Economic Science and the Austrian Method_3

Economic Science and the Austrian Methodas it would be wrong to think that one can predict humanaction in the same way as one can predict the growing stagesof apples. It is here where the unique Misesian insight intothe interplay of economic theory and history enters the. 36pIcture.In fact, the reason why the social and economic futurecannot be regarded as entirely and absolutely uncertainshould not be too hard to understand: The impossibility ofcausal predictions in the field ofaction was proven by meansof an a priori argument. And this argument incorporated apriori true knowledge about actions as such: that theycannot be conceived of as governed by time-invariantlyoperating causes.Thus, while economic forecasting will indeed always bea systematically unteachable art, it is at the same time truethat all economic forecasts must be thought of as beingconstrained by the existence of a priori knowledge aboutactions as such. 37Take, for example, the quantity theory of mone~ thepraxeological proposition that if you increase the quantity360n the relation between theory and history, see in particular Mises, HumanAction, pp. 51-59; and Epistemological Problems ofEconomics, chapters 2-3.37The former Austrian and neo-historicist-hermeneutician-nihilist LudwigLachmann, who repeats ad nauseam the unpredictability of future states ofknowledge (see his "From Mises to Shackle: An Essay on Austrian Economics andthe Kaleidic Society," Journal ofEconomic Literature 54 (1976); The Market as anEconomic Process (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), entirely misses recognizingthis latter point. In fact, his arguments are simply self-defeating. For evidently heclaims to know for certain the unknowability offuture knowledge and, by logicalextension, of actions. Yet then he does know something about future knowledgeand action. He must know something about knowledge and action as such. Andthis, precisely, is what praxeology claims to be: knowledge regarding actions assuch, and (as I have explained in my "On Praxeology and the PraxeologicalFoundations of Epistemology and Ethics," p. 49 below) knowledge about thestructure which any future knowledge must have by virtue of the fact that itinvariably must be knowledge of actors.44 • The Ludwig von Mises Institute