On Method

Author: Indigo Curnick

Date: 2026-04-19

#philosophy  


Introduction

"Is more beef or pork sold in the United Kingdom?", "How can iron ore be refined into iron?", "is abortion ethical?". These are are all questions we might like to answer. However, these questions can not all be answered in the same way.

For beef and pork sales, we will want to gather retail data. That might not even exist in the way we want, but we could look at tax receipts for instance.

For the refining of iron ore into iron, the discovery process was likely accidental. Fires on iron rich sand left behind small lumps of a strange new material. We then needed more empirical experiments. What materials contain iron ore? What is the necessary temperature required to refine it? How can we produce such temperatures? How do we measure impurity? And so on and so forth

For abortion, the debate is on philosophical grounds. That includes religious discussions, arguments about law and rights.

Each of these questions requires a very different technique for us to solve. If we used religious arguments to try and figure out beef and pork sales, we'd catastrophically fail. If we used tax receipts to figure out how to refine iron, we'd catastrophically fail. If we tried looking at iron purity to figure out if abortion is ethical, we'd catastrophically fail.

So, how do we know what the correct method is? The answer is often that we don't: many experiments don't tell us what we think they may have. Many scientists have had the experience of their work being misinterpreted by the general media. For instance, tenuous results being interpreted as conclusive; links being interpreted as causes and so on.

In this blog I wish to do something that as far as I can tell has never been before done. I will engage in the first study of the theory of comparative epistemic practices. I would have loved to call this field "methodology" but that word is sadly taken, leaving us with the next best option of gnoseotechnics (from "gnosis" (knowledge) and "techne" (craft)).

In this blog, I can not possible enumerate every single methodology ever crafted. The amount of methodologies so far discovered is impossible to know, but functionally it's already infinite. In the future this number is certain to increase. Thus, my goal will be to adumbrate the following methodologies:

All these are huge fields, which could have many blogs written on each one. I aim only to give a flavour of each.

Some work has already been done by others. The philosophers of science have done extraordinary work in the philosophy of science and developed methods there. The philosophy of mathematics is nearly as developed. Philosophy of history and economics is also somewhat developed but less well known. Philosophy of journalism is developed basically not at all.

It is important to note that for each field I discuss, that field has practitioners. Those practitioners are people. You, the reader of this blog, are also a person. These fields of study are not made by some divine infinite being in some plane of eternal time, space and resources. Due consideration must be given to this fact. We shall call this the human limitation, and will refer back to it constantly.

Inspirations

I initially became interested in this topic during the COVID-19 pandemic. I disliked how the phrase "trust the science" was used; it seemed, ironically, deeply anti-scientific. Around the same time, I also read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, in which he describes a kind of proto-gnoseotechnic, which we'll look at later.

Since then, I've read a number of works which deal with method. It was perhaps coincidental, some of them at first seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with epistemology. However, I kept noticing this theme pop up over and over again.

I've searched fairly wide for anyone who has done work similar to this before, but I think each field is cut off from the others. This is where my other background comes into play. At university, I was the president of the Polymath Society. We aimed at cross discipline communication. This is why I've never been afraid to stick my nose into a broad range of fields.

Beyond that, I love sorting, composing and categorising. Taxonomy is deeply pleasing! Who wouldn't want a fully worked out taxonomy of everything!?

The Aims of Gnoseotechnics

What is the aim of gnoseotechnics? Gnoseotechnics aims to categorise different kinds of methodologies, describe them, and then select the correct methodology for a given study.

Methods are very important. If we use the wrong method for a particular area of study we will produce nonsensical results. Thus a second goal of gnoseotechnics is to asses the methodologies used in a study. We want to determine if that study is sound. From the perspective of gnoseotechnics, a study can be considered sound if its conclusions are even possible to be drawn from the methodology used.

Why hasn't gnoseotechnics been developed before by someone else? Surely if this is important, then there would have been other thinkers who have developed this field before? That's true, and does need to be addressed. I think the answer to this is other thinkers have essentially developed this before. Certain thinkers, like Alexander Bird, Ludvig von Mises and James Burnham have in fact essentially made many of the distinctions I will outline in this blog. However, these thinkers have been generally siloed into their own fields. For instance, Alexander Bird has a phenomenal grasp of method in natural science, but has, as far as I am aware, never encountered the works of Mises. Gnoseotechnics is by its very nature a cross discipline field.

