Economic Science and the Austrian Method_3

Economic Science and the Austrian MethodIn contrast, everything that is an action must be categorizedteleologicall~ This realm ofphenomena is constrainedby the laws of logic and arithmetic, too. But it is notconstrained by the laws of geometry as incorporated in ourinstruments of measuring spatially extending objects, becauseactions do not exist apart from subjective interpretationsof observable things; and so they must be identifiedby reflective understanding rather than spatial measurements.Nor are actions causally connected events, but eventsthat are connected meaningfully within a categorical frameworkofmeans and ends.One can not know a priori what the specific values,choices and costs of some actor are or will be. This wouldfall entirely into the province of empirical, aposterioriknowledge. In fact, which particular action an actor is goingto undertake would depend on his knowledge regarding theobservational reality and/or the reality of other actors' actions.And it would be manifestly impossible to conceive ofsuch states of knowledge as predictable on the basis oftime-invariantly operating causes. A knowing actor cannotpredict his future knowledge before he has actually acquiredit, and he demonstrates, simply by virtue ofdistinguishingbetween successful and unsuccessful predictions, that hemust conceive of himself as capable of learning from unknownexperiences in as yet unknown ways. Thus, knowledgeregarding the particular course of actions is onlyaposteriori. And since such knowledge would have to includethe actor's own knowledge-as a necessary ingredientof every action whose every change can have an influenceon a particular action being chosen-teleological knowledgemust also necessarily be reconstructive, or historical knowledge.It would only provide ex-post explanations whichwould have no systematic bearing on the prediction of80 • The Ludwig von Mises Institute