No, for the same reason I would not believe in Lamarckian evolution or that light moves through a substance called "ether" -- we should know better by now. Because praxeology starts from the idea that we can't know how humans think and that such data is irrelevant ("that black box issue") and generally rejects the use of empirical data, it just ends up being a kind of stagnant logical exercise. I compare it to Euclidean geometry -- nice to look at and sometimes helpful, but not really descriptive of the real world, which is better modeled by fractal geometries.BRUTE wrote:
does Dragline "believe" in praxeology? why/why not?
Historically, praxeology is not something terribly original, but simply a diametrical reaction to the positivistic movement began by Auguste Comte in the 19th century and reached its hey-day in the 1920s and 30s, but has been mostly discarded -- except by Austrians who label everything they don't like as "positivism". See https://mises.org/library/positivism-and-behaviorism
So you have positivism trying to treat human behavior as if it could be described and predicted with the precision of Newton's laws (a form of scientism) and praxeologists saying that it can never be known why anyone does anything, so we should not even try, just accept it as "rational" and only make logical deductions from there. That von Mises also says that its teleological means essentially that it is also utopian, which is doubly bad in my view. (When you combine a utopian philosophy with a psychopathic leader -- which will come along sooner or later -- you usually end up with purges of the undesirables who are made scapegoats for any problems in getting to utopia.)
Problem is, they are both wrong -- neither positivism nor praxeology has survived the test of time and both should be left in the dustbin of history with ether and Lamarkian evolution.
While particular human action is unpredictable, human tendencies and decision-making processes are quite knowable through experiments and otherwise. Thus, reality and human action has a probablistic quality to it that it beyond the simplistic ideas of either the positivists or the praxeologists. There is a whole industry devoted to this (advertising/marketing) and academics have devoted their careers to it and won Nobel Prizes for it. (Kahneman in particular.) Neurologists are catching up, too, with concepts like "mirror neurons".