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Het epistemologisch statuut van de wetenschappen van het menselijk handelen: de bijdrage van Ludwig von Mises

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Abstract

The epistemological status of the sciences of human action: the contribution of Ludwig von Mises - Ludwig Von Mises, best known for his contributions to economics, was also a student of the epistemological and methodological problems of the social sciences - or the sciences of human action, as he preferred to call them. The present note summarizes Mises’s exposition of the relationship between the historical and the praxeological method, the former aiming at cognition of the place, meaning and importance of particular factors or events in the flux of human interaction in the past, the latter at cognition of the necessary and universal relationships implied by the category of purposive action. Attention is drawn to the unavoidability of subjective, although purely cognitive, “judgments of relevance” in historical explanation - an unavoidability that stems from the praxeological theorem that in the field of human action there are no constant relations among (at least in principle) measurable quantities. It is argued here that denial of this theorem amounts to a denial of the possibility of scientific activity as the quest for critical knowledge. Mises’s insistence that praxeology be put into a category distinct from both the formal and the physical sciences is defended on the ground that the axiom of praxeology, viz. that man is a free agent, is neither a tautology nor a falsifiable proposition: its non-falsifiability derives from the fact that the critical attempts to falsify it, being itself conceivable only as a free action, exemplifies its truth. Finaly there is some discussion of the role of falsifiable hypotheses (regarding e.g. the disutility of labour for members of the species Homo Sapiens) in the praxeological analysis of the human condition or of the condition of particular men.

How to Cite:

Van Dun, F., (1979) “Het epistemologisch statuut van de wetenschappen van het menselijk handelen: de bijdrage van Ludwig von Mises”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 24(2), 181–192. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.96114