An Apology

This is the first piece I've ever written on gnoseotechnics, so the field is in it's very earliest days. There are bound to be many errors. There are ideas I have not yet fully developed and claims not yet fully warranted. Therefore, I encourage you to read critically. If I waited till all ideas were totally and fully developed before writing this piece, it would surely have taken me eternity.

You'll also notice there is no study in this blog of the methods of philosophy. This is because at the moment I've not been able to develop any satisfying answer to what this is beyond just "thinking". One day, gnoseotechnics will study gnoseotechnics, but not today.

The Method of Logic

Logic is the study of the formats of arguments and their validity. The absolute simplest form in logic I can think of is modus ponens, which goes like this

Logic does not deal with the content of arguments. You could substitute A for "dog" and B for "cat"

which makes no sense whatsoever, but logic is not concerned with that. Logic is concerned only with a priori structures of argument and their validity.

What is the method of logic? This is still very much a field open for debate. That debate is well beyond the scope of this blog, but we shall proceed along the lines of the Platonist-ish answer of rational intuition. This would be the view developed by someone like Kurt Gödel (see e.g. Gödel (1990)).

This view is also expressed well by Smith (1996). Smith uses the example of the transitive law of "If A is a part of B, and B a part of C, then A is also a part of C". He says

It may be that some of us may recgonize a point in our lives when we first apprehended this law. But still, it is difficult seriously to entertain the thesis that our knowledge of the law is a result of empirical research, of observation and induction. The proposition in question is, however, clearly of extraordinary importance for every science and for every scientific experiment

The same could be said about any other logical laws e.g. modus ponens, modus tollens and other you might come across.

In other words, the view is that these logic laws are "out there" already in the world, and we discover rather than invent them. The method of discovery is simply direct intuition.

The Method of Mathematics

Mathematics is a slight extension of logic. As we saw, the goal of logic is the study of valid inferences. The goal of mathematics is the study of abstract a priori objects such as numbers, space, groups and so on. The method of this study is logic.

The precise boundary between mathematics and logic is theoretically sharp but in practice extraordinarily blurry. While theoretically the above distinction I presented is sharp and hard, in practice, there are few people working as "pure logicians" and "pure mathematicians", and the fields are usually developed by the same people, at the same time, in the same works.

A side note here, many people say that mathematics is the most "pure" field. It's usually presented in jokes like how psychology is applied biology, which is applied chemistry, which is applied physics which is applied mathematics. However, I do take issue with this, if any is the most "pure" field it is logic, which mathematics applies to study a priori objects.

Like logic, mathematics is an entirely a priori field of study. No empirical knowledge can be used, strictly, to study abstract objects. A discussion of the full nature of abstract or a priori objects and structures simply can not be in scope for this blog, and regrettably, this is also an area I have not read as much as I wish I had. Nevertheless, the exact nature of the objects of study for mathematics isn't strictly necessary here. The point from the perspective of gnoseotechnics is that mathematics is a purely a priori field. As such, I think any view of mathematics that allows for this would work just as well for our purposes, for example Platonism (see e.g. Maddy (1997) or Maddy (2000)) or structuralism (see e.g. Benacerraf (1965), Shapiro (1997) or Shapiro (2000)).

What is the method of mathematics? The method of mathematics is logic itself. Critically, the method of mathematics is not the method of logic, but logic in itself. In other words, logic can be considered a "complete" tool for the practice of mathematics. formally, logic is assumed epistemically given when practising mathematics.

The assumption of logic being an epistemic given means that when practicing mathematics, we simply assume the discovered relationships of inference within logic are correct. There are several reasons to do this.

The first is that logic is a very well developed field already, and taking what is known already as correct without question is useful from the perspective of efficiency: if every treatise on mathematics had to begin reviewing all logic from first principles we would literally never get anywhere. This is the human limitation, mathematicians need to actually get on with mathematics!

The second is that logic itself is still a field of active debate. Some logicians, such as Hilary Putnam (see, for example, Putnam (1969)) argue that logic is (very charitably) empirical, or (less charitably) fake or made up. Again this is a human limitation - we simply can't wait for the debate to be settled before starting on mathematics because we want things like computers and planes and so on, which depend upon developing the field of mathematics.

The third is that logic is not yet complete. There are certainly many more things left for us to discover in the field of logic, but we can proceed forward anyway using the parts we do already know and understand.

The Method of Journalism

Turning away from a priori science now and into the realm of empirical science we have journalism.

Journalism isn't really a science in and of itself, nor is it exactly a field of study. Rather journalism is a foundational technique or method that all empirical fields of study depend upon.

