KOL156 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 4: Epistemology, Methodology, and Dualism; Knowledge, Certainty, Logical Positivism”

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 156. This is the fourth of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. Lecture 4: EPISTEMOLOGY, METHODOLOGY AND DUALISM; KNOWLEDGE, CERTAINTY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 4: Epistemology, Methodology, and Dualism; Knowledge, Certainty, Logical Positivism Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 1, 2011 00:00:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … and methodology and epistemological dualism, the Austrian approach.  So if you recall, last time we talked about argumentation ethics and libertarian rights, and as I said, the midterm will be posted shortly.  And some of you may be interested in the IP talk I gave at Mises University on Wednesday, which I have a link to here on the slide two.   And Hoppe also gave two – he has several lectures, but two of them are particularly relevant for tonight actually.  The science of human action and praxeology as a method of economics are both great.  They cover a lot of what we’re going to talk about tonight, actually. 00:00:42 00:00:47 So we’re going to talk epistemology and methodology and dualism, which are the Misesian approach, and related aspects of logical positivism and knowledge and certainty.  And I’m just going to outline here the readings I had suggested that you read with certain pages of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Hoppe’s pamphlet, “Economic Science and the Austrian Method.”  I have my ragged old copy here from years in the past.  I don’t know what the current version looks like, notes, so this is my favorite copy, and another paper from EEPP and another journal article on rationalism. 00:01:25 And then there are some supplemental readings if you want to go further.  But we’re going to try to cover as much as we can here.  So let’s start off talking about what we’re talking – the subject of our lecture is the economic science and the methodology appropriate economic science or the discipline of economics.  So what do we mean by the word science?  I mean when I was in college and growing up, the word science to me meant what most people think of it now as technology, gadgets, gizmos, physics, theories, chemistry, things like this, things that are testable. 00:02:01 This is actually sort of a fairly new twist on the word science as caused by the rise of positivism and empiricism and what we might call scientism.  It’s a much older term of course.  You see the little diagram on the right of some spooky government agency, the Information Awareness Office, but they have the all-knowing eye on top of the pyramid looking at the earth and the motto, Scientia est Potentia, which means knowledge is power.  So you see the word science there, meaning just general knowledge.  In the Lionel Robbins, famous sort of proto-Austrian economist, at one point, wrote a treatise in 1932, very influential treatise until the ‘50s probably called “The Nature and Significance of Economic Science.” 00:02:57 So you can see the word science is being used for even economics, although nowadays, most people would restrict it to the technical or natural sciences.  Back in the US Constitution in 1789, in the clause authorizing patent and copyright, look at how the words are arranged here.  This is the power granted to Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries. 00:03:30 So I’ve got in red here the words that pair together: science, authors, and writings.  Now, most people would think science has to do with inventions and inventors and discoveries.  But no, that’s the useful arts like artisan crafts, machines, things like this.  Science meant just the general field of human knowledge, and in particular here, it was referring to artistic creatings of authors like novels or paintings, things like this.  So the word science is a general broad term. 00:04:07 Now, we’re going to talk today about epistemology and the nature of economic science.  Epistemology – I don’t want to be too basic here, but for those who don’t know, epistemology is a term that used to confuse me when I started reading it in high school and college.  It mystified me.  But basically, it’s just the study of knowledge.  It’s a branch of philosophy, and it’s what Hoppe actually specialized in, which is one reason we’re bringing it up.  Now, as Hoppe lays it out, the modern concept of science that I just explained as a narrow idea of science as being technical and causal knowledge, the natural sciences like physics and chemistry, is a fairly modern occurrence. 00:04:56 It started in maybe the 1950s with the rise Popper’s thought and empiricism.  Okay, so as Hoppe lays it out, you can think of the big battles or the big divisions in philosophy and epistemology as the rationalist versus the skeptics.  Okay, the rationalists were Plato, Kant, and now Mises you can think of some of the big ones there.  The skeptics or the empiricists were Hume and now Popper.  You can think of him as a good representative. 00:05:32 Now, Hayek and Robbins are interesting, Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins.  Well, Hayek was a student of Mises and was very much influenced by him early on.  And Lionel Robbins, also in the 1932 treatise I mentioned, was extremely influenced by Mises’ epistemology.  But they were colleagues of Karl Popper, the sort of arch-positivist, at London School of Economics, LSE.  And so over time, they actually came to adopt some of Popper’s methodology and epistemology and to sort of veer away from the museum type of framework. 00:06:13 We’ll go into some detail in a few minutes.  But the basic idea here – by the way, I’ve got like 55 slides.  There’s a lot of material here.  I don’t think we’ll get to all of it.  I might lecture most of the class and try to cover as much as we can, and if I don’t finish next class in the first, say, 30 minutes, we’ll try to finish up and then get to the economic stuff next time. 00:06:33 00:06:36 Okay, good.  I will be very basic then, Jock.  That’s fine.  By the way, I am collecting questions to send to Hoppe.  I talked to him last week about this.  He is on board.  So I have some questions to send to him, and if anyone has any more questions for Hoppe that we don’t address, say, between – by the end of next class, go ahead and send them to me.  And I’ll submit them to Hans for any answers he wants to give, and then we’ll go over them on the sixth and last class. 00:07:04 Anyway, so the basic idea of the skeptics, or the empiricists, was they believe that all propositions or statements of knowledge can be divided into two types.  They’re either analytical, or they’re empirical.  So this is their basic view.  Analytic means a statement like all bachelors are married.  It’s basically a statement that’s almost true by definition.  So they think that analytic statements say nothing really real about the world.  They don’t give you any new information.  They’re just manipulation of formal rules. 00:07:44 Or the statement can be empirical.  But if it’s empirical, or another word for that is synthetic—you’ll sometimes hear analytic and synthetic used—empirical statements say something about the way the world is.  But it only says things about the way the world happens to be, and the only way we can find out these things is to use the scientific method.  That’s to test or to try to falsify these statements.  So they view any statement that is not something that’s testable as unscientific.  Okay, so this is the basic view of the empiricists, influenced heavily by Hume and lately by Popper. 00:08:24 Now, there are several words you’ll see used a lot.  It took me a while to sort of grapple with all these, and you don’t really need to know a lot of the nuances and distinctions because they’re not always used carefully by critics of these views or by the adherence of these views themselves.  But most of them are related to each other and are sometimes used as synonyms for each other.  And I will use some of them as synonyms in this lecture tonight. 00:08:49 So let’s start off with empiricism.  So empiricism – the idea is the only testable or falsifiable statements are meaningful or scientific.  You say testable or falsifiable because the older view was that you had to be able to formulate a statement so you could test it.  So like you could say I propose that there is a relationship between mass and gravitational attraction of a certain equation.  And therefore, let’s go test it with an experiment and see if the results confirm my theory. 00:09:26 Now, Popper put a different twist on this, and he said, well, you’re not really confirming it.  You’re trying to falsify it, so basically, every bit of scientific knowledge, according to the empiricists is always contingent, never, ever finally certain, and always subject to falsifications.  So all you can say is that, so far, we haven’t falsified this theory.  Now, one thing to note: Karl Popper called his own theory critical rationalism.  Hoppe’s view, and I agree with him, is that this is a misnomer.  It’s a mislabel.  He wasn’t a rationalist in the sense of Kant. 00:10:04 He was a logical positivist and an empiricist.  It’s sort of like the word liberal, how the word liberal has been hijacked in the United States by the left, by the democrats, in the last 100 or so years so that the word liberal now means the opposite of what it used to mean and what it still means in Europe, which means to refer to sort of progressive, pro-property rights,