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Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics and the Logic of Action
Roderick Long (Routledge 2009)
Preview from the Author
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Where does Wittgenstein stand on this issue? As I read him, he rejects the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. As traditionally understood, analytic truths are linguistic stipulations, and therefore have no factual commitments, whereas synthetic truths do have factual commitments, and so are not merely stipulative. Neither of these descriptions characterizes conceptual truths as Wittgenstein understands them. For Wittgenstein, a conceptual (or, as he would say, “grammatical”) proposition is indeed stipulative, and so in a certain sense lacks factual content; so it would be misleading to call it “synthetic.”
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But it would also be misleading to call a conceptual truth “analytic”; for while such a truth lacks factual content, it does not lack factual commitments, because for Wittgenstein the ability to apply a concept correctly is part of what it means to possess that concept in the first place.
A similar idea is expressed by Ayn Rand, another fellow-traveler of the Austrian School . . . .
In other words: we don’t have the abstraction and then see if we can apply it to the concrete; rather, the ability to apply it to the concrete is part of having the abstraction. Likewise, for Wittgenstein, one cannot employ a concept, or any proposition containing that concept, without being committed to the truth of various factual propositions that apply that concept to reality. For example, although “bachelors are unmarried men” is a grammatical proposition that holds in virtue of a linguistic stipulation, one cannot assert that proposition without employing the concept “bachelor,” and one cannot count as employing that concept unless one has a reasonably reliable capacity to distinguish bachelors from non-bachelors in the real world. Otherwise “bachelors are unmarried men” is just meaningless sounds, or dead marks on a page, not something that can serve as the content of a judgment
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Socrates fully accepts the Misesian point that all action is driven by the agent’s own judgments of value. If that is economic subjectivism, then Socrates is an economic subjectivist. But in that case, Socrates’ view is that economic subjectivism entails ethical objectivism. For once we combine the Socrates-Mises point that all action is driven by value judgments with the Socrates-Frege point that the logical form of value judgments requires that they be objective, then the conclusion follows that we cannot act without ommitting ourselves to the existence of objective value. Ethical subjectivism is not merely indefensible; it is praxeologically indefensible.
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Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics and the Logic of Action by Roderick Long