Journalism is nothing more than simply recording things that happen. It is the mere act of writing down events as observed.

Our investigation will not consider journalistic ethics whatsoever. While that is a valid field of study in itself, what concerns us is more the scope and boundaries of what journalism can actually do.

As I stated, journalism is the basic record of events as observed and nothing more. Examples might be "I went to a kite show today", "yesterday, the house passed the bill 120 votes to 12", "the train arrived 2 minutes late", "120.0m, 132.2m, 117.3m" (an engineer recording how far a canon fires a cannonball).

There's not much more to say about journalism done correctly then. It's really rather simple. However, there are some considerations that need to be made when it comes to the reliability of journalism.

The most important consideration is by far bias. Whenever a human being records something, some degree of bias slips in. In politics, the bias can be immense. In natural science it is usually, but not always, marginal. When recording current events which might be relevant to history or politics, I think it is impossible for there to ever truly be bias free journalism.

A secondary consideration is relevance. In natural sciences, we can usually design an experiment and be very clear in our understanding of what measurements will be relevant. However, when it comes to politics or history it's not always clear what will be relevant. Many events and statistics will never be recorded, but may become interesting or important in hindsight.

The Methods of Human Action

The science of human action was treated very well by von Mises (1998). This section will be somewhat longer than others as we will consider both history proper and also praxeology, as well as an example of a specific field within history, namely the science of power.

As Mises explains:

There are two main branches of the sciences of human action: praxeology and history.

History is the collection and systematic arrangement of all data of experience concerning human action. It deals with the concrete content of human action. It studies all human endeavors in their infinite multiplicity and variety and all individual actions with all their accidental, special, and particular implications. It scrutinizes the ideas guiding acting men and the outcome of the actions performed. It embraces every aspect of human activities. It is on the one hand general history and on the other hand the history of various narrower fields

Therefore, we shall consider both history and praxeology in turn.

The Method of History

History is the study of the past. The goal of history is to construct a framework to help understand why events happened the way they did, and to extrapolate these frameworks into the future to hopefully gain some wisdom or some prediction of what might happen in the future. As Mises explains

The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action. We are never in a position to observe the change in one element only, all other conditions of the event being equal to a case in which the element concerned did not change. Historical experience as an experience of complex phenomena does not provide us with facts in the sense in which the natural sciences employ this term to signify isolated events tested in experiments. The information conveyed by historical experience cannot be used as building material for the construction of theories and the prediction of future events. Every historical experience is open to various interpretations, and is in fact interpreted in different ways.

As Mises says, predictions of the future and even the frameworks of the past are never ironclad like the understanding and predictions we can make in natural sciences, for reasons we will see later. This does not mean that the process has no value whatsoever, but we understand we are doing the best we possibly can.

The method that historians have to actually use is the following.

First, historical period and topic selection must be made. This would be coming up with specific real questions which could potentially have specific real answers. Examples include "why did the French Revolution happen?", "why did European nations colonise America and not the other way around in the 1500s?", "in what ways did the Bible influence politics in 9th century England?" and so on.

Second, sources must be selected and evaluated. This is usually the lengthiest and most challenging part of the method of history. In this step the historian must rely upon the sources and works of journalists from the past. This is fraught with challenges. Consider for example the question: "why did the French Revolution happen?". The historian would want to wade through many thousands of written accounts from the time for example diaries, pamphlets, newspapers, books, reports and so on. They would also need to (if the field is not totally new) evaluate secondary sources which have already been written by other historians.

By selection and evaluation I mean judging a source by relevance, accuracy, completeness and bias.

For relevance, I mean deciding if a source could even be useful for answering the question. For example the historian might get a list of all works published in France in 1788 from their library. In this might be a pamphlet containing instructions on knitting a jumper. There is likely very little information to be gained from such a work when discussing the question of the revolution.

By accuracy I mean evaluating sources for truth. It is entirely possible that a source contains simple factual errors like incorrect dates, numbers, events and so forth. This is usually done by considering a large number of sources: if they all agree on certain points, we can usually eliminate the outliers.

For completeness, we are considering the fact that events were recorded at the time, and the journalists then were not necessarily interested in the same topics as the historian now. They may have left out, for reasons of simple economy, information that the historian now craves.

For bias, we consider the perspectives of those writing the sources. "Descriptions" of events by pro-revolutionary figures will vary wildly from "descriptions" of events by pro-royalist figures. The historian must be prepared to at least address this in their analysis.

