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Mind the Theory

- Thorsten Polleit -

i had read A. E. before and did read the piece you sent along. It has done nothing to change my mind whatsoever. That there is "almost a universal opposition to Austrianism" as stated in the article should tell you something. And what it should tell you is that a priori knowledge in the field of economics is utterly and completely impossible. Things that can be understood in such a fashion are few and far between and are never a matter for dispute. (A key point.) No one has doubts as to their own existence. A.E. is fine in other regards and i have no disagreements with it. But this nonsense that its precepts can be understood in an a priori fashion is doubtlessly a major reason why there is such opposition to it. This intransigent resistance by Austrians to such an obvious truth makes it seem more like a cult than anything else. Without experiment there is no science, for that is how theory is validated or disproved. Which leads to my next point. Economics is really a pseudo science in that with conditions always in flux, no test can ever be repeated. Conditions may be similar, but never the same. We can only make progress toward discovering what works best in this or any other field of study by studying what has gone before us, analyizing it and making changes to the theory as required; perhaps even abandoning it altogether in favor of another.
Think of it this way: a person who has spent their entire life living in a cave without any human contact would know with absolute certainty that he is alive. That is an example of a priori knowledge. That same person in the same situation would not be able to grasp the concept of a business cycle or deduce that gold works better than paper as a unit of account because he would have had no experience of such things.
Your statement that economics is an a priori science does not make it so. It is a dogmatic statement completely lacking in proof. Which of course it must be, for there is no gedanken experiment that can be undertaken by our cave dweller that would lead him to know with the same certainty he has that he is alive that there is a business cycle. Once you understand that, you can begin to use your own critical faculties to think for yourself; always employing your b.s. detector to steer clear of the pure, unadulterated nonsense that ideologues and messianic types try to bamboozle us with.
In the words of Jerry Rubin: Ideology is a brain disease.

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Beginning of the headline :I. The saying that things may work nicely in theory, but do not necessarily work in practice is well known.[1] It is typically meant to disparage the importance of theory, suggesting it would be too far removed from practical matters to help in solving the issue at hand. The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his 1793 essay "On the Popular Judgment: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice,'" responded to such criticism; in fact, he responded with his essay to criticism leveled against his ethical theory by the philosopher ChristianGarve (1742–1798)... Read More

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