from: Journal of Libertarian Studies , 12 (1996), 179-192. pdf version

Introduction

I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question:
 
 

1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions?

It is one solid result of modern philosophy of science that no such conception of the way scientific knowledge is gained and scientific hypotheses formulated can be acceptable. The philosophy of science has shown that certain categories (conceptions, hypotheses, assumptions) are necessarily presupposed if, for example, an empirical observation is to be scientifically usable. Every observation is in this sense 'theory-' or at least 'category-laden'. One cannot measure anything, and one can bring no results of measurement into correlation with one another, if one does not have prior concepts or categories of what one wants to measure.⁽¹⁾

To carry out experiments in meaningful and systematic fashion, to represent the results of these experiments theoretically, and to process these results one needs assumptions, concepts, categories and other theoretical instruments. Logic and the theory of definition, as well as many branches of pure mathematics belong to this pre-empirical foundation of the empirical sciences -- 'pre-empirical' in the sense that it cannot be gained through induction or observation but rather makes induction and observation possible.

All scientists bring with them non-empirical presuppositions of different sorts, presuppositions which are usually tacit in nature, which will often seem trivial when made explicit, and which will therefore no less often lend sanction to the view that they are somehow empty or analytic, that they are all without exception derived from logic. Most twentieth-century philosophers of science have indeed assumed as a matter of course that scientific theories ought properly to consist entirely of empirical propositions (propositions amenable to empirical testing) built up on a foundation of strictly analytic propositions of logic and mathematics. This leads to the further question:
 
 

2. Are the propositions which express the pre-empirical assumptions of empirical science in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)?

Consider for example the law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation.⁽²⁾

This law reads as follows:

It may be that some of us may recognize a point in our lives when we first apprehended this law. But still, it is difficult seriously to entertain the thesis that our knowledge of the law is a result of empirical research, of observation and induction. The proposition in question is however clearly of extraordinary importance for every science and for every scientific experiment. Like many other laws pertaining to the simplest and most general relational categories, it is at the same time also entirely trivial. Now it is a common peculiarity of human beings that they like to turn away from trivial or elementary propositions of this sort and that they have a tendency to refuse to accept their peculiarities and their consequences: 'trop de vérité nous étonne', as Pascal once formulated the matter. ⁽³⁾

Who, after all, is interested in the fact that human action exists, that pleasure is different from greed, that triangles are different from squares, that warnings are different from congratulatings, that Julius Caesar is not a cardinal number. It is for this reason possible that both philosophers and scientists have often overlooked the fact that all normal human beings are in possession of a whole host of such items of knowledge or insight. And for this reason also the temptation very easily arises to want to devalue such propositions by classifying them as 'analytic' or 'tautological' or 'lacking in content'.

The law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation is however - for all its triviality - not analytic according to the standard reading of this notion. According to this standard reading we are to define 'analytic' as follows:
 
 

A proposition is analytic if and only if it is either itself a law of deductive logic or it is capable of being transformed into such a law through the replacement of the defined terms it contains with corresponding definitions.

[TRANS], now, contains just one term which might come into question as 'defined', namely the relational term 'is a part of'. This expression is not a logical term; axioms governing the corresponding relation will be found in no standard logical textbook, and neither will [TRANS] itself. Unfortunately for the advocates of the logical positivist conception, however, it is also not definable. Rather it presents an example of one of those fundamental concepts with whose help the very process of defining scientific terms can sensibly begin.

According to the definition of 'analytic' that is standardly accepted by logical positivists and by analytic philosophers in general, then, the given law is synthetic. But might one not call into question the preferred definition of 'analytic'? Might one not, with Carnap and others, assert that the truth of a proposition such as [TRANS] is somehow a consequence of the rules of language?⁽⁴⁾

[TRANS] would then be lacking in content in the sense that it would have nothing to do with the actual world but rather only with our language. Yet the given law would clearly still obtain even if no language or rules of language should ever have evolved; indeed it would clearly still obtain even in a world lacking all cognitive subjects. Even then it would still for example be true that, of three arbitrary parts of a stone, or of a planet, if the first is part of the second, and the second part of the third, then the first is also part of the third. To conceive the law of transitivity as 'lacking in content' in the suggested fashion is therefore at least a mite more problematic than the defenders of the corresponding theories have normally supposed.

For this reason I shall assume in what follows that at least some of those non-empirical assumptions or hypotheses which are presupposed by the various branches of science are not analytic. The question then arises:
 
 

3. Do we have an infallible knowledge of all the synthetic pre-empirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development?

