Mises and Kant (part two of a three-part series) (Go to part one)(part three)

Aristotle’s categories, detailed in his work called The Categories, are fundamental concepts of reality, such as entity, quality, action, etc.
 
Immanuel Kant, using some of those terms, describes categories as fundamental, innate concepts that prevent us from knowing true, noumenal reality. We can only know appearances, says Kant, called the phenomenal world. This creates the impossibility of perceiving “things-in-themselves,” which means concept formation is limited and cannot know concretes (Rickert 1; 2, chap. 5).
 
This is what makes reason impotent to know reality and in essence is Kant’s disastrous influence on later philosophy. It has confounded nearly all who have followed him, including economists such as Ludwig von Mises.
 
But let us go back to birth—of an infant. Perception, which is to say, knowledge of concretes, begins at birth. The infant cries when hungry and cries when having to eliminate. We know this because infants, after a short time out of the womb, will give us a cute smile when sated and when vacated. This is one of our (the infant’s) first perceptions of concretes.
 
Awareness of the concretes of reality is not, or rather should not be, a philosophical problem. We live and act in the world of concretes, which in fact are the so-called things in themselves. A theory of concept formation that incorporates concretes is what has been needed for hundreds of years. Ayn Rand, I submit, has provided this solution and the answer to the philosophical problem of universals (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology).
 
A child at around one or two, after learning some elementary words, begins to form and apply universal concepts, such as “ball,” “dog,” and “table.”
 
In briefest essence, the child, according to Rand’s theory of concept formation, observes differences and similarities in the world and focuses on the similarities of what we eventually call a ball, dog, or table. Similarities of, say, tables are abstracted from the concretes by omitting their measurable differences, then by integrating the similarities into a new mental entity called a concept. The mind is “so constituted as to be capable of this process,” to borrow a few words from Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 100a13), which means the child does not have to think about that particular process for it to happen.
 
The concept, using Rand’s metaphor, is like a file folder that includes all concrete, specific tables past, present, or future, observed or not. The (mental) omission of measurements gives us the essential distinguishing characteristic and the nature of the concept as universal. A word labels it and its definition summarizes its meaning, tying it to the general category from which it was differentiated, and to all of those observed and unobserved concretes, its referents “out there” in reality.
 
This is the inductive process of concept formation. Application is the deductive process of recognizing an object initially unfamiliar to us and identifying it as an instance, a concrete, of the concept table.
 
Now let us see what we can say about some of Mises’ confusions caused by German, especially Kantian, philosophy.
 
 
1. A priori categories and the logical structure of the human mind (Human Action, chap. 1 & 2). If by “logical structure of the human mind,” Mises means that consciousness has an active nature, or identity, then he is correct, but Mises says that such categories as causality and human action are innate, prior to experience like, allegedly, mathematics and logic. Therefore, deduction is the fundamental method of praxeology (human science).
 
The a priori/a posteriori distinction, however, is a false dichotomy. All cognition is cognition of reality. If our concepts are true—correctly recognizing or identifying reality—then the most abstract concepts, such as the law of non-contradiction, integral calculus, causality, human action, and the law of supply and demand, are all derived from reality and therefore are empirical. The chain of abstractions required to arrive at these concepts may be extensive, but if true, will be anchored in the perceptual world. In the same way that “human-made object” is anchored in the perceptual world, derived initially from “tables,” “chairs,” and “beds,” and connected to the abstraction from abstraction “furniture,” and still further connected to the broader abstraction of the human made, all the different categories and subcategories of objects that humans create. This last notion of a broader concept becomes a big file folder holding all human-made objects.
 
Mises does not seem to have a notion of abstractions from abstractions, only directly perceivable concretes (an apparent influence from positivism) and the innate categories from which all of economics is supposedly deduced. Indeed, economics is a highly deductive science of application, but its basic concepts and laws are empirically and inductively derived from experience. The concept of human action is not a self-evident axiom, as Mises asserts. Action is an attribute of all living organisms, human action of human beings.
 