Third, a narrative must be crafted. This is the analysis itself; for instance in our French Revolution example the historian might craft a narrative that hunger in the population creates revolutionary sentiments.

Fourth, the constructed framework may be used for predictive power, if relevant. In the French Revolution example, the historian might offer the experience that a starving population is prone to revolution and so could identify parts of the world in which this is true, and so identify some potential hotbeds of revolution. The historian must always remember that circumstances are never the same in the past as the present, so the predictions will never carry ironclad accuracy.

The Method of the Science of Power

The science of power is the study of sovereignty; who is in control of political institutions. For our study of the science of power we shall look to Burnham (1943). Burnham begins

There are certain goals which are peculiar and proper to science, without which science does not exist. These are: the accurate and systematic description of public facts; the attempt to correlate sets of these facts in laws; and, through these correlations, the attempt to predict, with some degree of probability, future facts. Many scientific investigations do not try to go beyond these specific goals; nor is there any need for them to do so. In the field of historical, social and political science, as in other sciences, these goals might be, and sometimes are, alone relevant. But without these goals, whether or not there are also others, an inquiry is not scientific.

Burnham's analysis for politics is to have a model of real and formal meanings for political texts. The formal meaning is the words presented in the text, while the real meaning is the meaning when we "read between the lines". An example of this can be more illustrative.

Dante in De Monarchia (Alighieri (1904)), written 1313, argues for all of mankind to be ruled by a single empire which should be ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor, and his authority independent of the Catholic Church. He argues this based on the "evidence" that the ultimate goal is the "development of mankind's potentialities" (and so a one world government should encourage these potentialities); that the Roman people are descended from Trojan Aeneas and that Pontius Pilot sentenced Christ to death (and so the Holy Roman Emperor is the rightful ruler); and that God created mankind with body and soul (and so a duality of Church and State should exist).

Quoting Burnham at length (because there is nothing I can do to improve on the following paragraphs)

Eternal salvation, the highest development of man's potentialities, everlasting peace, unit, and harmony, the delicate balance of abstract relations between Church and State, all these ghosts and myths evaporate, along with the whole elaborate structure of theology, metaphysics, allegory, miracle and fable. The entire formal meaning, which has told us nothing and proved nothing, assumes its genuine role of merely expressing and disguising the real meaning. The real meaning is simply an impassioned propagandistic defense of the point of view of the turncoat Bianchi exiles from Florence, specifically; and more generally of the broader Ghibelline point of view to which these Bianchi capitulated. De Monarchia is, we might say, a Ghibelline Party Platform.

It should not be imagined, however, that this point of view is argued rationally, that there is offered in its favor any proof or evidence, that any demonstration is attempted to show that its acceptance would contribute to human welfare. The proof and evidence and demonstration, such as they are, are all devoted to the mysteries of the formal meaning. The real meaning is expressed and projected indirectly through the formal meaning, and is supported by nothing more than emotion, prejudice and confusion. The real aims are this intellectually irresponsible, subject to not intellectual check or control. Even if they were justifiable, the case for them is in no degree established.

The ostensible goals of the formal argument are noble, high-minded, what people often call "idealistic". This serves to create a favorable emotional response in the reader, to disarm him, to lead him to believe in the "good will" of the author. The unwary reader carries this attitude over to the practical aims of the real argument. But what of these latter aims, what do they concretely amount to? When we dig behind the formal façade, they emerge as vengeful and reactionary.

They are the aims of an embittered and incompetent set of traitors. Dante and his friends had failed miserably in their political careers. They had been defeated in their attempt to take over the government of their country. Quite properly, in accordance with the customs of the time, and for the interests of internal security, they had been exiled. They then joined with the disintegrated forces of earlier exiles, whose only wish was to revenge themselves on Florence, and to destroy her power. The enlarged group also failed. They then crawled slavishly to the feet of the Republic's oldest and most thorough enemy - the Emperor - begging him to do what they were too weak and too stupid to have done. The aims of the Empire in northern Italy were very far indeed from eternal salvation, universal peace, and the highest development of man's potentialities. The Empire clutched greedily after the amazing wealth and resources of these remarkable cities, and dreamed of reducing their proud, fierce independence to the tyrannical rule of its Gauleiters.