For the same (logical) reasons we should have to deny the thesis that the synthetic pre-empirical propositions at the core of science might all be true. Even in the realm of the pre-empirical there is no infallible knowledge and no truth-guarantee. We are dealing here with 'assumptions' in a strict sense of the word, assumptions which may, even if only in isolated instances, turn out to be false. Interestingly, traces of this fallibilistic conception of the a priori are present in Husserl, and already Leibniz spoke of a 'methodus conjecturalis a priori', which proceeds with the aid of hypotheses: '[assumere] causas licet sine ulla probatione'.⁽⁵⁾

With this, however, there arises the following question:
 
 

4. Could these assumptions be arbitrary?

This, however, implies that there must be some criteria of evaluation which the scientist applies, whether consciously or not, in working out his assumptions, or through which he allows himself to be guided in determining which assumptions are and are not acceptable.

How, then, does this evaluation of scientific assumptions proceed? The answer to this question that is favoured by the positivists is in its simplest version as follows: we evaluate assumptionsexclusively according to their consequences, i.e. according to the principle of expedience or predictive power. We establish in other words that certain assumptions yield assertions about the future which are empirically confirmed - or at least not easily falsified.

A position of this sort is defended for example by Milton Friedman, at least in his methodological writings (especially his 1953). Friedman maintains that assumptions can be completely arbitrary, that they can even be false, if they only enjoy a certain power to generate predictions. It might for example turn out that an economic theory was developed which correlated stock-market movements with sun-spot activity, and then, so long as this theory enjoyed predictive power, it would as theory be fully acceptable. For the positivists, science evolves by becoming ever more concentrated on assumptions with predictive power. Theories and hypotheses which prove unreliable will be slowly filtered out.

We have accepted already that there can in this sense be a control even of the pre-empirical assumptions adopted by the natural sciences. This can indeed be counted as a scientific commonplace. The corresponding process of filtering out however, whether it is understood according to the classical model of empirical confirmation or according to the Popperian model of falsification, because it is purely retrospective in nature, does not take us further with respect to the just-mentioned problem of arbitrariness. The question of criteria of ex ante evaluation thus remains extent open (a consequence which we could incidentally have predicted, if we had kept in mind the example of pure mathematics, in which pre- (or non-)empirical assumptions are equally necessary, but where talk of predictive power is clearly inappropriate).

For it is of course not the case that the scientist occupies himself with arbitrary assumptions in the hope - and to the extent that the relevant assumptions were truly arbitrary this would have to be a groundless hope - that they will manifest in unexpected fashion a high predictive power. No scientist would ever consciously rely on pure arbitrariness in this fashion. The search for assumptions on the part of the scientist is subject rather to a whole host of ex ante (or as we might also say: a priori) controls. For he seeks only those assumptions which will give him a justified expectation of predictive power. The sun-spot example fails to awaken such expectations precisely because we can find no intelligible reason why sun-spots should cause stock-exchange movements. Even if we were to accept such a correlation as a fact, we would still be unsatisfied with the corresponding hypothesis, because we would feel no certainty that this correlation might not at any moment cease to obtain. Certainty of this sort is acquired only where we have some explanation as to why these and those stock-exchange phenomena are associated in a non-arbitrary fashion with these and those sun-spot phenomena.

What, then, are the criteria of ex ante evaluation which serve to temper arbitrariness? Here there is much that is to be said - for instance that our assumptions must in the normal case stand to other accepted assumptions in relations of logical consistency. For our present purposes however it will suffice to point out that these assumptions must, in general at least, be characterized by a certain plausibility. Scientists attempt to find assumptions in relation to which they can have a justified expectation that they be true.⁽⁶⁾

This holds not least for the category of synthetic pre- empirical assumptions. Indeed we want to claim that with the development of science the relevant synthetic pre-empirical propositions must come to be characterized by such plausibility to an ever increasing degree.Then, however, the question arises:
 
 

5. Might this sort of plausibility be always a contextual affair, so that an 'intrinsic' plausibility would be excluded?

There are, it follows, intrinsically plausible pre-empirical assumptions which play an indispensable (if often trivial) role in the advance of science and knowledge. In the philosophical literature on the topic of the a priori it is usually only certain selected examples of such propositions which are treated of, so that it can easily appear as if they could each be shown in turn to be 'analytic' or 'tautological' by some manipulation of definitions.⁽⁷⁾

The question however arises:
 
 

6. Whether the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences are truly given only individually, i.e. in such a way that there obtains no systematic relation between them?

