For over two centuries, the scientific study of human beings has been given various names, often followed by the word “science”: moral, human, humanistic, social, and cultural. Other suggested names have been the science of human action, or just the humanities.
None of these terms should be confused with academic departments in universities or the courses they teach, as these departments and courses usually represent more specific subjects of study determined by current fashion.
My goal in this post is to define and delimit the epistemological meaning of the fundamental science of homo sapiens and to differentiate it from two terms in use today: social science and praxeology, the science of human action.
To provide a broader context, here is a footnote from my book In Defense of Advertising (162n44):
It has been said that there are three fundamental sciences: physics, biology, and psychology, or physical science, life science, and human science. (Philosophy is not a separate science; it is the science of all sciences, the foundation of them all.) I agree with this three-way distinction. Another way to describe the division is: (1) the sciences of inanimate matter; (2) the sciences of the life forms that possess a vegetative function of life or, in addition, the conscious function of sensation, or, still further, the conscious function of perception; and (3) the sciences of the life form that possesses, in addition to the vegetative functions and the conscious functions of sensation and perception, a volitional, conceptual consciousness.“Note that the sciences,” I go on, “are cumulative in the sense that principles of physics and chemistry and of the vegetative actions of life are used in the life science of human medicine in such specialties as biomedical engineering, molecular medicine, and cardiology” (cf. Binswanger, 4-16).
Physical sciences study inanimate matter; the life (or biological) sciences study living organisms, and the human sciences study human beings. The aim of the human sciences is to study and develop a theory of human nature as the rational animal that possesses a volitional, conceptual consciousness, which means one that exhibits the capacity to reason, not one that reasons automatically.
The focus of human science is on the motivation and behavior, primarily, of the individual and only secondarily, of the individual in a group. This makes psychology the basic, foundational field of study of the human sciences.
The term “social science” has been around since the eighteenth century but became dominant in the twentieth. It refers to the study of human beings in society and is a close synonym of “sociology,” a word coined by the collectivist philosopher Auguste Comte and defined as the science of society.
Comte also coined the word “positivism” as a post-Kantian approach to identifying “true reality,” which Kant said we cannot know, by restricting awareness to directly perceivable concretes, all else being empirically meaningless. In subsequent elaborations positivism came to mean that metaphysics, universals, objective facts and values, and, especially, truth, are all unknowable. All we can do is mimic the physical sciences in method and produce statistical probabilities.
The emphasis on “social,” not individual, human beings, and statistics as method, because it looks at groups to come up with averages and percentages, made this so-called science of human beings collectivist at root. “Society,” in other words, became the entity of study, not the individual.
Use of the word “social,” or the prefix “socio-,” proliferated to modify many disciplines and endeavors: social psychology, social engineering, social justice, sociobiology, socioeconomics, sociology of (physical) science, and so on. Because of this collectivization of human science, I refused in In Defense of Advertising to endorse the word “social” when writing about the “social” criticisms of advertising. “It is a misnomer,” I wrote:
to refer to these charges [against advertising] as “social” criticisms, for the term “social” implies that morality is essentially a social concept. It is not. Morality defines a code of values to guide each individual in his choices and actions. Hence, the quotation marks around “social” (34n12).Individualism and the individual are primary. Sigmund Freud, who described himself as a “liberal of the old school” (classical liberal), “was fully persuaded that individual and social psychology are impossible to separate” (Gay, 338; Independent Judgment and Introspection, 50n3). Not just impossible to separate, I would add, the individual is the starting point of analysis, proceeding later to the individual’s relation to and interaction with others in a group setting. Society is an assortment of individuals who are the primary entities.
The dispute over methods, or methodenstreit, of the nineteenth century involved Carl Menger of the Austrian School of economics and Gustave Schmoller of the German Historical School. Menger advocated a distinctively Aristotelian theory of universal principles and their application to individual human action. Schmoller rejected such an “essentialist” epistemology and advocated the positivist notions of collecting large quantities of historical data, especially statistics.
