Subjectivism and Economic Analysis: Essays in memory of Ludwig ...

LÁSLÓ CSONTOSoutside observers because outside observers can hardly do more thanto establish the fact of an action. If we make the further assumptionthat the thought processes of the actors are just like ours, then weare allowed to attribute beliefs, desires, objectives and intentions tothem on the analogy of our own mental states, making their actionsthus directly and empathically understandable to us.How do we learn about our own mental states and thus how dowe get to know the mental states of other people? According to oneof the fundamental epistemological postulates of methodologicalsolipsism, we can learn about our own mental states only by way ofintrospection (Hayek 1964:44–5, 50, 75–6; Mises 1933:41, 122).Introspection is a kind of inner perception, independent of any bodilyorgan of sense, through which we can acquire (so the theory goes) asingularly reliable form of self-knowledge. This introspectively gainedself-knowledge, as a result of the basic similarity of the human mindand the commonalities of our mental structures, gives us direct accessto those thoughts, concepts and objectives with the help of which wecan understand individual and collective attitudes and actionsobservable in the world around us. In the view of the advocates ofmethodological solipsism, this introspective knowledge is not onlythe methodological starting point for the social sciences, but in itssubjective nature lies the ultimate explanation for the systematicsubjectivism of these sciences (Hayek 1952a: 192–3; 1964:50). Thisunique method of acquiring knowledge and information stretchesthe methodological rift between the social and the natural scienceseven further. While the natural sciences approach their subject mattermechanistically and externally (Mises 1940:27; Gottl 1925:255),social scientists possess a kind of a priori and internal knowledge oftheir field of study, superior to the shallow knowledge of simple causalconnections (Mises 1933:122).The principle of epistemological isolationism has some veryunpleasant substantive and methodological consequences, however.To avoid them, methodological solipsists tend to qualify their positionby saying, as Hayek (1952b:89–90) does, for example, that theassumption of the basic similarity of human consciousness is trueonly under certain circumstances and that the likelihood ofunderstanding the actions of other human beings diminishes as wemove away from our habitual and familiar social environment.Moreover, methodological solipsists are forced to admit that fromtheir epistemological point of view ‘crazy’ or mentally ill peoplecannot be considered part of humanity (Hayek 1964:79; Gottl1925:161), because it is doubtful that their mental structures are86