there are also other sciences - or 'pre-sciences' ( Vorwissenschaften) as Husserl's teacher Stumpf called them ⁽⁹⁾ - which consist exclusively in intrinsically plausible pre-empirical principles. Stumpf himself offers as examples what he called 'phenomenology' (which he defined as the theory of sensible phenomena), 'eidology' (the theory of non-sensory 'formations' given in experience, including value- and Gestalt-formations), and the 'general theory of relations' (the theory of relational concepts such as 'similarity, equality, intensity, logical and real dependence, the relation of part and whole, and so on' (op. cit., p. 37. These pre-sciences are according to Stumpf:
 
 

the atrium und the organon of every other science insofar as the object of every science includes their object, since all research makes use of relational concepts and laws ... In an ideal encyclopedia of knowledge everything which can be said about relations between arbitrary elements in general would have to come first (Op. cit., p. 39).

Husserl himself held that there were three a priori ontologies, three 'material a priori sciences' of thing, soul, and society: the pure science of nature, pure psychology and pure sociology, respectively. The ontology of things includes as branches the pure theory of space (geometry), pure time theory (chronometry), pure kinematics, and the pure disciplines of the possible deformations of spatial formations. The pure a priori science of the soul, first called by Husserl 'descriptive psychology' and associated with the 'rational psychology' of Christian Wolff has as its subject-matter the psychical experiences, perceptions, memories, imagination, expectations, decisions, choices, and so on, in other words thought experiences of every sort, as well as feelings and acts of will. The regional ontology of society, finally, concerns itself with cultural formations like state, law, custom, church and so on. (Schuhmann 1990)

Husserl's early followers in Munich, the so-called 'realist phenomenologists, and above all Pfänder, Scheler and Reinach, embraced wholeheartedly the project of working out in systematic fashion the entire pantheon of such theories and sub-theories, both formal and material. There are, first of all, the formal a priori disciplines of ontology and mathematics, including arithmetic, set theory, topology, mereology, the 'theory of objects' in Meinong's sense, and many others. We then have a priori disciplines dealing with the three-dimensional world of space and time, and with the objects of nature, including the overlapping disciplines of rational mechanics (Scheler 1913, p. 449n.), naive or qualitative physics (Hayes 1985, Smith and Casati 1994), kinaesiology, stereology, geometry, chronometry, and so on. We then have the various sub-disciplines of aesthesiology (theories of secondary qualities: cf. Witschel 1961): colourology, the a priori science of tones, of feelings of warm and cold, textures and so on. There then follow logic and the various disciplines associated with logic, including the theory of evidence, apophantic logic, concept-theory, decision theory, the logic of truth, and so on. Next come various sciences of 'rational psychology', sciences of beliefs and desires, feelings, values and valuings, including Scheler's material ethics and formal axiology and deontic logic, the a priori theories of imperatives (Pfänder 1982), of norms, of will, a priori aesthetics, the ontology of art and art works developed by Roman Ingarden, and so on. We then have various a priori sciences pertaining to the domain of language and expression (Holenstein 1975), universal and categorial grammars, the a priori sciences of phonology, and the theory of speech acts or categorial pragmatics developed by Reinach (1913; see also Mulligan (ed.), 1987) and later by Austin and Searle. In the same work Reinach conceived the project of a general a priori ontology of the entire domain of social interaction. Sub-branches of the latter might include praxeology, the a priori science of action, the a priori ontology of work, a priori economics, the a priori theory of institutions, of law, a priori politics,⁽¹⁰⁾ the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the a priori science of dialogue, a priori sociology, a priori geography, the a priori theory of the life world, eidetic history, a priori anthropology, and so on.

Of the non-formal disciplines on this list it is above all two whose principles and applications have been worked out in detail: the a priori theory of law worked out by Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law" of 1913 and the a priori science of economics worked out by successive generations of so-called 'Austrian economists' from Menger to Rothbard and beyond. Few in the tradition of Austrian economics have however taken cognisance of the fact that, as Reinach puts it, the realm of the ontological a priori is 'unsurveyably wide; whatever sorts of object we know, they all have their "what", their "essence", and of all essentialities essential laws hold.' (Reinach 1969)

On the standard praxeological account of economic science shared by Mises and Rothbard and succinctly stated in the latter's "In Defense of 'Extreme Apriorism'" of 1957, there are held to be certain fundamental axioms of economics which are both true and such that their truth is grasped immediately. The theorems of economics are then established via logical deduction from these axioms. There is in consequence no need for empirical testing of these theorems, which is fortunate since, as Rothbard points out, empirical testing is in any case impossible in the sciences of human action:
 
 

It is physics that knows or can know its "facts" and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, … [t]here is no laboratory where facts can be isolated and controlled; the "facts" of human history are complex ones, resultants of many causes. These causes can only be isolated by theory, theory that is necessarily a priori to these historical (including statistical) facts. (1957, p. 315)

Rothbard draws a distinction between two approaches to the a priori as follows:
 
 

Professor Mises, in the neo-Kantian tradition, considers [the law of human action] a law of thought and therefore a categorical truth a priori to all experience. My own epistemological position rests on Aristotle and St. Thomas rather than Kant, and hence I would interpret the proposition differently. I would consider the axiom a law of reality , rather than a law of thought (1957, p. 318).