In short, there is a divergence between the real and formal meanings. In a scheme of a divergence between real and formal meanings, Burnham finds

  1. There is a huge divorce between the formal meaning and arguments and the real meaning and real arguments (but there are usually no real arguments in most political works)
  2. The formal aims are either supernatural or transcendental, or are so utopian as to be totally unachievable. Thus, a total distortion of the truth is necessary. And of course, it is impossible to give an account of how these "goals" could be reached
  3. From a purely logical point of view the goals and methods given in the formal arguments may be good or bad, but this has literally no impact whatsoever on the real meaning. Politically, very well argued formal points are no more successful than those which are full of logical fallacies
  4. The formal meaning serves as an indirect but obfuscating metric for the real meaning; we think we are debating human rights and the relationship between Church and state but it is an argument about whether one faction or the other controls a country.
  5. The real meaning is always irresponsible at best. Sometimes it might be a good aim, but no reason for it is ever actually given; reasons and arguments and evidence are always at the formal level, never the real level.

In short, a political work in which the real and formal meanings diverge can not be considered a scientific work. Let's turn instead to a thinker who is in fact scientific in his political activities.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is widely considered the father of modern political philosophy, and is likely the first true political scientist. In The Prince (Machiavelli (1903)) Machiavelli is concerned with the unification of Italy. In the time he was writing, Italy was a collection of disorganised states. In fact, the political structure of compact, efficient and progressive city-states which was a boon in Dante's time, now 200 years later leaves Italy vulnerable to intrusion from more modern states like Austria, France and Spain. For example, the Kingdom of Naples in the south, fell to Spanish control around 1502-04.

Critically, Machiavelli does not have a divergence between real and formal meaning in his text. His stated intentions are the unification of Italy, and his real intentions are also the unification of Italy. His goal is not lofty nor utopian - Spain, France and England had all demonstrated that his vision was at least in principle achievable. He did not make allusions to transcendental concepts or religious allegory for arguments, instead staying focused on how an actual real human ("The Prince") would actually go about really physically unifying Italy in the real world.

Machiavelli, was arguing, as Neema Parvini in The Populist Delusion (Parvini (2022)) would say: "how it is, and not how it ought to be". Dante, by contrast, was not arguing for how things are, but instead how he would like them to be.

So we are now in a position to finally contrast what is and is not the methodology of the science of power. First, there must be no divergence between real and formal meanings. Second, the question, evidence and arguments must stay focused on what is real and not what is transcendental, allegorical or mythical. Third, the analysis must be done in the world as it is and not how it "ought" to be. Finally, the step by step process mirrors any other empirical historical analysis: beginning from a question, collecting evidence, evaluating evidence for accuracy and relevance, and finally drawing conclusions.

As a final note, Machiavelli is not necessarily totally pure in his scientific approach. For instance, his question was essentially "how can Italy be unified?". Perhaps it would be better to consider Machiavelli a kind of political engineer - there is some intrusion of politics as he wants it rather than politics as it is here, but we can forgive this given how early in the development of science he is. A more scientific way to phrase his question would be "will Italy unify [in the next X years]?". The answer to which was "not in Machiavelli's lifetime". While Machiavelli lived 1469-1527, the unification of Italy took place between 1848 and 1871.

Mises vs. Burnham

Astute readers might notice that there is a conflict between Mises and Burnham. Mises says that "[t]he information conveyed by historical experience cannot be used as building material for the construction of theories and the prediction of future events". Yet, Burnham in the above section demonstrates using historical experience to construct a theory and make future predictions. How do we resolve this conflict?

I believe there is actually no conflict between Mises and Burnham, but we must be subtle in our investigation.

Burnham is not an epistemologist, and speaks in much looser terms than Mises when it comes to the epistemic nature of the scientific investigation. Mises would never consider a historical theory or predictions "real" as they have some degree of uncertainty. Burnham works far more practically. If you pressed him, he would probably have admitted that historical theories are not as ironclad as a law of physics.

The subtle distinction is found in the phrase "the attempt to predict, with some degree of probability". Epistemically, this is us running into the human limitation again. While it is true that laws on the same scale of physics can't be achieved, we still need to organise society. So, we can still make some headway on studying history (or power, in this case), even if we understand it will never be fully reliable. Mises, in such a theoretical work, cares not for the human limitation.

This can be seen easily in the fact that Machiavelli's main goal; the unification of Italy (specifically under the Florentine de Medici family) did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, I would strongly make the claim that Machiavelli did the best possible science given the limitations of the time, and of the nature of the science of power more generally.

