[Philosophical Method: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Williamson (Oxford University Press, 2020; xvii + 142pp)]
Timothy Williamson is one of the foremost contemporary analytic philosophers, and some of the ideas in this book can be used to defend the epistemological views of Murray Rothbard, though there are some differences as well. I suspect that doing this is far from Williamson’s intention; and, though I don’t know what his political opinions are, some of his comments, e.g., on “climate change,” suggest that they are of a conventional leftist sort, and—were he apprised of what I am attempting here—he would probably recoil in horror.
Some people question the action axiom—the starting point of Austrian praxeology—by saying that, “I know that I act, because I know what’s in my own mind, but how do I know that anybody else acts?” In my many years of lecturing on praxeology, I have often gotten this response from students, and when I respond that praxeology isn’t an attempt to solve the problem of other minds, I am met with disbelief.
If you look at the opening chapter of Man, Economy, and State, though, you will see that this sort of skepticism doesn’t worry Rothbard. He takes for granted that other people think and act in the same fashion he does. Here is what he says:
THE DISTINCTIVE AND CRUCIAL FEATURE in the study of man is the concept of action. Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior. It is therefore sharply distinguishable from those observed movements which, from the point of view of man, are not purposeful. These include all the observed movements of inorganic matter and those types of human behavior that are purely reflex, that are simply involuntary responses to certain stimuli. Human action, on the other hand, can be meaningfully interpreted by other men, for it is governed by a certain purpose that the actor has in view. The purpose of a man’s act is his end; the desire to achieve this end is the man’s motive for instituting the action.
All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings. We could not conceive of human beings who do not act purposefully, who have no ends in view that they desire and attempt to attain. Things that did not act, that did not behave purposefully, would no longer be classified as human.
It is this fundamental truth—this axiom of human action—that forms the key to our study. The entire realm of praxeology and its best developed subdivision, economics, is based on an analysis of the necessary logical implications of this concept. The fact that men act by virtue of their being human is indisputable and incontrovertible. To assume the contrary would be an absurdity. The contrary—the absence of motivated behavior—would apply only to plants and inorganic matter. (emphasis in original)
Isn’t he being philosophically naïve in doing so? In fact, he is not and here is where Williamson can help us. He says that, in philosophy, we shouldn’t begin from a starting point that takes everything as open to doubt except your own thinking. On the contrary, the proper beginning is with common sense: “We have no choice but to start from the knowledge and beliefs we already have, and the methods we have for getting new knowledge and beliefs. In a phrase, we have to start with common sense” (emphasis in original). And it is common sense that other people have minds.
But the critic might respond,
I can’t observe what goes on in someone else’s mind. And according to physics, nothing really exists anyway except subatomic particles and fields of various sorts. Everything else is just an appearance; hence “man acts” is no more than a convention that we find useful to adopt.
It’s true that I can’t see someone else’s thoughts, but the claim that I am confined to a world of mere appearances quickly leads to a morass:
On their view, there are really no such things as the large-scale objects of common sense, no sticks or stones, or tables and chairs. Although these appear to be large-scale objects, really they are not. But now the danger in a radical rejection of common sense starts to emerge. For to whom do these appear to be large-scale objects? To us humans, apparently. . . But humans are large-scale objects too, so in the radical view there are no humans, thus it doesn’t even appear to anyone that there are sticks and stones. (emphasis in original)
In brief, the “appearances” view is a self-undermining theory. Let’s look at another criticism of praxeology that Williamson helps us address. The criticism is that Rothbard doesn’t give a precise definition of action, merely identifying it as “purposeful behavior.” How can he talk about an action axiom that isn’t even exactly defined? Williamson points out that the alleged “problem” is quite common in mathematics and logic:
There are no standard mathematical definitions of “belongs” or “set”. . . What we need for clear reasoning are not trivial “truths by definition” by a strange, mythical standard of “indubitability.” Rather, the point is to make mistakes in reasoning clearly visible, as they are in mathematics.
The critic needs to show where Rothbard has made a mistake in his reasoning, and to demand a more “exact” definition from him is to hold him to an unrealistic requirement.
Williamson helps us grasp why, like Rothbard, we ought to reject the Cartesian doubt of common sense. As Williamson notes, it didn’t get Descartes anywhere—once he doubted everything except his own thinking, he was unable to reconstruct the world, except by blatantly weak arguments.
