What is Alertness?
Roger Koppl
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Madison, NJ 07940
November 2001
Israel Kirzner’s most celebrated contribution to economics is his theory of entrepreneurship. It is a fundamental contribution to the core of our discipline. In spite of its importance, however, it remains a somewhat elusive concept. Like Kirzner’s own mind, his concept of entrepreneurship is subtle and profound. Because the essential point is subtle, it may easily be mistaken for a detail or a nuance. But his “nuance” makes all the difference. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship gives us a theory of equilibration, rather than of equilibrium. It carries us away from the world of static equilibrium to a dynamic theory of rivalrous competition.
I believe that we can enrich our understanding of Kirzner’s concept of entrepreneurial alertness by recasting it in the language of phenomenological psychology. The great pioneer of phenomenological psychology was Edmund Husserl.[1] My source, however, will be his follower, Alfred Schutz.[2] As Prendergast (1986) has shown, Schutz meant his theory to bolster the Austrian economics of Ludwig von Mises and related thinkers. He attempted to do so by reformulating Max Weber’s methodology of ideal types with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Prendergast’s story has been repeated many times, often with an elementary précis of Schutz’s theory (Augier 1999, Kurrild-Klitgaard 2001, Koppl 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002.) I will not use this occasion as yet another opportunity to do so. Instead, after a very quick review of Kirzner’s ideas, I will develop one Schutzian notion (originating in Husserl), which I think enriches our understanding of Kirzner’s praxeological contribution. (Volume 14(2/3) of Review of Austrian Economics, published in 2001, is a good introduction to Schutz and his relationship to economics including the Austrian school.)
Kirzner gives the word “entrepreneurship” a double meaning. Entrepreneurship is “alertness” to new opportunities. In this meaning, it is a praxeological category. Entrepreneurship is also the activity of arbitrage that necessarily follows the alert discovery of an opportunity.
As “alertness,” entrepreneurship contrasts with “Robbinsian maximizing.” According to Kirzner, “there is present in all human action an element which, although crucial to economizing, maximizing, or efficiency criteria, cannot itself be analyzed in [those] terms” (Kirzner 1973, p. 31). Alertness distinguishes “action” from “maximizing.” Kirzner defines “alertness” as “the ‘knowledge’ of where to find market data” (1973, p. 67).
At the market level, entrepreneurship plays a similar role in economic theory. Entrepreneurship “occupies precisely the same logical relationship to the more narrow ‘economizing’ elements in the market that, in individual action, is occupied by the entrepreneurial elements in relation to the efficiency aspects of decision-making” (Kirzner 1973, p. 32).
The paradigmatic form of entrepreneurship is arbitrage. The entrepreneur buys low and sells high. To do so he must have discovered an opportunity for profitable arbitrage. To have made such a discovery, he must have been alert to new possibilities. Alertness leads to discovery, which leads to action.
The entrepreneur is the agent of change in the market. Minniti and I have said in an earlier contribution to this journal, that “neoclassical” models represent the economy as an equilibrium system. The system is made up of many agents, each in equilibrium. “Nothing really happens.” In the timeless neoclassical model, “It is all economizing, maximizing, and efficiency.” With Kirzner’s theory “time passes, things happen, and changes occur.” Entrepreneurship is “the element in human action that corresponds to the passage of time, that makes things happens, that creates change” (Minniti and Koppl 1999).
This entrepreneurial vision is the foundation of the Austrian theory of the market process as rivalrous competition. And yet the core idea, “alertness,” remains elusive. As we have seen, Kirzner defined it as “the ‘knowledge’ of where to find market data.” But if entrepreneurship is a praxeological category, then it cannot be exclusively a matter of finding market data. If it is an aspect of action, it is not just knowing how to uncover data. Alertness is the uncaused cause whose effect is change. It is, perhaps, not so much knowledge as change of knowledge. I believe we can improve our understanding of alertness as a praxeological category by recasting it in the language of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological approach to social science. In particular, his notion of “open” and “problematic possibilities” can be put to good use. Alertness, I will argue, is the propensity to problematize open possibilities.