 
2. More on the logical structure of the human mind (Human Action, 35).
 
Mises writes, “The human mind is not a tabula rasa on which the external events write their own history.” True. Reality does not write on our minds. We actively identify it.
 
“[The mind] is equipped with a set of tools for grasping reality.” True. We have tools, such as perception, conceptualization, evaluation, etc. They are mental processes that we have the innate capacity or potential to perform. And they constitute the nature or identity of consciousness. But they are not content. Tabula rasa means there is no content in our minds at birth.
 
“Man acquired these tools, i.e., the logical structure of his mind, in the course of his evolution from an amoeba to his present state.” True. “But these tools” Mises continues, “are logically prior to any experience.” They are built-in from birth, yes, and we use them, as mental tools, to identify, not passively receive, reality and to guide our choices and actions.*
 
 
3. Does Mises believe we can know reality? Yes, and this, along with his methodological individualism and emphasis on the nature of things (money, capitalism), makes him Aristotelian, or as Hülsmann (liii) says, “a representative of Aristotelian realism.” In his last book on epistemological issues, Mises writes, “From the praxeological point of view it is not possible to question the real existence of matter, of physical objects and of the external world” (Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, 6).
 
In Human Action (36), though, he is more equivocal: “It is idle to ask whether things-in-themselves are different from what they appear to us, and whether there are worlds which we cannot divine and ideas which we cannot comprehend. These are problems beyond the scope of human cognition.”**
 
To clarify, nothing is unknowable—with emphasis on the -able—to the human mind. We do not live in a phenomenal world, unable to know the noumenal. We live in reality. And the appearance of a bent stick in water is a correct perception of what looks like, or rather appears to be, a bent stick, though with the use of our sense of touch and our knowledge of the causal effects of light in water, we know that the thing-in-itself stick is not bent. (See the form-object distinction in Rand, 279-82.)
 
 
To be continued next month. At this point, let me emphasize that my comments about Mises are not meant to be serious criticisms of his work. His accomplishments are vast and exemplary, even his partially mistaken epistemology, and especially considering his professional life where he was not offered a professorship in either Vienna or New York. In spite of this he taught and wrote tirelessly as a decades-long lone voice for laissez-faire capitalism. He needs to be read.
 
 
* Ayn Rand rejects the correspondence theory of truth and the misleading notion of “grasping” reality, a relic of naïve realism (though she does use the word in a metaphorical sense). Hers is an identification theory of truth. Our minds must actively focus on reality and form those concepts to identify correctly what is “out there.” The “out there” is what Rand would say is metaphysical, whereas the “in here,” the mental processing of our consciousness, is epistemological. The empirically derived and recognized principles of the applied science of logic, and especially the law of non-contradiction, are the tools by which we judge whether or not our mental content has correctly identified reality or contradicted it.
 
** This quotation apparently is Mises’ way of dismissing as unimportant Kant’s dilemma of appearance versus reality and of asserting his emphasis on analyzing the world in which we live—the Aristotelian world. A few pages later (Human Action, 39), he writes, “Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things,” and in Ultimate Foundation, 18, he says, “We see reality, not as it ‘is’ and may appear to a perfect being, but only as the quality of our mind and of our senses enables us to see it,” which I would take to mean reality with no Kantian distortions.

Read part one, part three.

How Do We Know Concretes?

To the layperson the title of this post must seem strange.
 
To academics, especially philosophers, the issue for a couple of millennia has been a big deal.
 
Of course we know concretes, says the layperson. We open our eyes and look out at the world—to see specific, individual, concrete people, animals, plants, and things. Reminiscing about our childhood, we can recall many specific, individual concrete events, ranging from games we played with relatives or next door friends to vacations taken with the family to the years spent in various schools.
 
And historians specialize in reporting the concretes of the past, do they not? Well, throughout the nineteenth century, and still today, historians, along with psychotherapists, medical doctors—and anyone working in applied fields—are said not to be true scientists. Only theoreticians are scientists. This is the dispute over theory versus history.*
 
To put the issue in more philosophical terms, we live in a world of particulars, yet with the exception of proper names our knowledge consists of universals.
 
