because the world isn’t quite like that you get all this dogmatism and quibbling on the margins.

Unisonus,

It is synthetic a priori because through reflection for any man to deny that he acts is a performative contradiction.
No observation is necessary. The idea that observation could have occured does not change the nature of a priori truths. To observe that 2 apples and 2 apples makes 4 apples does not change the a priori nature of mathematics.

Given the nature of man as a thinking, rational being it is necessary that man implies action.

Thought implies action, and choosing between options implies action.

GMB

You dont know how close to the truth you are. I recognize Unisonus’ name from philosophyforums.com. I used to peruse there from time to time. I’ll never forget an argument in the math section of that site. Someone claimed it is apodictically true that 2+2=4. Some other forum member denied this truth, since he could conceivably create a different number system in which its ’2′ would not be the same as our system’s ’2′. Thus, it isnt true that 2+2 always equals 4. The poster would not budge from this bozo assertion and many defended him. Unisonus was not part of that but that sort of argument is typical of that philosophy site (at least it was when I stopped visiting about 1-2 years ago).

Edwards,

No one said that the proposition “men act” is false. So why in the world are you trying to convince me that it isn’t? We were talking about how the proposition is known, not if it is known.

Dan,

—It is synthetic a priori because through reflection for any man to deny that he acts is a performative contradiction.—

I can know that I act via reflection; but I cannot know that “men act” via reflection. First I must come to realize that I am a man, and then I must come to realize men (in general) act. This requires experience.

About logic: The use of logic is essential to any kind of intellectual pursuit. And it’s pretty obvious that Rand’s work is to analytic philosophy as pro-wrestling is to wrestling (I took that from someone, but I can’t recall who).

“No one said that the proposition “men act” is false.”

Actually that is a lie and also a confession of sorts. Since people are in fact disputing this. And also if you agreed with it we can see that your entire purpose on this particular thread is to get in the way.

Unisonus,

To pile on you even further, you stated:
“I can know that I act via reflection; but I cannot know that “men act” via reflection. First I must come to realize that I am a man, and then I must come to realize men (in general) act. This requires experience.”

If you, qua man, can know that you act via reflection, then surely all other men can know this via reflection. Thus the generized statement “men act” is known a priori, and it is irrefutable. Unless of course polylogism is going to come into this? < >

“—And what was it that conjured up all you incredibly naieve philosophy bully-boys.—
Above the text box, it it says, “Post an intelligent and civil comment.” Your posts are neither.”

Why CMB? I think my comments are very intelligent. Very worldly. Its important that someone points out to the kids when they have been taken in by this sophistry. You might review your own comments……. (jerk).

Paul Edwards.

“To which I answer, yes: a dead man, a brain dead man, or a man in a coma would fit with your scenario. No one else would. And for purposes of the study of praxeology, these men would not be part of the study because they do not act and do not influence the environment for their own purposes as all other men do.”

Yeah that’s the point isn’t it. Even if people can muck about with categories and definitional destinctions for days on end exceptions to the idea that ‘Man Acts’ are not relevant to economics to the extent that such exceptions exist at all.

GMB,

For a while i thought maybe you were being a little hard on poor old unisonus. My mistake. You had his number alright.

Dan,

Sorry . All you can deduce from “I act” is that any being exactly like you acts. But to assume that all men are exactly like you is a flagrant case of petito principi; a fallacy – an invalid argument – and, as Paul Edwards has admitted- false

“Therefore to say that theory starts with hypothetical principles is wrong. Theory starts with deductive axioms (again, independent of reality) which then produce testable hypotheses (notice, that’s the second step) which we can then TRY to test against empirical facts in the real world, bearing in mind Goethe’s warning that “every fact is already a theory”.”

This is all wrong. And historically inaccurate. Aves tell me one theory which started in this way. I can only think of the invention of symbolic logic by Betrand Russel and some other guy. But its not really even a theory so much as an invention.

Theories start pretty much how the person you responded to said they did.

Paul Edwards writes “…the laws of praxeology are not refuted when a mother disregards financial gain…I think we simply agree and so the confusion is my fault.”

First let me commend Paul for suggesting that he may have been mistaken. I find it rare and valuable for someone to admit an intellectual error, and further believe that what we need is less a matter of people being right, than of allowing that they may have been wrong. That being said, it may well be that I hadn’t clarified my main point. It is that *there is a difference between viewing the a priori as necessary categories of thought, and how well they model given events*. Thus praxeology is known to be true a priori, while its detractors think they are refuting it by examples of how it can incorrectly model certain events.

