Economic Science and the Austrian Method_3

Economic Science and the Austrian Methodthe means employed must be economized, too. Not so,however, with respect to knowledge-regardless ofwhetherone considers ita means or an end in itself. Of course, theacquisition of knowledge requires scarce means-at leastone's body and time. Yet once knowledge is acquired, it isno longer scarce. It can neither be consumed, nor are theservices that it can render as a means subject to depletion.Once there, it is an inexhaustible resource and incorporatesan everlasting value provided that it is not simply forgotten.55 Yet knowledge is not a free good in the same sense thatair, under normal circumstances, is a free good. Instead, it is acategory of action. It is not only a mental ingredient ofeachand every action, quite unlike air, but more importantl);knowledge, and not air, is subject to validation, which is tosay that it must prove to fulfill a positive function for anactor within the invariant constraints of the categoricalframework of actions. It is the task of epistemology toclarify what these constraints are and what one can thusknow about the structure of knowledge as such.While such recognition of the praxeological constraintson the structure ofknowledge might not immediately strikeone as in itselfofgreat significance, it does have some highlyimportant implications. For one thing, in light of this insightone recurring difficulty of rationalist philosophy findsits answer. It has been a common quarrel with rationalism inthe Leibniz-Kant tradition that it seemed to imply some sortofidealism. Realizing that a priori true propositions could notpossibly be derived from observations, rationalism answeredthe question how a priori knowledge could then be possibleby adopting the model of an active mind, as opposed550n this fundamental difference between economic, i.e., scarce means andknowledge, see also Mises, Human Action, pp. 128, 661.68 • The Ludwig von Mises Institute