Theories, science, and principles are all expressed in terms of universals. How do we use those universals to know particulars?
 
The problem arises from the theory sometimes called naïve realism—Aristotle’s improvement on Plato—that says universals are external to our minds, lodged, so to speak, in the things of reality, “out there,” but not in Plato’s separate realm.
 
Aristotle said that the form is embedded in the matter, form being his word for what in more modern terms we call essence or essential distinguishing characteristic. Matter, as in the stuff that something is made of, is what makes the thing a unique, concrete individual entity.
 
How can we know concretes when nearly all knowledge is universal? The glass on my desk, so the theory goes, contains “glassness,” the universal essence that we grasp and understand as a thing we drink liquids out of. The glass, or in my case, plastic, that the container is made of is its matter, and this includes its color and the number of ounces of liquid it can hold.
 
The matter of the glass, we could say, is that the glass on my desk is plastic, its color is blue, and it holds twelve ounces. Does that mean we have understood the concreteness of this glass?
 
No, say the critics of Aristotle’s common sense realism, because we are using universals in every word (“plastic, blue, twelve ounces”) to describe this individual concrete. We fail to get to “the thing in itself” (the thing as it really is, its identity), a problem that led John Locke, in exasperation, to conclude that the individuality of a thing is “something I know not what.” Further problems led David Hume to fail to find a “necessary connection” between cause and effect, heading us down the road to Immanuel Kant who said we can never know true, noumenal reality (where the “thing in itself” is presumed to reside).
 
And that is where we are today—reality is unknowable, concepts are arbitrary, and nothing is universal—with bad consequences in ethics and politics: values are subjective and there is no objectively valid, justifiable political or economic system.
 
Thomas Hobbes said we need a strong “public sword” to keep the peace among warring groups, each with its own arbitrary values, but today’s postmoderns want to crush any group with different values, especially those who advocate capitalism.
 
In other words, dictatorship follows from philosophy’s failure to solve the so-called problem of universals.
 
But let’s go back to our layperson who looks out at the world and sees a myriad of concrete things and their attributes. Although such a layperson may still think in Aristotle’s realist tradition by saying, “I just look and see glassness in the glass,” the conclusion is not correct, because there is in fact no essence of glassness in the thing out there. The layperson’s mind is doing more than he or she thinks.
 
What Aristotle called abstraction—mentally separating the form from its matter—is a more complicated process than he knew.
 
Concept formation, or conceptualization, is the human being’s method of turning percepts into universal concepts. How does this occur?
 
All knowledge begins at birth with perception, by observing concrete particulars. Later, when we begin to talk, we learn to form concepts, which become our universals.
 
Ayn Rand’s theory (ch. 1 and 2) holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what’s “out there,” the essences and concepts are objective, in an epistemological sense, not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
The process proceeds as follows. We perceive many similarities and differences among the things of the world. When we focus on one group of similar things that are somewhat similar to, but also different from, another group, we have isolated something we want to identify with a concept and word.
 
To form the concept, we focus on the characteristic(s) that explains and causes most of the others, then omit its measurements. Measurement omission in the process of abstraction is what enables us to identify the essence of the concept.
 
Using Rand’s example of forming the concept “table,” we isolate (from chairs and beds) those objects that have flat surfaces and are designed to hold smaller objects. Individual, concrete tables differ according to their measurements, but the measurements of their height, length, width, color, oval vs. rectangular top, etc., are omitted to make the concept of “tableness.”
 
The omitted measurements are still there, in reality and in the concept formation process, but they are not used (or necessary) to form the concept. Identifying that tables are flat and hold other objects is all we need to know to distinguish tables from chairs and beds and to give us the essence or essential distinguishing characteristic of tableness. Particular height, width, weight, color, shape of top, etc., are left out. A word and definition are finally assigned to complete the process of concept formation.
 
All the varying aspects of each entity in the world, including the varying measurements of all its qualities, and including its location and time of existence, are what give each entity its unique individual, concrete identity.
 