I think you are being extremely nit-picky. By your critique, not even the tools of reason for men are logically prior to experience. All you must do is take the phrase ‘men use reason’ and then state it is not known a priori because you dont know anything about other men, even that they exist.

But I think that it is ridiculous to imply…no not imply, you are saying, so it is ridiculous to say that the tools of reason are not logically prior to man’s experience. Like reason, action is unanalyzable. It must be presupposed to be proven. The only ‘proof’ of reason and action is that to attempt to disprove their existence results in contradiction. Man may not question reason and action without presupposing them and thus without contradiction. Thus, we cannot disprove them, they simply exist. And they are logically prior to experience. You think that is fallacious, I think you are applying something to analytics that cannot be applied.

Unisonus,

What is the nature of this statement?

“It’s simply not possible to deductively move from specific to general propositions.”

Is this a general proposition? Is it necessarily true? Did you arrive at it deductively from your intellectual apprehension of the nature of general propositions and didn’t you grasp this via thinking about a few instances where it might apply and see its general truth? It is necessary you thought you did because you know you couldn’t have experienced infinite empirical validations of it. And yet, your proposition, if true, is a counter-example to its own thesis. Again, we have a performative contradiction. Your statement cannot be true.

What all of this comes to show is that, 1) yes, (paraphrasing) “people do stuff”. So what? and 2) “Austrians” (the members of that scool of economics, not the folks from Austria) are a tragic example of how you can have an unassailable technology of reasoning and still be wrong about quite a lot of things.

Empiricism (i.e, actually looking at the world) and honesty (i.e, not redefining common terms like logic, purpose and benefit until they mean whatever you find convenient) are still better at getting to some usefull form of truth (well, for writing a PhD thesis in economics any crap will do – that’s for sure) than some pseudo-logic “derivation” of propositions from trivial platitudes.

Unisonus,

To say that “man acts” is not necessarily to say that every man is acting all the time, or that every man is even capable of action (see the aforementioned examples).

To deny that “man acts” is a performative contradiction. Despite your talk about this not being a “proper contradiction”, it is in fact a contradiction of sorts, as the action of saying such contradicts the alleged truth of what is being said.

If I say, “men do not act”, I am contradiction myself, because I, a man, am engaging in the action of saying such. Your point out that it does not follow from this that all men act; that may be true, but so what? Non-actors (e.g., the dead, the comatose, the brain-dead) are not a legitimate subject of praxeology. We could generalize the statement “man acts” to be “actors act”, in which case it would cover any conceivable “extra-terrestrials” of intelligence.

As regards praxeology, the only thing that we need empricism for is to find out to whom (or to what) the discipline applies.

foobar,

From the simple proposition that “man acts” (or as you put it, “people do stuff”), we can derive a number of important insights into praxeology, such as means-ends, time-preference, marginal utility, etc; see MES.

Also, all so-called empricism rests on — in spite of itself — statements that empricists assume to be axiomatic (although most of these implicitly assumed axioms are false, as they are self-contradictory).

This is so nonsensical. Undergraduates learn all the various ways things can be categorised in terms of modern philosophical jargon. And then they just get in the way.

The great success of fuzzy logic tells us that we can come to meaningful solutions without this hard-edged block-building from axioms up. People take this pseudo-reasoning seriously in error. Its really just a meaningless pastime.

The thought that all your assumptions need to be axiomatic leads to endless redefining of terms in order to avoid being caught out with the odd exception. So in the end the wording gets emphasised over the meaning behind the words. No stable theory in human history has been developed in this digitised: True/false on/off yes/no way.

We can see this by analogy from the failure of programming giant elegant software programs for (lets say) a factory process. Always you end up having to break the process up into blocks lest errors multiply.

The sort of reasoning that parallels fuzzy logic by contrast is forgiving of changing circumstances and economical in its usage.

(Whereas some particularly gullible phiosophy boffins are yet to get past the first sentence of the first line in Man Economy And State. Far from economical. Yet they are necessarily hypocritical and arbitrary at what they choose to devote this digitised nit-picking too.)

Much of this endless philosopy talk ought to be obsolete by now as a consequence of the insights that fuzzy logic brings. That is for those who weren’t already hep to the silliness of all this verbiage. Human reason was never the same as plodding logic using discrete meanings or quanta.

Fuzzy logic and for that matter Venn diagrams model far better the natural world and the circumstances that we face.