The Method of Praxeology

Quite apart from history and the science of power we have already looked at, and especially from natural science which we will look at soon, is the method of praxeology. Praxeology is the study of human action, but it is not historical. Mises also defines history as a study of human action, but differentiates them like so:

A limitation similar to that which the experimentally tested theories enjoin upon the attempts to interpret and elucidate individual physical, chemical, and physiological events is provided by praxeology in the field of human history. Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events. Without them we should not be able to see in the course of events anything else than kaleidoscopic change and chaotic muddle.

This view may strike some modern readers as unusual: how is it possible to make concrete statements about human action without any empirical observations of humans? The methodology in which we do this is via the methodology of logic. In this way praxeology is very similar to mathematics in the sense that it rests upon logic. However there are some differences.

The chief difference of course is the objects of study. As discussed in the section on mathematics, it is studying abstract a priori objects, while praxeology studies human actions.

How is this viewpoint justified? I wrote a blog back in 2023 (Curnick (2023)) where I advanced the position given in Hoppe (1995). That position is a broadly Kantian position where I argue that praxeological claims are synthetic a priori in nature.

We can summarise the basic points again here. First, there are two sets of ways in which we could categorise a statement. First is the analytic-synthetic distinction:

Then there is the a priori-a posteriori distinction:

Then for any given statement you can select one of each, giving four possible types of statements.

Analytic a posteriori statements do not exist. If the predicate is already contained within the subject, what could possibly be learned from empirical observation? You already know everything from the analytic definition.

Synthetic a posteriori statements are generally not controversial, they provide new knowledge about the world by observing the world. This is really the foundation of natural sciences which we will look at later. An example of this might be "grass is green".

Analytic a priori statements are also generally not controversial. The predicate is contained within the subject, so for instance we know that all three sided shapes are triangles simply because that is how triangle is defined.

Synthetic a priori statements are the unique characteristic of the Kantian view. These statements have the property that they can be known without empirical evidence, but also that reason alone is not sufficient to justify them. This seems at first impossible. However, there is an extraordinarily subtle argument used. These statements are usually of the type that they can not be argued against without first tacitly admitting to their truth.

An example is helpful. You could imagine, or make the case, that humans act in a mechanical way. However, the genius move of the synthetic a priori statement is to recognise that if you were to make such an argument, you would yourself be a human purposefully acting to make an argument [against humans purposefully acting]. In other words, the fact you could argue against the proposition is the proof of the proposition. How we use this to justify praxeology is to expand the definition of "human" to include "purposeful actor".

The critical point is that the statements of praxeology are themselves analytic statements that follow from the synthetic a priori statement that humans engage in purposeful action.

An example is more illuminating here. Let's go with the exchange law, which Hoppe (1995) states as

Whenever two people A and B engage in a voluntary exchange, they must both expect to profit from it. And they must have reverse preference orders for the goods and services exchanged so that A values what he receives from B more highly than what he gives to him, and B must evaluate the same things the other way around.

So, since we know that A and B are acting purposefully, the rest follows analytically. For A to value the goods of B more than their own means that A expects to profit from the exchange which means that the exchange happens voluntarily. In fact, this is really just a tautology since all three statements mean the same thing.

In short, praxeology is the study of human action in and of itself. It is done without any reference to concrete human acts. It rests upon a bedrock of Kantian synthetic a priori statements, and proceeds from there by logic. However, it is important to keep in mind the conclusions of praxeology are limited in scope. While they are always ironclad laws, similar in weight to the laws of physics, there are not that many of them.

The Method of Natural Science

We can begin by returning to Burnham here

There are certain goals which are peculiar and proper to science, without which science does not exist. These are: the accurate and systematic description of public facts; the attempt to correlate sets of these facts in laws; and, through these correlations, the attempt to predict, with some degree of probability, future facts.

What we saw in the section of history was a series of inconveniences which prevented us from realising the above quote from Burnham in its entirety. However, we are unshackled from those same limitations in the natural sciences.

First, our sources are much less unreliable. Observations in natural science tend to have little, if any, bias. They are also immediately relevant to the experiment at hand.

Experiments can also be repeated over and over, as many times as required to reach whatever degree of confidence we like.

Furthermore, we can now correlate these observations into laws, usually by the use of mathematics. From those we can make predictions about the future which don't just have a high probability of success also but a degree of certainty.

The objects of study for natural science is physical phenomena. The methodology for this is the scientific method. This involves the following steps.

First, a question is made. The question is usually spurred by some observation of reality. For instance "how does the moon orbit the earth?", "why does salt dissolve in water?", "what is the purpose of the spikes on cat's tongues?" and so on.

