A Fifth Method of Fixing Belief? Some Peircean Reflections on Methodological Apriorism Steven Yates [email protected] I. In his classic essay “The Fixation of Belief,” the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce criticizes and rejects three methods of fixing belief—the method of tenacity, the method of authority, and the a priori method of those he labels metaphysicians—and settles on a fourth: the method of empirical science. The fundamental hypothesis of science, writes Peirce, is: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.1 As Pierce develops his conception of the specifics of the scientific enterprise, a theory characterized by universal fallibilism emerges. The fourth method is superior not because of its promise of yielding a transcendent Truth we are capable of recognizing as such. The “sole object of inquiry,” Peirce rather writes, “is the settlement of opinion.”2 The superiority of empirical science to the other methods derives from its capacity to settle opinion in ways that appear more decisive than any of the other methods. Tenacity is often just stubbornness that won’t hold its ground for thinking persons in the face of considered contrary opinions by others. Authority has also been proven wrong by contrary evidence many times over. The a priori method as Peirce sees it is superior to the first two, but ultimately confuses the parochial and familiar with the necessary so that “metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest.”3 Thus we look to the method of empirical science, for scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion. These afford the explanation of my not doubting the method or the hypothesis which it supposes; and not having any doubt, nor believing that anybody else whom I could influence has, it would be the merest babble for me to say more about it. If there be anybody with a living doubt upon the subject, let him consider it.4

Empirical science still holds a unique and privileged place in the epistemic hierarchy of many scholars, including most scientists, obviously. To others, though, today’s postmodern era—or, for philosophers of science, its post-Kuhnian and postFeyerabendian era—provides a multitude of reasons for thinking claims on behalf of such a status as quaint rather than insightful. The fall of the Newtonian paradigm in physics set the stage for a conception of science as revolutionary instead of evolutionary, involving large scale conceptual changes replacing old concepts with new ones rather than merely showing the old ones as special cases of the new.5 The effects of the global historicizing and postmodernizing of inquiry brought about during the past 50 years have not spared science, after all, and in many quarters the idea that science has no special epistemic status is no longer considered new, interesting or radical. To say the least, no longer can a philosopher simply presume that empirical science has special epistemic standing without brows going up. Empirical science has found interesting and effective ways of describing and explaining a wide variety of entities—and promises to describe and explain still more. But the historicist and postmodernist genies are out of their bottles. Writers of many stripes have thrown into question the Enlightenment-derived modernity Peirce took for granted. Peirce’s fourth method of fixing belief, in this case, is as much in doubt as the first three, and by his own criteria. The doubt is not frivolous but—to use his word—“living.” The consensus sought among scholars as a whole is just no longer there, whether for better or for worse. However interesting the various historicist and postmodernist critiques of the idea of the specialness of the epistemic status of empirical science might be in their own right, I do not intend to pursue them further here. There is good reason to believe that even if the epistemic privileges afforded empirical science were a mistake, many of the assumptions guiding current developments have gone in an equally untenable direction. Speaking in Peircean terms, it is arguable that recent years have witnessed not the rejection of the fourth method of fixing belief in favor of something better but rather a retreat to earlier methods, and not to the somewhat respectable a priori method or even that of authority—but all the way to the method of tenacity. For example: My philosophical education taught me to follow reason wherever it went and to distrust political considerations. My experience as a feminist has taught me to stick by my political commitments even when I appear to have lost the argument.6 Susan Haack recently observed that we are now in danger of losing our hold on the very concepts of Reals, of truth, evidence, and the possibility of objective methods of inquiry, and being swept along in the rising tides of what she calls preposterism: a range of irrationalisms that permit both a scientism that sees science as capable of addressing every intellectual/cognitive problem (for example: eliminative materialism) as well as those brands of antiscience emanating from the academic left.7 Surely we want to carry philosophical method forward, not backward. Genuine, as opposed to what Peirce (and Haack) have called “sham” and “fake” reasoning, demands no less. Enlightenment modernity attempted to elevate the epistemic status of empirical science to supremacy.

Its culmination was a disaster for philosophy: logical positivism. Clearly, though, it is yesterday’s news that logical positivism and its offshoots failed, are dead, its obituary written, with almost everyone home from the funeral. It has been unclear, at least among the majority of academics, however, where we were supposed to go next. Hence today we have moved from scientistic supremacy of positivism to various forms of epistemological relativism and nihilism that are equally untenable—unless philosophers are to be satisfied with continuing the “conversation of the West.”8 My aim here is to re-open the discussion of an older method of philosophizing never mined for its full potential and find in it a means of moving philosophical inquiry forward. In Peircean terms, this will offer a fifth method of fixing belief. Austrian scholars should find this method of fixing belief of great interest. Both they and a number of philosophers who have explored the reasoning involved have concluded that it does more than just fix belief. I myself have defended this idea elsewhere.9 However, in this paper I will stick with the somewhat more modest aim of proposing a fifth method of fixing belief that neither offers empirical science unwarranted privileges nor backslides to earlier methods. Why we might accept the limits suggested by the phrase fixing belief is an issue I take up in this paper’s final section.

