Logical or Empirical?

OK, yet another post on the Callahan article, though in my defence, this was going to be part of the last one.  Anyhow, consider again the example Callahan provides for how reasoning in ‘logical economics’ proceeds:

the logical school attempts to illuminate how an actor’s efforts to improve her perceived circumstances as much as she is able to do, when occurring within a social context including several property, will result in prices for economic (scarce) goods.

This is then contrasted with the sort of reasoning characteristic of neo-classical economics.  Here, a mathematical model will be where any explanation begins, the explainer then attempting, Callahan claims,

to demonstrate why, under certain conditions that are taken as true by initial assumptions, a particular price will arise when some particular quantity of a good is brought to market.

On my interpretation, these two examples express the idea that where logical economics analyses and elucidates presuppositions, mathematical economics just presupposes them.  Admittedly, this formulation reads into Callahan’s words Collingwood’s account of the relation between the ‘metaphysician’ and the ‘ordinary scientist’ in An Essay on Metaphysics – though in my defence, Callahan himself seems to approve of Collingwood’s earlier formulation of it (cf. p.140 of the article), which contrasted ‘philosophical’ with ‘empirical’ forms of a discipline, a contrast Collingwood himself explicitly applied to economics.

Nonetheless, there is something odd about the direction of the reasoning in Callahan’s example for logical economics. For, if the logical economist’s main task is presupposional analysis, then the direction of her reasoning should not be ‘forwards’ like Callahan’s is, but ‘backwards’:

the logical school attempts to illuminate how when we talk of prices for economic (scarce) goods, we presuppose the fact of a social context existing that includes several property, a presupposition that itself presupposes the fact of actors who are attempting to improve their perceived circumstances as much as they are able to do.

Or, more generically:

the logical school attempts to illuminate how the concept of situation c presupposes the concept of b, which itself presupposes the concept of a.

The corresponding form of Callahan’s actual formulation, in contrast, is as thus:

the logical school attempts to illuminate how a, in circumstances of b, will result in situation c.

This, I think, is crucially ambiguous to the extent that it is unclear whether the links are supposed to be strictly conceptual or at least partly empirical.  It doesn’t take much to interpret it empirically:

the logical school attempts to illuminate how a, in circumstances of b (where b is unconnected to a considered in itself), creates situation c.

Now, Callahan’s position (I think) would be to deny such an interpretation, logical economics being a strictly a priori affair (cf. pp.323ff of his Economics for Real People, which adopts Misesian orthodoxy on the matter).  Moreover, forward-looking reasoning cannot simply be ruled verboten, since every grand-sounding claim the orthodox Austrian economist makes (‘socialism is impossible!’) must ultimately be spun from an analysis of the concept of action.  Nevertheless, any use of the forward-looking form will be prone to empirical interpretation if the reasoner and reader’s intuitions about the concept of action do not exactly match each other’s, and indeed, it is not impossible that the logical economist may deceive himself, ambiguous phrasing obscuring how an argument he makes is really empirical (or at least partly empirical) rather than strictly a priori.

Now of course, just because an ostensibly a priori claim is really an empirical one does not in itself say it is false – it might still be a secure generalisation (or at least a valuable one), and thus, true given its ‘real’ status.  Because of this, there is something futile, I think, in Callahan seeking principled arguments against neurologists sticking their oar in: for, such arguments would only work in a perfect world in which no Austrian economist slipped into making empirical arguments in the guise of a priori ones, and where both Austrian economists and and their readers were of the same mind when it came to their intuitive sense of what the concept of action holds.  Insofar as neither condition may hold in the real world, arguing against neurological criticisms by epistemological diktat is, dare one say it, somewhat ‘rationalistic’ in a pejorative sense of the word, begging the important question of whether such-and-so argument, even if true, is true because it fits the logical economics ideal.  For sure, this isn’t an argument against denying appeals to neurology that seek to reject logical economics wholesale — but as soon as the rejector comes to reject individual theses instead, the problem kick in.