How do we know the entity as a concrete? To say it one more time, initially through perception.
 
We then identify it with a concept and word. Then, our ever expanding accumulation of concepts—our increasing knowledge—enables us to know and describe the concretes in their extensive variety, their attributes and actions and their myriad differences according to their varying measurements.
 
Assuming our concepts accurately describe the concretes they represent, that is, their referents out there in reality, and are not detached or floating, we have objective knowledge.
 
And that objective knowledge can be theory or history, basic science or applied science, general knowledge or personal knowledge. In all cases, it is knowledge of the concretes of reality.
 
Our minds are not “mirrors of nature,” as critics of “naïve” Aristotelian realism often say. They are active processors of it. Rand’s recognition of the mind’s active nature and her incorporation of it into her theory provides a major improvement on and defense of Aristotle’s epistemology.
 
We might, although she may not like it, even call Ayn Rand’s theory a “mature” realism about knowledge.
 
 
* Ludwig von Mises clarified the issue by rejecting the Hegelian-Marxist view that there are laws of history. Rather, Mises recognized that there is a valid science of individual historical events using the theories of basic sciences, especially psychology and economics, to understand and describe those events. Psychotherapists and medical doctors, in addition, use the theory of basic sciences to identify and treat their patients’ problems, which to the therapist and doctor are de facto historical events. This is called applied science.

Independence and Certainty

In our age of post-Kantian skepticism and relativism, it follows, according to the skeptics and relativists, that anyone claiming epistemological or ethical certainty is either a deluded fundamentalist or a wannabe or actual dictator.

Inquisitors and jihadis are certain of their convictions and maim and kill those who do not agree with them. Hitler was certain and viciously imposed his will on his own citizens and the world and, of course, the Jewish people. The implication is that Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers are selfish, independent personalities.

The argument often does not go this far, though it is implied, and some, including Holocaust scholars, have said as much.* After all, this train of thought continues, no one is omniscient, and because of our inherent fallibility, we must allow freedom of speech. This is what makes a society free.

Lack of omniscience means inability to be certain, which means we must invite and relish criticism to clarify our thoughts, and perhaps gradually get closer and closer to the truth, though absolute truth can never be attained.

This is what logical positivism and its offspring have taught us. Claims of certainty are dangerous. We have to talk things over and aim for consensus, sometimes through voting. This in essence is the epistemological justification of democracy.**

In other words, anyone who believes in absolutes believes in absolute authority. The independent personality is one who asserts facts as absolutely true, and that is what is dangerous.

So does this mean the boy in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes should request a vote before speaking up, assuming the emperor is tolerant of critics(!)? In addition to the self-contradictions of skepticism and relativism, this question is a reductio ad absurdum.***

It does not follow from human fallibility that absolute certainty is authoritarian or that strong, independent personalities are actual or wannabe dictators. Nor is the argument from fallibility the fundamental defense of freedom of speech and the free society.

In a single sentence, the answer to the issue is a sound, objective theory of universals that allows the identification of sound, objective values, which in turn defines social relationships in terms of individual rights, that is, freedoms to take action without coercion, including the freedom to express oneself on one’s own property or on that of someone else with whom one has contracted to make that expression.

Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, and democracy, if it is not to be a form of dictatorship—democracy, remember, killed Socrates—presupposes and is restrained by all individual rights, which therefore means democracy in a free society is demoted to the relatively minor function of selecting our leaders, along with other non-rights-violating details.

Democracy is not the arbiter of truth (or “approximate” truth) or of ethical or legal behavior.

The sound theory of universals is Ayn Rand’s (1; Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). It is a theory based on the contextual nature of knowledge that allows certain truth to be asserted as absolute within a specified context. Because knowledge grows over time, adjustments to earlier absolute certainties may have to be made, as Newton’s theories were adjusted by Einstein’s.

Incidentally, something over the years must have been right, true, and certain about Newton’s and Einstein’s ideas, because in the use of both theories, spaceships have gone to the moon and back.

Truth and certainty—by peaceful, independent-minded, non-authoritarian scientists—do seem possible.