At this step, it's generally a good idea to do prior background research. For any question you might ask at this point, there's probably already good literature on it. In fact, it is possible that the question has already been answered, or at least, there has been an attempt to answer it. Doing this can help refine the question, provide additional background or observations, and help in upcoming steps about experimental design. This research stage isn't strictly necessary, so I won't consider it a core part of the scientific method but in practice not doing this is deeply unwise.

Second, a hypothesis is be formed. If you wisely did background research, you can check that your hypothesis hasn't already been ruled out. At any rate, a hypothesis is an educated guess about what the answer might be. The goal here is to create something that we can test. If the hypothesis is true, then what would be the consequence?

Third, the experiment. By using the hypothesis, we can design an experiment which allows us to find evidence that either rules in or rules out the hypothesis (actually, there's a lot of debate within philosophy of science about whether science can prove something to be true, or only prove things are not true. But I'm not touching that one right now!). This step is the one which utilises journalism as critical method!

Fourth, is gathering and analysing results. From the experiment, we'll have a lot of raw data which needs to be categorised, collated and otherwise have some kind of statistical analysis applied.

Fifth is the conclusion, where we see if the results of the analysis confirm or reject the hypothesis.

The scientific method is iterative. We make borderline insignificant progress on each cycle. However, over the course of centuries millions of people make this loop billions of times between them and suddenly very refined hypothesis are arrived at.

The sixth step then is to start forming theories. These are more concrete forms of hypothesis which arise from many repetitions. We use theories to make predictions about future states of affairs and results of later experiments. The hallmark of successful science is theories which continuously generate successful predictions.

The Axioms of Natural Science Which Separate it From History

We've enumerated the differences above between history and natural science, and how this means natural science can be much more ironclad in its conclusions. This should immediately raise the issue though of how we know these differences are real.

This is due to some axioms that natural science can rest upon.

The first is that the universe operates by natural laws which can be investigated and described. History does not have this axiom because societies very clearly do not have such laws - for any rule you can easily find a counterexample.

But how do we know that the universe has such axioms? There are several viewpoints on this. For the purposes of this blog, we are assuming that such an axiom can be taken.

Not everyone agrees with this take, most famously of course is Hume (1888) and Hume (1757), but with notable upgrades in more recent years by Goodman (1983) and Popper (2002). A few different responses exist. Perhaps the strongest response is that of scientific realism, see for instance BonJour (1998). Another response is that of pragmatism, see for instance Brandom (1998).

While I am a proponent of the realist take here, it's way beyond the scope of this blog. The pragmatist view can be summarised extremely briefly though as simply if we do not do this, then science, and more generally, learning anything about the world, becomes impossible. Because of the human limitation we take this axiom because we need to get things done.

A consequence of this axiom is a further axiom which lets us be a little differential within natural science. Within sciences like physics or chemistry, this also allows us to rerun experiments. When we say experiment by dissolving salt in water, we can make the assumption that different instances of salt molecules do not behave under different natural laws and so we can repeat "the same" experiments with different instances of "the same" materials.

This is actually the reason why psychology is "weaker" than physics or chemistry, mainly because the repeat assumption can not hold in psychology. Obviously different people do not behave the same. And even within that, a person can't repeat the same experiment again, as the first experiment will change them enough to be different (now, having memory of the first experiment). A full treatment of psychology is beyond the scope of this blog though.

Why Are the Flaws of Journalism Less Prevalent with Natural Science than History?

As mentioned, both natural science and history depend upon journalism for the inputs to those sciences. However, in the history section we spent a lot of time developing ideas about collating and evaluating sources as a critical part of the historical process. No discussion on the same order is necessary for natural sciences. Why is this?

First and foremost, bias just tends to be much less significant in science than history. For instance, at one point in time we needed to measure the speed of sound. It's almost inconceivable that someone will have so much vested interest in the speed of sound being 342 metres per second rather than 343 metres per second (at standard conditions). However, in the kinds of journalism that's required for history this bias absolutely can not be ignored. Take any politics for instance: in the US almost everyone either supports Republicans or Democrats; any "objective" account of the day's political proceedings needs to take that into account.

Secondly, relevance is much easier to establish in natural science. Typically a particular variable (or set of variables) are measured which have been determined before the experiment started to be relevant. Usually this is associated with some mathematical investigation before to establish relevancy. So in natural science, when we record these variables, we're already confident that they have some relevance to our case. The historian however does not have this luxury. The diarists, essayists, journalists, opinionists of the time were very unlikely to be thinking about and asking the same question as the historian now. And so the historian has to wade through and select the most relevant sources they can find.

