Rationality and Experience

I think he misuses the term irrational. Using my past knowledge to make future decisions is not irrational. If situations have changed, I might be incorrect for using that past information but I am rational.

Realizing that situations have changed and taking extreme measures as a result (fleeing to liquidity, risk aversion, selling everything and running to mexico) are not necessarily irrational either, though they certainly can be.

"In every single case when someone is pontificating on how irrational people are, that person needs to go look in a mirror to see the irrational one.

In every single case their arguments boil down to the same fallacy: people aren't doing what I think they should be doing, I'm rational, hence people are irrational."

You are saying the one who judges is irrational, but in every single case it boils down to a fallacy: the one judging the irrationality is not doing what you think should be done, hence the judge is irrational — therefore, according to your logic, you must look in the mirror to see who is irrational. Your rebuttal here seems to be illogical and circular.

Hayek was a closet critical rationalist. He befriended Karl Popper, and the two discussed epistemology and methodology frequently.

If mainstream economists understood Karl Popper's work as Hayek did, as opposed to assuming positivist or pragmatist nonsense, then much of this confusion about "rationality" would be seen for the waste of time that it is. Some even claim that W.W. Bartley, another critical rationalist and editor of The Fatal Conceit, practically wrote the book himself while Hayek suffered from a debilitating illness.

The ideas expressed in Hayek's work were deeply affected by these underlying philisiphical presuppositions, and much nonsense which proliferates in economics today would be banished if they were more understood.

dg lesvic,

What Mises called human action or praxeology, Popper called situational analysis. But both held very different views on epistemology and methodology. Mises has his apriorism, whereas Popper was a critical rationalist. The main contention revolves around wheat Bartley called 'justificationism'; Mises was and Popper was not, and I think Hayek agreed with Popper.

I much prefer Popper's philosophy. It is more consistent with the classical liberal tradition, and offers an excellent paradigm in which to understand the marketplace as an evolving example of Popper's objective knowledge.

Lee Kelley,

I appreciate your effort to enlighten me on Popper vs. Mises, but I'm afraid I still don't get it.

I never read Popper. Somehow I had a feeling I wouldn't care for him, and what you said about Hayek taking his side against Mises reinforces that feeling, inasmuch as I'm on Mises' side against Hayek, in those matters. And so was Hayek really. He admitted that he compromised his principles in order to gain acceptance.

But thanks again for the effort, and keep up the good work. I really like your comments, and look forward to them.

dg lesvic,

Popper was emphatically not an empiricist, but neither was he a Cartesian-style rationalist. Critical rationalism is off that philosophical spectrum in the same way that libertarianism is off the left-right political spectrum. It is a whole other way of thinking about philosophical, epistemological, and methodological problems. Bartley referred to it as a metacontextual shift, which requires and abandoning, and in some cases, outright reversal of standards by which philosophical problems are traditionally recognised and their solutions evaluated.

Although Popper's situational anaylsis was very similar to Mises' praxeology in logical content, each thought about their theory very differently. These deeply rooted differences led both to make very different claims about what they had accomplished.