How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? For the members of the Munich group, as also for Aristotle, Aquinas and Rothbard, there exists an ontological a priori, an a priori in reality . The a priori status of judgments, propositions, beliefs or 'laws of thought' that is so central to the Kantian approach then proves to be derivative of this more deep-lying a priori dimension on the side of the things themselves.

According to the Kantian conception, in contrast, science consists not so much in the attempt to construct a system of intrinsically intelligible assumptions, but rather in a 'coercion of nature' ('Nötigung der Natur') of such a sort that the latter comes to be formed in conformity with prior principles. Consider the following passage from Kant's first Critique:
 
 

When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane …, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, coercing nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in observance to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover. ⁽¹¹⁾

Now however we must ask:
 
 

7. Is it really true that, as the Kantians assert, intrinsically plausible or intelligible pre-empirical synthetic propositions are in some sense imposed upon the world by cognizing subjects?

The thesis of the supposed subject-dependence of all laws of this kind - as originally formulated by Kant - is moreover not capable of being harmonized with the fact that pre-empirical assumptions are sometimes contradicted through retrospective empirical control. For the assertion that the given laws hold only because we have read them into the structure of the world, that the empirical world of what happens and is the case is itself a product of such reading in, surely excludes the possibility of conflict between such laws and empirical happenings.

The thesis that the world is 'transcendentally' formed leads further to the question why precisely these rather than those transcendental forms should be the ones through which the imposition of structure is effected. Once again, the problem of arbitrariness seems here to raise its ugly head. Many Kantians (and Popperians) are today content with an evolutionistic treatment of this problem. In their eyes those pre-scientific assumptions have come to dominate which enjoyed under the prevailing circumstances a greater capacity for survival or a greater adaptability than the available alternatives. But the proponents of this doctrine appeal in this connection to the results of a science - biology - which itself presupposes very many pre-scientific assumptions of its own. This means that they are precluded from extending their account to at least one important group of pre-scientific assumptions, since the assertion that a science which itself presupposes certain principles can itself serve to justify those principles contains an obvious vicious circle. The striving for a fully adequate picture of reality thus requires an answer to the question as to how pre-scientific assumptions arise and are justified that goes much deeper than the answer of the evolutionists. And as Husserl showed in the "Prolegomena" to his Logical Investigations, the same holds of every attempt to account for such assumptions through appeals to an empirical science.

Our realistic conception of the empirical sciences tells us, however, how we are to formulate an answer of the required sort. The striving on the part of scientists for intelligible assumptions can be justified by appeal to the fact that the world itself possesses certain intelligible structures - structures of the sort which are captured for example in the laws of mereology or colourology. The world itself is in many of its traits in itself intelligible.

The general idea is well conveyed by the Munich phenomenologists, for example by Scheler in his great critique of formalism (and in particular of Kantianism) in ethics (1913/16). Scheler is there concerned to establish the basis of an ethical theory which is 'a priori' in the sense that, as he puts it, 'its propositions are evident and can neither be tested by something that has been found, prior to such testing, by observation and induction nor be refuted by observation and induction' (translation, pp. 47f.) Our knowledge of such a priori propositions is gained by means of what Scheler calls an 'intuition of essences' of the sort that is involved, for example, when we grasp the colour red and grasp that it is different from green or blue, or when we grasp the essential interconnection between red and visual extension. We do not have to observe and check and carry out inductions in order to grasp that red is different from green, or that jealousy is different from greed.
 
 

Whenever we have such essences and such interconnections among them (which can be of different kinds, e.g., reciprocal, unilateral, conflicting, or, as in the case of values, ordered as higher and lower), the truth of propositions that find their fulfillment in such essences is totally independent of the entire sphere of observation and description, as well as of what is established in inductive experience. … Hence the a priori is not dependent on propositions (or even on acts of judgment corresponding to them). It is not dependent, for example, on the form of such propositions and acts (i.e., on "forms of judgments," from which Kant developed his "categories" as "functional laws" of "thinking"). On the contrary, the a priori belongs wholly to the "given" and the sphere of facts. A proposition is only a priori true (or false) insofar as it finds its fulfillment in such "facts". (Scheler 1913/16, p. 448, translation, p. 49)

… It therefore is not experience and non-experience, or so-called presuppositions of all possible experience (which would be unexperienceable in every respect), with which we are concerned in the contrast between the a priori and a posteriori; rather, we are concerned with two kinds of experience (translation, p. 52):

8. Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false?