Schutz distinguished “open” and “problematic” possibilities. Virtually all of our ideas are vague. Perhaps certain purely scientific or mathematical ideas are completely unambiguous, though I doubt it. This possibility, however, does not affect our understanding of the “common-sense” knowledge of economic actors. That knowledge is a structured collection of more or less open-ended concepts. We know what a miser or a postman is. But this concept does not tell us all the particulars of individual misers and postmen. The concept is “open” because there are many different ways it can be filled in.
In the vocabulary of phenomenology, our concepts carry “open horizons.” “All anticipation has the character of indeterminacy,” Schutz explains, “and this general indeterminacy constitutes a frame of free variability; what falls within the frame is one element among other elements of possibly nearer determination, of which I merely know that they will fit in the frame but which are otherwise entirely undetermined. This is exactly the concept of open possibilities” (1951, p. 81).
Schutz distinguished open possibilities from “problematic possibilities” (1951, pp. 79-82). Open possibilities are concepts (“typifications”) existing without implying any need for choice. Problematic possibilities imply the need to choose. Problematic possibilities exist when there are two or more possibilities, let us say A and B, between which one must choose. Problematic possibilities define the choice situation for the agent. As we shall see, they are pre-constituted wholes implying both the need to choose and the preferability of the chosen alternative.
Consider our choice between A and B. In choosing between them, the agent wavers, leaning first one way, then the other. As this process unfolds in time, however, the nature of each alternative changes. As Schutz explains, “the project to which I return is no longer the same as that which I dropped” (1951, p. 85) if only because I have grown older and view it, now, differently. The agent wavers first between A and B, then between A' and B', then A'' and B'', and so on. Finally, the “free action detaches itself” and falls “like too ripe a fruit” (1951, p. 86).
Choice makes open possibilities problematic. A young woman’s concepts of law and medicine, for example, may be open possibilities that present no problems of interpretation. But if she is a student choosing between law school and medical school, these open possibilities become problematic. They are problematic because she must choose between them. As she considers her choices, their meanings change for her. She begins by imagining, let us say, that lawyers are “crooks” and doctors are “healers.” In the end, perhaps, law is transformed in her mind into a noble profession that protects our liberties while medicine seems to her “merely” a technical marvel. This interpretation sways her fully and she chooses law over medicine.
Only now that the choice has been made are the problematic possibilities, “law” and “medicine,” completely formed. The choice between “noble profession” and “technician” is not a real choice. It is for her impossible to prefer the latter to the former. Her choice is “strictly determined” by her preferences. These preferences, however, do not exist prior to the final choice. While she was wavering, her preferences were being formed. The possibilities rendered problematic by the choice were still open. The preferences that “determine” her action do not exist apart from the choice of law over medicine. These preferences merely give expression to the fact that she has finally interpreted law one way and medicine another.
Schutz and Luckmann develop the point at length with an example from Carneades.[3] A man enters a dark room and sees a coiled form in the corner. Is it a rope or snake? Rope and snake are “problematic alternatives, as Husserl defined them.” The man “becomes unsure and oscillates between the two” (1973, p. 185). He weighs different bits of evidence. The object does not move and may thus be a rope. But snakes “become torpid in the cold of winter,” the present season. The object may thus be a snake. He continues to weigh various considerations and to look at the object from different points of view. Finally, perhaps, he jabs it with a stick and finds it does not respond. It is a rope, he concludes. The man’s conclusion depends on a prior assessment of “the probabilities and degrees of probabilities” (1973, p. 186). This last consideration leads Schutz and Luckmann to the related theme of “relvance,” which we will examine briefly. (I discuss Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship in the light of Schutz’s theory of relevance in Chapter 6 of Koppl 2002.)
Schutz and Luckmann point out that Carneades’ example creates a problem. “How does it come about that just this object in the corner, whatever it may be, ‘interests’ us?” (1973, p. 187). Schutz’s theory of relevance provides the answer. The object may become the center of the man’s attention (it may become “thematic”) either because it is “imposed” or because he turns to it voluntarily. For the latter case, Schutz and Luckmann use the term “voluntary advertence.” But this dichotomy, like others in Schutz, is really a continuum in which the extremes are strictly hypothetical pure cases.