II. It is useful to begin by observing that Peirce, though a trained scientist, is offering in the remark quoted at the outset not empirical science but the beginning sketch of a philosophy for empirical science. The claim that “Real things exist” is metaphysical, not scientific; claims about the knowability of the objects studied in the empirical sciences and conditions for the revisability of scientific knowledge claims are epistemological and methodological respectively. Science qua science cannot establish its own metaphysical, epistemic and methodological supremacy by experimental or other means. That it can yield reliable, lasting knowledge about sets of stable, determinate entities interacting in law-governed ways in a mind-independent reality is something its practitioners must take for granted; otherwise scientific inquiry loses its point.10 Nevertheless, attempts to establish such points are not scientific but philosophical; scientific attempts to establish the epistemic supremacy of science obviously beg the question. Peirce’s effort to fix belief by his fourth method, therefore, is vulnerable to the charge of being a product not of scientific findings but philosophical reasonings, offered on grounds at least similar to those of the a priori method he had eschewed. Herein lies the paradoxical nature of any effort to grant science the last word on matters epistemic: the effort is not itself scientific but philosophical and thus refuted in the very act of its utterance—a performative contradiction. The error is important, because it points to the necessity of a fifth method of fixing belief, one which holds out hope of resolving many of our current dilemmas. Establishing the presence of performative contradiction is one variation on a brand of philosophical reasoning which has been employed from Plato’s time to the

present, and involves the application of the internal logic of certain kinds of statements, propositions and theories that apply to themselves and then eliciting the consequences. This method, if carried out properly, shows that certain philosophical theses are selfrefuting—and that their denials are therefore validated by means other than that of empirical science. For example, consider also the claim that empirical science is the sole method for deciding the truth or validity of cognitively meaningful propositions. We are to presume this to be a cognitively meaningful proposition. But it is not itself the product of any empirical science. Thus it fails by its own standard. It is false or invalid by its own standard of truth or validity. Hence it must be false. Its denial—that there is at least one method for deciding truth or validity besides empirical science—seems of necessity true. This may be thought of as our first application of the fifth method of fixing belief. One philosopher who developed the logical and conceptual background for this kind of method was Frederic B. Fitch. In a seminal paper he wrote: A theory always has a particular subject-matter associated with it. We say that the theory is “about” its subject-matter. For example, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is about living organisms, and species of living organisms, and genetic relationships among species. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation is about particles of matter and about certain relationships of attraction between such particles…. Some theories are about theories. Others are not…. [E]mpirical science is not generally concerned with framing theories about all theories. A different situation prevails in philosophical research. Here extreme comprehensiveness is sought for. Theories are constructed which purport to deal with all entities whatsoever and which therefore have an unrestrictedly extensive subjectmatter. In dealing with all entities, such theories in particular deal with all theories, since theories are themselves entities of a special sort…. If a theory is included in its subject-matter, we say that it is a self-referential theory…. [C]onsider the view that every valid theory must be obtained from observed empirical data. This is a theory about theories and their validity. Incidentally, it is a theory which does not seem to conform to its own criterion as to what constitutes a valid theory, at least not unless it can itself be shown to have been obtained as a generalization from observed empirical data…. If a self-referential theory T implies that T has the property P, and if T in fact does not have the property P, then we shall call T self-referentially inconsistent.11 Fitch goes on to observe that this method of reasoning “is for the most part peculiar to philosophy and philosophical logic.”12 It sets philosophy apart from science, that is. It also, I would argue, stands at the core of the distinctive method of beginning economic science as employed by the Austrian school and, if the reasoning is carried out properly, validates Austrian school methodology.

