Hoppe’s CaricatureofEmpiricism
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In all its befuddled glory:

“I would like to challenge the very starting point of the empiricists’ philosophy. There are several conclusive refutations of empiricism. I will show the empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge to be plainly false and self-contradictory. That will then lead us to developing the Austrian position on theory, history, and forecasting.

This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.

Let us first assume it is analytical. According to the empiricist doctrine, however, an analytical proposition is nothing but scribbles on paper, hot air, entirely void of any meaningful content. It says nothing about anything real. And hence one would have to conclude that empiricism could not even say and mean what it seems to say and mean. Yet if, on the other hand, it says and means what we thought it did all along, then it does inform us about something real. As a matter of fact, it informs us about the fundamental structure of reality. It says that there is nothing in reality that can be known to be one way or another prior to future experiences which may confirm or disconfirm our hypothesis.

And if this meaningful proposition is taken to be analytical, that is, as a statement that does not allow any falsification and whose truth can be established by an analysis of its terms alone, one has no less than a glaring contradiction at hand. Empiricism itself would prove to be nothing but self-defeating nonsense.

So perhaps we should choose the other available option and declare the fundamental empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge an empirical statement. But then the empiricist position would no longer carry any weight whatsoever. For if this were done, it would have to be admitted that the proposition – as an empirical one – might well be wrong and that one would be entitled to hear on the basis of what criterion one would have to decide whether or not it was. More decisively, as an empirical proposition, right or wrong, it could only state a historical fact, something like ‘all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical.’ The statement would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones. Indeed, if empiricism’s central claim were declared an empirical proposition, empiricism would cease altogether to be an epistemology, a logic of science, and would be no more than a completely arbitrary verbal convention of calling certain arbitrary ways of dealing with certain statements certain arbitrary names. Empiricism would be a position void of any justification.” (Hoppe 2007: 33–34).

It would be difficult to pack so many non sequiturs and straw man arguments into so few paragraphs, but it is quite an achievement.

First, Hoppe conflates logical positivism, Popper’s Critical Rationalism, and other empiricist traditions. For instance, the (1) logical positivist verifiability criterion for meaningfulness is conflated with (2) Popper’s falsifiability criterion for scientific knowledge.

Secondly, Hoppe imputes to all his empiricist opponents a certain view of the logical positivists called the verifiabilitycriterionformeaningfulness, but can’t even get that view right, and produces a garbled statement of it.

The logical positivists did not say that an analytic a priori statement is “scribbles on paper, hot air, entirely void of any meaningful content” or “self-defeating nonsense” at all. They said that of metaphysical propositions that were neither analytic a priori nor synthetic a posteriori, and that could not in principle be verified.

So the logical positivists did clearly think that mathematics and other valid analytic a priori statements had meaningful, cognitive content, although this content did not assert anything necessarily true about the real world. Moreover, Popper’s falsifiability criterion for scientific knowledge does not state that metaphysical propositions have no meaningful cognitive content, but only that they are not scientific statements.

And the fact is that the strict verifiability criterion for meaningfulness was quickly weakened and abandoned, and the type of empiricism defended in modern analytic philosophy has long since ceased to make any such extreme claims.

Then we have this:

“This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.”

And the answer is: that empiricist statement about epistemology is synthetic a posteriori.

But, when Hoppe considers this possibility, he commits a bizarre non sequitur:

“So perhaps we should choose the other available option and declare the fundamental empiricist distinction between empirical and analytical knowledge an empirical statement. But then the empiricist position would no longer carry any weight whatsoever. For if this were done, it would have to be admitted that the proposition – as an empirical one – might well be wrong and that one would be entitled to hear on the basis of what criterion one would have to decide whether or not it was. More decisively, as an empirical proposition, right or wrong, it could only state a historical fact, something like ‘all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical.’ The statement would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones. Indeed, if empiricism’s central claim were declared an empirical proposition, empiricism would cease altogether to be an epistemology, a logic of science, and would be no more than a completely arbitrary verbal convention of calling certain arbitrary ways of dealing with certain statements certain arbitrary names. Empiricism would be a position void of any justification.” (Hoppe 2007: 34).

According to Hoppe, just because the statement that

“Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge”

is synthetic a posteriori, then the “empiricist position” can “no longer carry any weight whatsoever,” and empiricism “would cease altogether to be an epistemology.”

Indeed, the defence of the original epistemological principle is empirical and its truth is only probable or highly probable, but the lack of certainty produces no such epistemological crisis for empiricism, for the reason that it never aimed at absolute necessary truth in the first place, as Hoppe demands. Our best scientific theories do not have apodictic truth, nor does the inductive method yield absolute certainty, yet modern science is incredibly successful.

The rejection of dogmatism and the willingness to regard any scientific theory as capable of revision or falsification are what give modern scientific epistemology its great strength.

But if we adopted the same type of argument used by Hoppe, then we must conclude that modern science must “no longer carry any weight whatsoever” and “would cease altogether to be an epistemology.”

Secondly, the legitimate response of an empiricist to a Rationalist that “all heretofore scrutinized propositions fall indeed into the two categories analytical and empirical” can be defended as true. Hoppe’s point here carries no weight.

We need only look at the way Kant’s original synthetic a priori knowledge, such as Euclidean geometry, necessary and deterministic causation, or certain laws of logic have either been refuted by modern science or seriously questioned.

Hoppe’s next statement that the empiricist’s classification of knowledge “would be entirely irrelevant for determining whether it would be possible to produce propositions that are true a priori and are still empirical ones” is also a non sequitur, since, on the contrary, it is a defensible starting point for analysing all statements and all future statements and determining whether they could possibly provide synthetic truth but be known a priori. If, for example, some Rationalist asserts that statement x is a synthetic a priori truth, but we discover that the real world produces overwhelming empirical evidence against the proposition, then it is the Rationalist who is faced with an epistemological crisis.

And of course Hoppe seems totally unaware of recent developments in analytic epistemology, such as the Kripkean necessary a posteriori or (more controversially) the contingent a priori, which expand the range of epistemological types of knowledge, but which are of no comfort to the traditional Rationalist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 2007. Economic Science and the Austrian Method. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn. Ala.

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