In some degree the object imposes itself because it was unexpected.[4] “The perceptions of the room do not ‘confirm’ the automatic expectations. . . an unexpected element is on hand in the field of vision” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, p. 188). We problematize possibilities that create surprise or discontinuity in the smooth flow of ordinary events. In some degree, however, the man turns his attention to the object voluntarily. Upon entering the room he wishes to get his bearings and familiarize himself with his surroundings. This is evident in case the room is strange to him. But even in a familiar room, there is change; the experience of entering it is in some degree novel. In some degree, the man’s situation falls outside of routine, because all experience transcends routine even if only by a little. But, “if one cannot be routinely oriented in a situation, one must explicate it. And if one knows that in advance, then he also in advance turns to it ‘voluntarily’” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, p. 191). In some degree one’s expectations are not “automatic.” For this reason one is alert to the possibilities in one’s environment. “We can state generally that the less familiar a total situtation is the greater the attentiveness will be with which one turns to it, so to speak, ‘on one’s own.’” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, p. 191).[5] Schutz and Luckmann describe this voluntary attention as “motivated,” the very word with which Kirzner describes the entrepreneur’s altertness.
Any action occurs within a context that is at least somewhat novel for the actor. He is therefore at least somewhat attuned to the unknown possibilities of the environment. He is receptive to non-routine elements of the situation. But the particular non-routine elements he notices are unexpected and present themselves, therefore, as impositions on the consciousness of the actor. They are for him objective elements to which he must adapt his actions. They create, in Schutz’s terms, “problematic possibilities” between which he must choose. In the imaginary world of static market exchange, there is only one non-routine element that might impose itself on the understanding of an entrepreneur, namely, a price gap, an opportunity for simultaneous arbitrage. And if this is indeed how the entrepreneur defines his situation, then by definition he will act to exploit the opportunity. To “see” and opportunity is to act on it. The logic of the case is unaltered if we switch to the more realistic case of markets in time. This case is much more complex, but the nature of alertness is the same.
“The sociologist’s assumption that the actor in the social world starts with the definition of the situation is,” Schutz explains, “equivalent to the methodological postulate, that the sociologist has to describe the observed social actions as if they occurred within a unified field of true alternatives, that is, of problematic and not of open possibilities.” Similarly, the “so-called ‘marginal prinicple,’ so important for modern economics, can be interpreted as” the postulate that we view “subjects as if they had to choose between pregiven problematic possibilities” (1951, pp. 83-84). In this sense, as I argue below, Mises was right to say that the scale of values is a construct of the economist and that preferences do not exist apart from choice. Indeed, Schutz analysis of choice was greatly influenced by Henri Bergson, whom Mises followed closely (Koppl 1997, 2002).
Kirzner’s concept of alertness may be usefully understood as the propensity to problematize open possibilities. Consider the case of apples selling dear on one side of the street and cheap on the other. The alert entrepreneur notices the price gap. Was has happened phenomenologically? Before the entrepreneur’s discovery, apples were apples; the concept “apple” was an open possibility. Here, the relevant concept of “apple” is not botanical, but mercantile. Apples are things one might buy or sell. The discovery of the price gap presents the entrepreneur with a problem. Is there really a difference in prices? Is it large enough to cover costs? Should I perform the arbitrage or not?
As Minniti and I have argued, the Kirznerian entrepreneur does calculate Robbinsian costs and benefits. (See also Kirzner, 1973, pp. 50-51.)
Consider the simplest case of Kirznerian entrepreneurship, namely, instantaneous arbitrage. There is no true opportunity cost associated with the discovery of a price differential. But before the arbitrageur elects to buy here and sell there he does calculate costs and revenues. He adds to his prospective purchase price any transaction costs that he now expects – now that his costless discovery has put the arbitrage opportunity on his list of possible actions. Once the possibility of arbitrage is on his menu of choice, the potential entrepreneur employs the usual economic calculus of a Robbinsian maximizer. If the costs of the arbitrage are sufficiently low, then the discovery was indeed a real, entrepreneurial discovery and the arbitrage will occur. (None of this goes to deny, of course, that the entrepreneur’s calculations may have been mistaken. He may suffer losses.) Thus, while the entrepreneurial discovery is, as such, costless, the entrepreneur does calculate his costs when deciding whether to act on what he has noticed. (Minniti and Koppl, 1999)
The discovery of a price gap creates a problem for the entrepreneur, whether to trade apples in our example. To resolve the problem, the entrepreneur must learn about apples. He will study the prices and business conditions on each side of the street, the probable costs of carrying apples from one side to the other, and so on. As he considers the possible opportunity before him, the entrepreneur’s concepts of “apple on this side of the street” and “apple on that side of the street” will change. If the fully constituted problematic possibilities are “untaxed apples” and “taxed apples,” he will give up the idea of apple arbitrage. If, however, the fully constituted problematic types are “cheap apples” and “dear apples,” then he will – he must – buy the cheap apples carry them across the street and sell them dear. In this case, noticing the price gap really was discovering a profit opportunity.