III. However, that gets ahead of things. There are writers who would dismiss this kind of procedure as involving a logical trick, failing to establish anything new or insightful because it begs the question. Begging the question is circular reasoning—smuggling contingent premises into an argument that have force only if the argument’s conclusion is already granted. The thesis here is that certain propositions must be granted—taken as “given”—as a condition for the employment of any reasoning whatsoever or the conduct of any inquiry whatsoever. For example: contradictions cannot exist; human reason is capable of achieving at least some knowledge; argumentation is a viable form of discourse; human beings employ means to achieve ends. These might be thought of as pragmatic presuppositions of discourse and inquiry. They point directly to what I am here calling the fifth method of fixing belief: a methodological apriorism more sophisticated than the a priori method Peirce rejects as metaphysical. It is not based on mere stipulation or establishment of a dogma but on the necessary conditions of inquiry itself and their immediate implications. The remote ancestor of the fifth method of fixing belief is Aristotle’s defense of the principle of contradiction. What is important here is that Aristotle provides not a proof of the principle of contradiction but a negative demonstration.13 The negative demonstration consists in showing that attempts at discourse collapse into unintelligibility in the absence of a principle of contradiction, making proof unnecessary. Aristotle tells us: Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they main to be more self-evident than the present one. We can, however, demonstrate negatively even that this view is impossible, if our opponent will only say something; and if he says nothing, it is absurd to seek to give an account of our views to one who cannot give an account of anything, in so far as he cannot do so. For such a man, as such, is from the start no better than a vegetable. Now negative demonstration I distinguish from demonstration proper, because in a demonstration one might be thought to be begging the question, but if another person is responsible for the assumption we shall have negative proof, not demonstration. The starting-point for all such arguments is not the demand that our opponent shall say that something either is or is not (for this one might perhaps take as a begging of the question) but that he

shall say something which is significant both for himself and for another; for this is necessary, if he really is to say anything.14 Aristotle proceeds to show that without this starting point, thought and discourse are unintelligible: For instance, we might say that ‘man’ has not one meaning but several, one of which would have one definition, viz., ‘two-footed animal,’ while there might be also several other definitions if only they were limited in number; for a peculiar name might be assigned to each of the definitions. If, however, they were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing.15 This principle applies not just to naming but to relations in matters of fact, for: The point in question is … whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can in fact. Aristotle concludes his exposition: Again, if when the assertion is true, the negation is false, and when this is true, the affirmation is false, it will not be possible to assert and deny the same thing truly at the same time…. [I]s he in error who judges either that the thing is so or that it is not so, and is he right who judges both? If he is right, what can they mean by saying that the nature of existing things is of this kind? And if he is not right, but more right than he who judges in the other way, being will already be of a definite nature, and this will be true, and not at the same time also not true. But if all are alike both wrong and right, one who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible; for he says at the same time both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ And if he makes no judgement but ‘thinks’ and ‘does not ‘think’ indifferently, what difference will there be between him and a vegetable? Thus, then, it is in the highest degree evident that neither any one of those who maintain this view nor any one else is really in this position. For why does a man walk to Megara and not stay at home, when he thinks he ought to be walking there? Why does he not walk early some morning into a well or over a precipice, if one happens to be in the way? Why do we observe him guarding against this, evidently because he does not think that falling in is alike good and not good? Evidently, then, he judges one thing to be better and another worse. And if this is so, he must also judge one thing to be a man and another to be not-a-man, one thing to

be sweet and another to be not-sweet…. Therefore as it seems, all men make unqualified judgements… And if this is not knowledge but opinion, they should be all the more anxious about the truth, as a sick man should be more anxious about his health than one who is healthy; for he who has opinions is, in comparison with the man who knows, not in a healthy state as far as the truth is concerned.16 Thus the principle of contradiction is not proved. The very concept of a proof presupposes it, since to prove anything one must use language in a noncontradictory fashion. We would say, with Aristotle, that the principle of contradiction is demonstrated negatively; it is a presupposition given in all intelligible thought and discourse. All attempts to suspend it collapse into unintelligibility. It is an axiom of all reasoning. We should see how this approach is superior to what Peirce criticizes under the designation, the a priori method. According to Peirce, the a priori method “is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. Indeed, as long as no better method can be applied, it ought to be followed….”17 In the long run it fails because it “makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement …”18 It leads to the rise of metaphysical systems that rest not upon “observed facts” but rather are adopted because they seem “agreeable to reason” (Peirce’s chief example is Descartes). In the long run, however, the a priori method reverts to a sophisticated version of the method of authority: We have examined into this a priori method as something which promised to deliver our opinions from their accidental and capricious element. But development, while it is a process which eliminates the effect of some casual circumstances, only magnifies that of others. This method, therefore, does not differ in a very essential way from that of authority.19 While no conscious authority, such as a state, dictates one’s thought, a method which falls back in the last analysis on a kind of sentiment posing as a “natural light of reason” will fail, because “sentiments in their developments will be very determined by accidental causes other than facts”20: all the more so since the sentiments are not recognized as such! Surely the defense of the principle of contradiction provided by Aristotle escapes such charges. We do not infer the axiomatic nature or universality of the principle of contradiction via a Cartesian “natural light of reason” or some such. It is a given. Being a given, and not “proved” in the standard sense of proof, it is a belief. The belief is fixed not by tenacity, authority, any natural light of reason, or empirical science. It is fixed by its very inescapability as a condition for thought, discourse and inquiry.

