Austrian Economics vs. Knowledgeless symbol manipulation

[Kriminal99]

First lets start by identifying the difference between the approach to knowledge for these two schools. When a person has a precise method for generalizing from their experiences, they can obtain useful concepts from just about anywhere and apply them to or even create specialized disciplines.

People who generalize in an imprecise manner cannot do this, and in fact are resigned to working with the knowledge and tools contained in a pre-existing discipline. This means however they may use mathematical logic to derive new results in said pre-existing discipline, since mathematical logic is a part of every such discipline.

This can cause problems where the fundamental assumptions of a discipline or even of all human knowledge can fail or be violated when mathematical logic is used in certain ways. While the architects of a discipline and those like them can identify when these situations would occur by having in mind some generalized concept that governs their reasoning (but is not included explicitly in the discipline), others may not.

This means such people may "prove" things that are totally wrong by what is best illustrated by the label "knowledge-less symbol manipulation".

The accuracy of mathematics is dependent on the accuracy of the assumptions

IMO Austrian economics does not reject all forms of formalization or careful description. It simply recognizes the fact that mathematics or the scientific method does not guarantee any degree of accuracy above and beyond normal argument.

The hard part of understanding economics is not understanding simple formulas - it identifying which of the underlying assumptions are accurate. You have empirical evidence... but can you UNDERSTAND what you are seeing? You believe you have proven something using mathematics... but what did you get wrong in the little story telling session you had before you began manipulating formulas. The part where you started making all kinds of unrecognized assumptions implicitly?

In austrian economics we simply realize that the hard kind of analysis is unavoidable if you really want to understand something, and the simple minded symbol manipulation and observation is trivial.