Subjectivism and Economic Analysis: Essays in memory of Ludwig ...

SUBJECTIVISM AND IDEAL TYPESsufficiently similar to that of social scientists to provide for a directand empathic understanding of their actions.Notice, however, that one of the unwelcome consequences of thismethodological principle would be to ban cultural and economicanthropology from the family of social sciences. It seems, for onething, very unlikely that researchers of tribal-religious rites or ofeconomic transactions in tribal societies, for instance, could rely onthe kind of introspective knowledge that guides them more or lesssuccessfully through the mores of their own societies and cultures.Bringing the principle of epistemological isolationism to its logicalconclusion implies a denial of the adage, first formulated andvaguely explained by Simmel and later fully vindicated by MaxWeber (1978:5): ‘one need not have been Caesar in order tounderstand Caesar.’The third tenet of methodological solipsism is concerned with thelogical-methodological status of models and theories in the socialsciences. Adherents of the methodological programme underdiscussion tend to believe that the information provided byintrospection and the knowledge based thereupon are true simply byvirtue of our privileged access to this kind of knowledge and thiskind of information. In Mises’ view, the theoretical statements of thesocial sciences are apodictically certain and a priori, that is,independently of any subsequent factual evidence, true (Mises1933:12, 26–7; 1940:18, 21; see also Hayek 1952b:51–3).Moreover, the social sciences do not strive for causalexplanations; their cognitive goal is to understand human behaviourthrough introspection, and to classify and order introspectivelyunderstood forms of behaviour (Hayek 1952b:91–2). Theories inthe social sciences are not sets of laws, that is, hypotheses withexplanatory power and informative content to be bolstered byempirical evidence, but are, like logic and mathematics, collectionsof tautologies furnished by the above mentioned process ofintrospection. In other words, theories of complex phenomena arenot nomological (Hayek 1967:41); they cannot be used to establishcausal connections. Thus economics, which, according to Mises(1933:12, 27–9), is only a part of praxeology, i.e., the general theoryof human action, is not an empirical but an a priori science, thetheorems of which are timeless and unchanging, and cannot beverified or falsified on the basis of empirical data or evidence. Agiven theory remains true as long as mental errors or fallaciousinferences don’t blemish it and as long as it is free of internalcontradictions. Marginal utility theory or general equilibrium87