IV. We now apply these insights to the distinctive method of the Austrian school. In Human Action, Mises wrote: The human mind is not a tabula rasa on which the external events write their own history. It is equipped with a set of tools for grasping reality…. Man is not only an animal totally subject to the stimuli unavoidably determining the circumstances of his life. He is also an acting being. And the category of action is logically antecedent to any concrete act. The fact that man does not have the creative power to imagine categories at variance with the fundamental logical relations and with the principles of causality and teleology enjoins upon us what may be called methodological apriorism. 21 Mises thus rests the whole edifice of the Austrian school on what he calls the logical structure of the human mind, and sometimes human reason. Central to his account is the very principle of contradiction we just saw Aristotle expounding: Everybody in his daily behavior again and again bears witness to the immutability and universality of the categories of thought and action. He who addresses fellow men, who wants to inform and convince them, who asks questions and answers other people’s questions, can proceed in this way only because he can appeal to something common to all men— namely, the logical structure of human reason. The idea that A could at the same time be non-A or that to prefer A to B could at the same time be to prefer B to A is simply inconceivable and absurd to a human mind. We are not in the position to comprehend any kind of prelogical or metalogical thinking. We cannot think of a world without causality and teleology.22 Is our thinking locked inside causality and teleology as if these were Kantian categories? Mises equivocates somewhat. On the one hand he tells us: It is idle to ask whether things-in-themselves are different from what they appear to us, and whether there are worlds which we cannot divine and ideas which we cannot comprehend. These are problems beyond the scope of human cognition. Human knowledge is conditioned by the structure of the human mind. If it chooses human action as the subject matter of its inquiries, it cannot mean anything else than the categories of action which are proper to the human mind and are its projection into the external world of becoming and change. All the theorems of praxeology refer only to these categories of action and are valid only in the orbit of their operation. They do not pretend to convey any information about never dreamed of and unimaginable worlds and relations.23

However, later Mises grasps for something more than a Kantian stance: The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the same source as human reasoning. Action and reason are cogeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason. The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.24 Moreover: The categories of human thought and action are neither arbitrary products of the human mind nor conventions. They are not outside of the universe and of the course of cosmic events. They are biological facts and have a definite function in life and reality. They are instruments in man’s struggle for existence and in his endeavors to adjust himself as much as possible to the real state of the universe and to remove uneasiness as much as it is in his power to do so. They are therefore appropriate to the structure of the external world and reflect properties of the world and of reality. They work, and are in this sense true and valid. It is consequently incorrect to assert that aprioristic insight and pure reasoning do not convey any information about reality and the structure of the universe. The fundamental logical relations and the categories of thought and action are the ultimate source of all human knowledge. They are adequate to the structure of reality, they reveal this structure to the human mind and, in this sense, they are for man basic ontological facts.25 In these sentences Mises escapes a Kantian position. Action—as basic to praxeology as the principle of contradiction is to logic—is the bridge between the structure of human cognition and mind-independent reality. Action—the employment of means in the pursuit of ends, with the purpose of solving specific problems (removing what Mises calls uneasiness and Peirce calls the irritation of doubt in the context of what motivates inquiry)—is necessarily action in mind-independent reality. Action is taken on something, in light of the causal properties of that something which inform the actor of what he can anticipate through his action. The reality of action as a phenomenon in reality—and not a “construction of consciousness” or a convenient way of speaking—is established a priori, via the kind of reasoning we saw Fitch employing. The philosophy of action strives for extreme comprehensiveness regarding everything human. A

taxonomy of actions would include linguistic actions (speech acts, etc.), and among these are to be found affirmations and denials. Thus the denial that anyone ever really acts would itself be an action—using language as a means to the end of persuading an audience to accept a conclusion. The conclusion, however, denies the reality of what gave rise to it. Hence the denial of the action axiom is a pragmatic contradiction— refuted in its utterance. Not all actions are linguistic, of course. Language is usually about something. Most of our actions involve the manipulation of nonlinguistic entities: action in the world. Given that action in the world is taken on something (the means) in order to achieve something (the end), a brand of open-ended metaphysical realism is also established a priori. It is open-ended, because it does not tell us what the mindindependent reals are. That must be settled by empirical investigation. It only tells us that they must, of logical necessity, be, and that they are determinate entities, members of identifiable, mind-independent classes. Their determinacy includes all the necessary and sufficient conditions for effecting change upon them—what Mises calls causality, without which effective action cannot take place because its outcome would be inherently unpredictable.

