To all my readers (if I have any! ;o) ): I’m going out of town to visit the folks for the holidays. I’ll probably be back around the middle of next week, maybe sooner. I probably won’t be posting while I’m gone, but you never know. In any case, have a safe and happy holiday!
Yours in liberty,
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Philosopher Barry Smith has argued in several places (see “The Question of Apriorism,” for an example), contra the Austrian economists, that the action axiom is not irrefutable. He points out that an alien could deny that human beings act. I think that he is correct here if the action axiom is defined as the fact that human beings act. But even so, any attempt by a human being to refute the action axiom would still be self-defeating. In any case, I would argue (as I believe notable Austrian economists have) that the action axiom is universalizable to all volitional beings, in which case a denial by an alien that human beings act would hinge upon an empirical-contingent claim, viz. the denial that human beings are volitional beings. The truth of the action axiom is thus never in question, and it remains irrefutable.
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I comment briefly over at the Mises Economics blog on the correlation between Rand’s theory of the agent-relative nature of values and the Austrian theory of subjective value, and on value-neutrality in economic science. Also, I wholeheartedly agree with Sheldon Richman’s comment immediately following mine.
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Neil Parille has written an article on “Ayn Rand and Apriorism” over at SOLO HQ (that’s Sense of Life Objectivists Headquarters). And, as it is a subject that I myself am very much interested in and currently working on, I have commented with my own insights into the issue.
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