Yes, we are fallible and not omniscient, which means we must submit our expressions to evaluation and criticism and be prepared to defend them, but this is not a justification of freedom of speech.

In order to survive and flourish, humans must exercise their inborn, volitional capacity to reason. Because this exercise of reason is not activated by our genes or environment (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18), we must be left free to choose—that is, it is right or moral for us to be free from the coercion of others, especially the government—to allow each of us as individuals to generate and sustain action to achieve our chosen values. Trade is our means of social cooperation.

The source and justification of individual rights is our nature as rational beings. It is right and moral to be free of any initiation against us of the use of physical force.

Thus, whatever we say or write, either on our own property or on that of the others cooperating with us, is, at least sometimes, an assertion of truth and certainty. It is right and moral for us to make these assertions, first, because our freedom of expression is consonant with and required by our human nature and, second, because our speech, writing, and expressions derive from our rights to life, liberty and property.

Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers of the world, in contrast, do also make assertions of truth and certainty, but they back up their assertions with a gun. Their expressions are not open to evaluation and criticism because they tolerate no disagreement.

They are the authoritarians, the dictators, who at root, as Stanton Samenow demonstrates, are criminal personalities. As liars and cheaters, they are not the least bit interested in perceiving and asserting facts as facts. They most certainly are not independent personalities; they are among the worst of the dependent.

Brandishing and using guns, as they do, is anathema to our rational nature. Their goals and accomplishments are to silence our reason. Their “truth” and “certainty” lead to wanton destruction of humankind and civilization.

Talking and voting does not make any individual more or less independent, and it is not the means of preventing another Holocaust. Lack of certainty may indicate insecurity or insufficient knowledge to make a decision with confidence.

To link certainty to dictatorship is the red herring of all red herrings, brought to us by post-Kantian agnosticism, both in epistemology and ethics.

It is time to restore certainty to its proper place in knowledge and values.


* Years ago, I heard a Holocaust scholar say that the Nazis were certain of their convictions; therefore, it is good that we not be.

** The argument is John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian defense of free speech, restated in Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Rauch in 1993 was responding to an early wave of censorship by political correctness.

*** Here are the self-contradictions: skeptics assert as an absolute certainty that certainty is impossible and the relativists claim absolutely that all claims are relative. Cratylus, the Greek skeptic who stopped talking, is another reductio.

Further Comment on Galileo’s Middle Finger

My previous post did not do justice to the Alice Dreger book Galileo’s Middle Finger. Here are a few additional comments.

Intersex people. Intersex infants, children, and adults, formerly referred to by the pejorative “hermaphrodite,” are born with ambiguous genitalia—for example, with external penis and vagina, usually of different sizes, or with an external vagina and internal testes but no uterus or ovaries.

Dreger’s doctoral dissertation focused on late nineteenth and early twentieth century hermaphroditism. Because such sexual differences were seldom ever talked about, most intersex people in that period lived relatively normal lives, presumably because they assumed that everyone else was built the same way. As Dreger put it, perhaps a little surprise on the doctor’s face when examining the patient was the only awareness anyone had of the medical issue!

Sometime during the twentieth century, doctors decided they should do something about the “shameful” condition. They decided, usually only telling the parents that some infant surgery was necessary, to play God and change intersex infants into boys or girls, based entirely on their judgment of which way the infant should go.

In recent times, it seems doctors have become more transparent by telling parents what they are doing . . . but rarely, even today, have doctors or parents told their patients and children what was done to them as infants.

“Shame, secrecy, and lies” is how Dreger describes the attitudes and behavior of doctors and parents. And it is this shame, secrecy, and lying that has incensed the human sexual identity activists. Intersex people are individuals with rights just like everyone else, but they have been denied honesty, have been discriminated against, and even denied choice—over which way they want to go, or whether to go at all.

Several early chapters of Dreger’s book detail her own activism to get the medical profession to fess up and change its ways. The stone wall she hit is part of the reason she felt the depression mentioned in my previous post.*

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Another stone wall was hit and described in the latter chapters of Dreger’s book. A doctor in New York City has made a career of administering dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, to in utero fetuses to prevent the formation of ambiguous genitalia and other sexual anomalies that can result from this inherited disease.