V. If these exercises constitute use of a method of fixing belief in Peirce’s sense, then they constitute—I submit—a fifth method of fixing belief. It is an apriorism vastly superior to the third method Peirce criticizes. It does not rely on familiarity, tradition, or the “natural light of reason” but on necessary conditions for thought and discourse. Why call it a method of fixing belief? Because in the final analysis, it rests on the negative demonstration supplied by Aristotle, and as we saw, a negative demonstration is not a proof. That all contradictory propositions are false, because contradictory states of affairs cannot exist in reality (to use a standard example, there cannot both be and not be houses on Elm Street), is a given and not the result of a proof. All methodological apriorism, whether praxeological and specifically focused on human action or otherwise, must recognize this and accept the consequences: that in the final analysis, it is a belief, albeit unshakable and demanding of the consensus of all rational people. Its very unshakability takes it to an epistemic level above that of empirical science. The central propositions of an empirical science such as physics are revisable, as is shown by their having been revised many times in light of new findings. Ontological givens established by this fifth method of fixing belief are incapable in principle of being revised, because the very idea of revising them is unintelligible. This is also true of the proposition that human actions are real phenomena, a class of events in the world. Any attempt to revise the action principle—by demonstrating, that is, that no one ever acts—collapses in pragmatic contradiction as we have seen. We normally assume that to exhibit any selfcontradiction in a position is to provide a sufficient condition for its rejection—precisely because all contradictions are false. Thus we have at our disposal a fifth method of fixing belief, one which goes beyond empirical science to a priori science. It is the method appropriate to the

economics of the Austrian school, and elucidates what separates the Austrian school from, say, neoclassical approaches to that discipline. However, a fifth method of fixing belief promises more than this. It suggests the possibility of a logical integration of all our knowledge at the highest level, solving the problems the logical positivists originally set out to solve (providing a “unified science”) without simultaneously obliterating philosophy! I would argue that this method has the potential to cut through the prevailing mood of postmodernist despair over the possibility of epistemology, and stop the backsliding towards earlier methods of fixing belief evident in contemporary philosophy. It threatens to place the act of philosophizing on a ground as firm as mathematics, arriving at something largely alien to contemporary academic philosophy: definitive, lasting results deserving to be called knowledge rather than contributions to a mere “conversation of the West.” 19 Landmark Dr., #13-A Columbia, South Carolina 29210 1

Charles Saunders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Books, 1955), p. 18. Hereafter: FB. 2 Ibid., p. 10. 3 Ibid., p. 17. 4 Ibid., p. 19. 5 See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975). 6 Anne Sellar, “Realism versus Relativism: Toward a Politically Adequate Epistemology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Philosophy, eds. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford, p. 169. 7 Susan Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13(2), 1996, pp. 296315, for a less formal exposition cf. “Science, Antiscience, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism,” The Skeptical Inquirer 21(6), Nov./Dec. 1997, pp. 37-42, 60. Cf. also her “Concern For Truth: What It Means, Why It Matters,” in The Flight From Science and Reason, eds. Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt and Martin W. Lewis (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1996), pp. 57-63. 8 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 9 Steven Yates, “Self-Referential Arguments in Philosophy, Reason Papers 18 (1991), pp. 133-64. 10 Some would invoke quantum mechanics as a counterexample here, since micro world entities and events seem to violate the canons of causality and mind-independence which had held for the rest of physical science—and in some interpretations, threaten realism as well. Observation of quantum entities automatically interferes with them and changes the outcome of experiments. While no effort to account for quantum mechanical explanation in this context would be short, it should be clear that the only way to observe anything is with electromagnetic radiation—usually light radiation. Quantum entities are such that the light used to observe them interacts with them. This is what yields the “observer-induced” changes. Thus it has not yet been demonstrated that interpretations of micro physics necessitate a mind-dependent “reality.” However, cf. Nicholas Maxwell, “Toward a Microrealistic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Foundations of Physics , for some intriguing insights. 11 Frederic B. Fitch, “Self Reference in Philosophy,” Mind 55 (1946), pp. 64-66. 12 Ibid., p. 66. 13 Cf. my discussion in In Defense of Logic, work in progress, ch. 4. 14 Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 737-38. 15 Ibid., p. 738. 16 Ibid., pp. 742-43. 17 FB, p. 16. 18 Ibid., pp. 16-17.

19

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. 21 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics [1949] (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1966), p. 35. Hereafter HA. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 36. 24 Ibid., p. 39. 25 Ibid., pp. 85-86. 20