Third, natural scientists can rerun and try again. If there is bias in the experimentalist, a different experimentalist will read the results, take issue and perform their own experiment. The historian can not magically go back in time and get some more impartial observer to make records. Similarly, if the natural scientist completes an experiment and finds the measurements don't quite tell them what they expected, a new experiment can be designed. The historian can not simply go back in time and get some more astute diarist to write more things down.

Can Natural Science Ever Make Ethical Decisions?

Sometimes natural sciences are used as some kind of proxy for ethics. Just a few years ago the COVID pandemic spawned a variety of thought-terminating cliches like "trust the science" or "follow the science". A simple gnoseotechnic analysis shows the shortcomings.

As stated, the ultimate aim of natural science is to describe reality and to make predictions about future states of reality. But questions about how humans should act simply can not be addressed by these methods. Natural science can, at most, help provide supporting evidence for an ethical argument, but the goal of an ethical argument must come from somewhere else i.e. philosophy.

In the case of the COVID pandemic, the actual argument is something like

As with syllogisms, there are multiple ways to attack such an argument. At the time, the most common arguments were against P1. Responding with something like "follow the science" to a refutation against P1 is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of science. Not to mention, P1 was almost never presented explicitly. An alternative schema could be

Proponents of this line of reasoning could just as much claim to be "following the science".

A further confusion made is about measurements of ethical ideas. Many papers in psychology aim to measure ethical values in the population, usually through some kind of survey technique. This is valid science and it answers the question "what is the ethical position in the population about X?". However, it is very very important to understand this is not the same thing as answering the question "what is the correct ethical position on X?". That question can never be scientific in nature, it is always a values-based question.

Again though, science can be used to inform the final step. Someone could for example argue "what is ethical is whatever saves the most lives" and then we would require some kind of scientific investigation to determine what that is. But just as equally someone could have the position "what is ethical is whatever damages the natural environment the least" and again we can do studies to determine what that thing is. In all cases though, start point or fundamentals of ethics can never come from science.

Is Natural Science a Replacement for Philosophy?

Another common held belief now is that philosophy is "dead" or now rendered unnecessary due to the development of natural science. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, it's sort of a gotcha style comeback, but of course, natural science is a process carried out by humans for the purposes of learning about the natural world. Of course, why do that rather than not? Because of the value which humans place on knowledge, which is ultimately philosophy.

A less gotcha argument is gnoseotechnics itself. Before we engage in natural science, we must engage in gnoseotechnics. We need to look at the question and determine if it is even one that natural science can answer. As we discussed in the above section, if we are presented with an ethical question then we could spend a trillion years investigating it with the methodology of natural science and it would not advance us even a single step. Or indeed, if we ask a logical question the use of the methods of journalism are totally useless. Even natural science itself requires some pre-gnoseotechnics. As Bird (1998) says

... there is nothing that can usefully be called the scientific method.

... there are many methods used by science

determining which of those many methods we should use at a particular time is us engaging in gnoseotechnics i.e. philosophy.

Conclusion

I have presented the "new" field and technique of gnoseotechnics. This technique allows us to

  1. Compare and contrast the different methods of study of different fields;
  2. Understand the boundaries and limitations of different methods of study;
  3. Practically select the correct methodology for a given question.

While this field has been developed before in piecemeal by thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises (in the sciences of human action), Alexander Bird (in the natural sciences), and many others in their respective fields, these thinkers have tended to remain extremely siloed in their own fields. This was the first true work of gnoseotechnics considering the major branches of study, and also the first work decomposing them into constituent parts and finding their relations.

Of course, this blog did not even scratch the surface of the total number of methodologies available. As such, there is a rich future of literature to come from exploring the future of this topic. Specific investigations which must be made of the highest priority are the methods of philosophy itself, and more broadly a more through enumeration of the different major fields of study and to classify their respective methodologies, for instance law, psychology, sociology or computer science.

Moreover, there's already huge scope for disagreements within the field of gnoseotechnics. For instance, I presented a narrative assuming a roughly Platonic approach to logic and mathematics. A staunchly anti-Platonist philosopher could very easily rewrite this piece with a wildly different narrative. Thus, more work is required in philosophy in general to come to terms with the nature of objects of study.

Nevertheless, philosophy has been gridlocked for near millennia now. Perhaps comparative epistemology will allow us to refine the nature of what mathematics, logic, natural science, history and so on are?

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