Dreger tallied a number of problems with this medical practice and lobbied hard, but failed, to stop it. The off-label drug—many drugs are so used—must be administered before there is any evidence the fetus is developing in an anomalous manner.

Dreger’s math found that only one out of ten such treated fetuses stood to benefit from the drug. On the other hand, the risks? Only one study—and only one—has been conducted to discern long-term consequences. The findings of that study indicated a significant minority of the sample suffered retardation, memory difficulties, and growth disorders; as a result, the study was shut down.

The controversy centered around informed consent, much of which seems not to have been given, and bureaucratic approval to proceed with such a treatment.

At one point, charges of fraud for phantom research projects were brought up, but the whistleblower, like many operating in bureaucratic environments, was attacked and threatened with psychiatric treatment. The Feds, responsible for protecting the public from risky medical practice, did little to stop a prestigious and well-established doctor.

Dreger lost the battle.

Social justice. Dr. Dreger views herself as an activist fighting for social justice. This has pushed me to clarify in my mind the difference between social and individual justice. “Social justice” has a long history, so it is not unique to Karl Marx, but today’s advocates use it in a distinctively Marxian flavor.

Is Dreger an advocate of social justice? Not really, though I’m sure she would disagree with my interpretation of her work.

Social justice, as I define it using today’s Marxian flavor, is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution in the form of additional wealth, education, employment, along with other favors that they otherwise have not been able to attain. The underprivileged include anyone who is deemed unsuccessful, but especially African Americans, women, and LGBTs. This is the collectivist definition.

Individual justice is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging individuals—oneself and others—according to the standards of honesty, integrity, courage, independence, and especially productiveness. This is the individualist definition.

I think Dr. Dreger, because of her uncompromising commitment to facts, is closer to practicing the latter form of justice than the former. This, I would say, is why she could not accept her Marxist colleagues’ epistemological relativism. Yes, African Americans, women, and LGBTs have been badly discriminated against, even enslaved, but each individual must be judged on his or her own merits. No “class,” to use Marx’s terminology, owes any other “class” anything, especially when restitution is made at the point of a gun.

To use a reductio argument against the Marxists one might say this: Ayn Rand wrote that the individual is the smallest minority on earth. Turning the thought around, can we not say that the group or “class” of individuals is the largest “class” on earth? And therefore the largest “class” on earth that has been discriminated against and oppressed??

Individuals of the world should unite! And fight off their oppressers!!

Marxists should be advocates of individualism if they are seriously concerned about justice for the oppressed.

Free speech at Northwestern. An unwavering defender of First Amendment rights, Dreger has, since the publication of her book, performed a little flipping off herself. She has resigned from the Northwestern University Medical School over her dean’s attempts to censor the content of a faculty magazine she edited. The content? About sex, of course, but also possibly “offensive” content—to the hospital’s brand name!

Sigh! As a marketing prof, I have to make one last comment. Bureaucrats, whether in academia or government, have no clue what sound marketing, including branding, means. They think the usual BS that marketing is just that and that a brand image is something made up and pawned off on the helpless, unsuspecting public. This is just good Marxist thinking about business.

Sound branding—that is, product identification—of a first class hospital should run something like this.

We use the latest, most advanced knowledge and techniques to treat and cure our patients. In the process we entertain and examine all ideas—the wilder and more offensive the better.

The better because we will then know that we have left no stone unturned in order to come up with treatments and cures to do justice [there’s that word again!] for our patients.

*To the sheltered, like yours truly, this was an eye-opening read. It also struck me as the perfect “borderline case” in the philosophical problem of universals. The existence of intersex people (and animals) demonstrates that there is no intrinsic maleness or femaleness “out there, in the thing” as the intrinsic theory of essences claims. It also took my teenage daughter to explain the difference between gender, which is social (actually, psychological), and sex, which is biological. Now I understand!