Such propositions can also be called 'a priori'. Note again, however, that the conception of the a priori that is then yielded turns out to be a non-Kantian conception. It claims that, where Kant wanted always to have the a priori viewed as something subjective, something pertaining purely to knowledge, there is in fact such a thing as an a priori in the world.

We affirm simply that there are synthetic intrinsically plausible true propositions, and that science strives to accumulate ever more of these; we do not however affirm that we know (or much less that we have certain knowledge about) which of the available candidates for such propositions are true among those which at any given time play a role in the really existing sciences. The given intelligible structural traits of reality can be overlooked or misinterpreted. The recognition that there are a priori structural traits in the world yields, to repeat, no easy sort of indubitable evidence in relation to the corresponding propositions. This fallibilistic doctrine of a priori laws of reality does however yield a nice solution to one age-old problem facing all defenders of the a priori. How, as Caldwell puts it (1984), does one choose between rival systems all of which claim to rest on a priori foundations? On the non-fallibilistic conception it is difficult to make sense even of the possibility of rival systems of this sort. On the conception here defended, in contrast, the existence of such rival systems can be seen to be a perfectly natural and acceptable consequence of the just-mentioned difficulties we will often fact in coming to know even the intelligible traits of reality. One adjudicates between such systems in the same way, then, in which one adjudicates between all rival scientific hypotheses, namely via a complex mixture of empirical and a priori considerations.
 

Conclusion

We can summarize the main argument of this paper as follows:
 

Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions?

Yes: Extreme empiricists

No: Are the propositions which express these pre-empirical assumptions in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)?

Yes: Logical positivists
No: Do we have an infallible knowledge of all the synthetic pre-empirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development?

Yes: Extreme Cartesians
No: Could these assumptions, which are presupposed by the empirical sciences, be arbitrary?

Yes: Feyerabend
No: The propositions in question must therefore be characterized by a certain plausibility. Is this plausibility always a contextual affair?

Yes: Hermeneutic relativists
No: There is therefore something like an intrinsic plausibility. Are the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences given only individually, so that we have only a few isolated examples thereof between which no systematic relations would obtain?

Yes: Ad hoc Kantianism
No: Is it really true, as the Kantians assert, that the intrinsically plausible or intelligible pre-empirical synthetic propositions here at issue are read into or imposed upon the world by us?

Yes: systematic Kantianism
No: Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false?

Yes: Epistemology Nihilism
No: Certain pre-empirical synthetic intrinsically plausible propositions thus require ontological correlates which are their truth-makers: there are intelligible structures in the world, which we could also call 'a priori structures' .

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Mises, Ludwig von 1966 Human Action, 3rd revised edition, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
 

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Pfänder, Alexander 1982 "Imperativenlehre" (MS of 1909), in H. Spiegelberg and E. Avé-Lallemant (eds.), Pfänder-Studien, The Hague: Nijhoff, 295-324.
 

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¹. See for example Popper 1972, pp. 187ff. A more powerful formulation of this same thesis is to be found already in the writings of Edmund Husserl's teacher Franz Brentano, for example in his 1982, pp. 1-10.

². See my 1986, § 6 and 1990.

³. Pensées, 199. See Lafuma (ed.), p. 527.

⁴. See for example Carnap 1947, pp. 222-229.

⁵. For Husserl's fallibilism see for example his 1913, §§ 137f. and compare Føllesdal 1988. On Leibniz see Schepers 1971, p. 466.

⁶. Their eventual falsification might then teach us something important and essential. Cf. Popper 1972a, pp. 196f.

⁷. Against this, see Zelaniec 1992.

⁸. See chapter 1 of Simons 1987.

⁹. Stumpf 1907, pp. 39f.

¹⁰. See Schuhmann 1988.

¹¹. KrV., B XIII; cf. Popper 1972, p. 189.

¹². Compare Rothbard: 'I would consider the axiom [of action] a law of reality rather than a law of thought, and hence "empirical" rather than "a priori." But it should be obvious that this type of "empiricism" is so out of step with modern empiricism that I may just as well continue to call it a priori for present purposes.' (1957, p. 318)