This dispute emphasized among the Austrian economists that economics was a narrower subject of a broader theory of human science. Ludwig von Mises, at first, accepted “sociology” as the parent discipline, but rejected its collectivist premises and followers. He settled on praxeology—a word not coined by him—to define a science of human action. Many of his followers today continue to base the foundation of economics on praxeology.*
From the first time I read Mises, I found his epistemology of praxeology thorough and intriguing, but not quite right in the sense that it did not seem to comply precisely with my understanding of Ayn Rand’s epistemology. My conclusion today is that Mises was so much caught up in German philosophy that, though he went a long way toward rejecting many of its irrational premises, he failed to remove all of the primacy-of-consciousness notions, most notable being his acceptance and use of Kant’s words “a priori categories.” Mises’ use of these terms, however, is more Aristotelian than Kantian, but that will have to be postponed to next month’s post.
The problem with a science of human action is that it lacks a theory of human nature. As a concept it tries to account for all human behavior in what amounts to a substitute for moral or practical philosophy without addressing or accepting the metaphysics—philosophical psychology—of a volitional consciousness (cf. Rand, 117, 133-34, and Long). Mises abundantly uses such terms as choice (caused by ideas), value judgments, and purposive behavior (of determining means by which to achieve ends), but does not explicitly endorse free will, leaving that issue to science as an unanswered problem—of determining the relation between our brains and consciousness.**
Praxeology as a concept also actually ignores ethics, because the science is said to be “formal” and “value-free,” yet the production of wealth as the aim of economics is hugely beneficial, i.e., a value, to human life. Further, praxeology does not recognize or accept human psychology as the basic, foundational human science. Indeed, Mises, using a positivist premise, relegates the psychological theory of human motivation and behavior to experimental psychology, a naturalistic psychology (or physical science), as he calls it, and the applied science of psychotherapy, which he prefers to call thymology, to history.***
This reveals the crucial error of praxeology, namely that it does not have a valid theory of universals to answer the irrationalism of the past two hundred years. Mises correctly recognizes that the epistemological problems of economics lie in the forms of irrationalism he was up against. These include polylogism (the theory of many logics, especially an attack on Aristotelian logic), historicism (the theory that history is determined by forces beyond human control, meaning the human sciences can only produce time-bound statistical generalities) and positivism, all three of which still plague us today.
Kant’s transcendental idealism told us reason is impotent to know reality.
Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, however, through her theory of abstraction as measurement omission, has given us a theory of universals grounded in reality. Conceptualization, properly understood and practiced, is what enables us to study and understand homo sapiens as the rational animal with a volitional consciousness, which enables us to study and understand human motivation and behavior as an individual and as a member of society.
Psychology, economics, political philosophy, and all of the applied human sciences follow without having to obsess continually over exact measurement or probabilities. More in next month’s post.
* The term “praxeology” was coined as early as 1882 from the Greek word praxis, meaning action or practice. See Hülsmann, Introduction to Epistemological Problems of Economics, xxii. This forty-seven page introduction is an excellent summary of Mises’ work.
** All we can know, says Mises, is that an acting person’s choices derive from “his individuality—the product of all that he has inherited at birth from his ancestors and of all that he himself has experienced up to the critical moment” of making a final choice, which sounds like determinism. Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, 58. See also Human Action, 46-47.
*** Thymology (Theory and History, chap. 12; Ultimate Foundation, chap. 2, section 8), like praxeology, was not coined by Mises. The term derives from the Greek word thumos, meaning soul or spirit, feeling or thought. Thymology is history in the sense that the psychotherapist must understand the patient’s concrete here-and-now thinking errors that are causing the unhappiness, as similarly the medical doctor must identify the specific ailment of a specific patient in order to recommend treatment. However, both psychotherapy and medicine rely on a vast store of previously learned universal concepts and principles that apply to these cases. Application is the epistemological process, an integral, deductive part of conceptualization and essential part of any applied science. Generalization is the prior, inductive component. “Thymology,” I submit, is not a necessary or helpful term, as applied psychology is the applied human science that psychotherapists practice, and basic or theoretical psychology is the inductive, conceptual science that is broad enough to include the experimental practitioners. Mises, as do I, rejects the pejorative term “literary psychology,” sometimes unjustly applied to Freud.
