Abstract:
The radical apriorism of Mises and Rothbard has frequently been violently criticized. Without attempting to rehabilitate this excessive thesis, the paper will revisit the intuition, originating in Kant, from which apriorism was developed. Taking as an example the "law" of diminishing marginal utility, it will propose an imaginary experiment that will allow us to compare economists' loyalty towards this kind of law to the loyalty that, according to Kuhn, physicists have to their theories. Through this discussion, it will specify and illustrate the nature of the condition of intelligibility from which a straightforwardly apriorist thesis has been incorrectly derived.
JEL-codes:B41B53 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Date: 2006