The Conflation of Empiricism and Nominalism-Sensualism

Since the time of Hobbes and his fellow British empiricists, their specific flavour of empiricism, nominalism-sensualism, has been taken as the only form of empiricism. This is a dire poison in modern philosophy as it gives a deadly false alternative: either be an empiricist, in which case your knowledge has no correspondence to reality, leaving you with complete scepticism; or be a Kantian rationalist, believing that knowledge of reality is impossible, and the proper way to do philosophy is to retreat into your mind and await your preferred mystic insight. This gives us: heads—knowledge is impossible; vs tails—knowledge is impossible.

The resolution to this conundrum is found in recognising that empiricism does not mean that all knowledge begins and ends with the senses—empiricism means that sense data is the origin of all knowledge. That is to say; empiricism does not per se reject the reality of concepts (nominalism), nor does it imply that sense perception is the only cognitive faculty available to man (sensualism).

One particularly egregious example of the consequences of this conflation can be found in the Austrian school of economics. Austrians recognise that the heart of economic theory is borne from deducing facts from the “action axiom,” and that most modern economists are too busy engaging in irrelevant mathematical symbol manipulation or Marxian dialectical analyses. This is our dichotomy: either knowledge can be found only in “relations of ideas” (mathematical symbol manipulation), or knowledge is gained from some Kantian trance (Marxian dialectical analyses). The broad majority of the Austrians have accepted this false alternative, they recognise that true economic theory borne from the action axiom could not be constructed on nominalist-sensualist grounds, so they reject empiricism and go with Kant.

This leaves the Austrian school in the position of agreeing with Marx on the fundamental philosophy, but just rejecting his specific mystic ticklings—a truly dire situation. But the fact is that empiricism does not mean that deduction is invalid or that one cannot make generalisations. It is perfectly valid to establish that man acts (that he has free-will), and then to deduce from this fact a body of economic theory. Proceeding in this way yields a pro-reality, empirical, this-worldly Austrian economics.