Kant, Mises, and Economics - An interesting read

[The One and Only...]

The article establishes economics as a science rooted in a priori synthetic truths, credits Mises with overcoming the problem of idealism in Kantian philosophy by grounding mental categories of understanding in action, and tirades against a posteriori economics views.

I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but I found it intriguing.

...Mises adds one more extremely important insight that Kant had only vaguely glimpsed. It has been a common quarrel with Kantianism that this philosophy seemed to imply some sort of idealism. For if, as Kant sees it, true synthetic a priori propositions are propositions about how our mind works and must of necessity work, how can it be explained that such mental categories fit reality? How can it be explained, for instance, that reality conforms to the principle of causality if this principle has to be understood as one to which the operation of our mind must conform? Don't we have to make the absurd idealistic assumption that this is possible only because reality was actually created by the mind? So that I am not misunderstood, I do not think that such a charge against Kantianism is justified. [14] And yet, through parts of his formulations Kant has no doubt given this charge some plausibility.

Consider, for example, this programmatic statement of his: "So far it has been assumed that our knowledge had to conform to observational reality"; instead it should be assumed "that observational reality conform to our knowledge." [15]

Mises provides the solution to this challenge. It is true, as Kant says, that true synthetic a priori propositions are grounded in self-evident axioms and that these axioms have to be understood by reflection upon ourselves rather than being in any meaningful sense "observable." Yet we have to go one step further. We must recognize that such necessary truths are not simply categories of our mind, but that our mind is one of acting persons. Our mental categories have to be understood as ultimately grounded in categories of action. And as soon as this is recognized, all idealistic suggestions immediately disappear. Instead, an epistemology claiming the existence of true synthetic a priori propositions becomes a realistic epistemology. Since it is understood as ultimately grounded in categories of action, the gulf between the mental and the real, outside, physical world is bridged. As categories of action, they must be mental things as much as they are characteristics of reality. For it is through actions that the mind and reality make contact.

Kant had hinted at this solution. He thought mathematics, for instance, had to be grounded in our knowledge of the meaning of repetition, of repetitive operations. And he also realized, if only somewhat vaguely, that the principle of causality is implied in our understanding of what it is and means to act. [16]

Yet it is Mises who brings this insight to the foreground: Causality, he realizes, is a category of action. To act means to interfere at some earlier point in time in order to produce some later result, and thus every actor must presuppose the existence of constantly operating causes. Causality is a prerequisite of acting, as Mises puts it.