Realism and Abstraction in Economics: Aristotle and Mises versus Friedman, by Roderick T. Long ( Auburn University )3/29/2004
"(...) Without exploring the latter issue in detail, I wish to offer a hypothesis as to how Friedman’s misunderstanding of abstraction and his resistance to Mises’ methodological apriorism are related. I don’t think one is the cause of the other, but I do think the two have a common cause:
a failure to distinguish between the logical and the psychological.
Consider first Friedman’s critique of apriorism:
"That methodological approach, I think, has very negative influences. … [It] tends to make people intolerant. If you and I are both praxeologists, and we disagree about whether some proposition or statement is correct, how do we resolve that disagreement? We can yell, we can argue, we can try to find a logical flaw in one another’s thing, but in the end we have no way to resolve it except by fighting, by saying you’re wrong and I’m right."
Friedman obviously thinks that in a priori reasoning, as opposed to empirical science, there is no objective way of resolving disagreements.
But why does he believe this? Why is he so confident that trying to “to find a logical flaw in one another’s thing,” as Friedman puts it, is unlikely to resolve the matter? I can only conjecture that Friedman thinks of a priori reasoning as a subjective process of consulting the inner contents of one’s own mind, heeding the deliverances of some essentially private inner voice that no second person can check on. The empirical method, by contrast, appeals to publicly available evidence and so allows for objectivity. But to think about a priori reasoning in this way is precisely to confuse the psychological with the logical.
Let’s take a less controversial case of an a priori discipline: mathematics. If two mathematicians disagree about the results of a calculation, they don’t come to blows; nor do they consult a private source of revelation. Instead they “try to find a logical flaw in one another’s thing,” and presumably one of them will succeed – because logical relations are at least as “public” as empirical ones. Methodological apriorism makes no appeal to anybody’s private psychological states;
as David Gordon points out:
“When a proposition is claimed to be self-evident, this does not mean that one is appealing to a psychological experience of certainty in support of the proposition. To do so would precisely be not to claim that the proposition was self-evident, since its evidence here depends on something else – the psychological experience.”
In advocating methodological apriorism, Mises was not advocating reliance on private psychological experiences. After all, it was Mises who wrote: “There is no rational means available for either endorsing or rejecting a doctrine suggested by an inner voice.”
Instead he was advocating reliance on the publicly accessible standards of logical reasoning. For Mises it is apriorism that resolves the intractable debates among empiricists, and not vice versa, since one cannot choose among competing interpretations of data without appealing to abstract theory:
“Disagreements concerning the probative power of experience can be resolved only by reverting to the doctrines of the universally valid theory, which is independent of all experience."
Friedman is of course free to dispute the content of Mises’ aprioristic arguments; but the very fact that he can do so shows that Friedman’s criticism of their form is misguided. In treating praxeology as a subjective, publicly untestable method, Friedman commits the fallacy of psychologism: conflating logical relations with psychological ones.
(This charge of psychologism is incidentally no particular slight to Friedman’s acumen. Psychologism is one of the most persistent and seductive errors in philosophy; brilliant minds have erected entire systems on its treacherous foundations.)
The psychologism that explains Friedman’s misunderstanding of apriorism arguably also explains his misunderstanding of abstraction. Friedman’s failure to see the possibility of nonprecisive abstraction suggests that he has confused the act of thinking with its content.
When act nad content are confused, it becomes natural to assume that if something is absent from the act of thinking it must also be absent from the content of thinking – in which case all abstraction would naturally be seen as precisive. But to confuse the act of thinking with its content is precisely to confuse an inner psychological item with a logical one.(...)"
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