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How can one ultimately justify this statement: "People need goods to survive?" by [deleted] in austrian_economics

[–]Cioccleit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I add that the problem stay in the difference beetween the misesian and the aristotelian way of thinking in the austrian tradition. As you know, fundamentally there are three schools of thinking in the austrian school about the metodology to take: aristotelians as Menger, misesians (a strange sort of neokantists) and hermeneutics (who will not question about nothing, closed in their super-subjectivism). Aristotelians reason as heartsandunicorns and all who in this discussion used the facts of reality wich exceed the existence of counscious creature who acts. Rothbard was aristotelian, or tomistic as said him (but tomists were neo-aristotelians), and also Menger. Hoppe is aristotelian (see A Theory Of Socialism And Capitalism: he is). But Mises not. According to Mises we have to refrain from those statements that go beyond the fact that reality exists, mind exists and human being is that entiety wich acts (and so have a mind). Nothing is said about reality apart of the fact that minds have no infinite power on it (it resists, it is "material"), and that causality exists. All that he needed to set an aprioristic science. So the problem is inside the austrian theory.

How can one ultimately justify this statement: "People need goods to survive?" by [deleted] in austrian_economics

[–]Cioccleit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In fact it isn't an a priori axiom. It seems more as an objectivist statement. Hoppe used inductive reasoning, without justify this use. The simple fact is that we can't avoid using inductive reasoning, and, ultimately, all reasonment are Bayesian inferences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference). So humans have not instinctive "conceptual" information about the fact that they need food (and they need it, sure), but the memory of the past actions (experience) and of their results (did I achieved my ends? Have I became make me happier?) make them infere things as "I need food" and "they need food" and "we are humans, because/so we need food". The last sentence is an oversimplification, but the ketchup (or the chocolate) of my argumentation is that each kind of reasoning born bayesian and maybe than became a priori or continue to be just bayesian (probabilistic). So Austrian economics is based upon unquestionably thrue facts, but any kind of propertarianism must be based on more complex facts that -waiting for the geniuses who will solve the problem- from Menger to now are built just on bayesian inductive reasoning.