We cannot know if a noticed price gap is an entrepreneurial opportunity except by observing the exploitation of it. Perhaps another alert entrepreneur had noticed the same price gap, but declined to act. In his mind, perhaps, the fully constituted problematic possibilities were “apple vendor” and “artist,” with “artist” as the preferred option. For this person, the opportunity cost of his time prohibited the exploitation of the opportunity. For him it was no opportunity at all. Thus, to “discover” a profit opportunity in the relevant is also to act on that opportunity. The situation here is analogous to our student choosing between law and medicine. Once the relevant problematic possibilities have been fully constituted, the choice is “strictly determined.” If, however, we attend to the process of choosing between projects of action, we see that the free action detached itself.
Kirzner’s work includes passages that support my phenomenological interpretation of alertness as the propensity to problematize possibilities. Entrepreneurship, “reflects not merely the manipulation of given means to correspond faithfully with the hierarchy of given ends, but also the very perception of the ends-means framework within which allocation and economizing is to take place” (Kirzner 1973, p. 33, emphasis in original). The process of formulating problematic possibilities precedes choice. The “explicit recognition of the entrepreneurial element in decisionmaking carries with it the recognition” of the actor’s “ability to identify unambiguously an ends-means framework perceived unambiguously, in turn, by the decisionmaker himself before his decision” (1973, p. 35, emphasis added).
In my interpretation, entrepreneurship is about change in knowledge. Recognizing the entrepreneurial element in all action helps us “explain the pattern of change in and individual’s decisions as the outcome of a learning process generated by the unfolding experience of the decisions themselves” (Kirzner 1973, p. 36). A theory of the market process requires us “to introduce the insight that men learn from their experiences in the market” (Kirzner 1973, p. 71, emphasis in original). In Kirzner’s theory, experience of the market process creates “systematic changes in expectations concerning ends and means” (1973, p. 71, emphasis in original). Kirzner does not, however, provide a theory of learning. “For the purposes of the economist it is not necessary to explore the psychology of the learning process . . . But it is necessary to build formally into our theory the insight that such a learning process can be relied upon. For this, the recognition of the entrepreneurial element in individual action is completely adequate” (1973, pp. 71-72 , emphasis in original).
My interpretation of alertness helps us to understand why entrepreneurship is costless. Cost is what is given up. But during the process of preference formation, the subjectively perceived alternative that is sacrificed in choice literally does not exist. It is not fully formed. The subjective opportunity cost of any action is a fully formed problematic possibility. It exists, therefore only in the act of choice and not ahead of time. As Kirzner says, for the pure entrepreneur, “there is nothing at all to be allocated” (1973, p. 46).
Kirzner’s thesis that entrepreneurship is costless is consistent with Mises’ view that every action entails a cost. When Mises says “There is no mode of action thinkable in which means and ends or cost and proceeds cannot be clearly distinguished,” he is considering the completed act, in which the choice is between fully formed problematic possibilities (1966, p. 40). When he says “Costs are equal to the value attached to the satisfaction which one must forego in order to attain the end aimed at,” he is presuming the sacrificed alternative to be well-formed, rather than in the process of formation (1966, p. 97).
Alertness is not an action, but a praxeologically necessary aspect of all action. The action as such must have an opportunity cost. But the alert discovery of an opportunity does not. It is through alertness that the possibilities between which the agent chooses are constituted. It is thus an aspect of all action, but cannot itself bear an opportunity cost.
Kirzner has insisted that his theory of entrepreneurship merely elaborates upon concepts fully present in Mises’ work. In seminars, he never tired of repeating “It’s all in Mises.” But if it is fair to interpret alertness as the propensity to problematize possibilities, then we may probably judge the evidence to be ambiguous. On the one hand, Mises emphasizes uncertainty; on the other hand, he distinguishes “thymology” from “psychology.”
Mises defines the “entrepreneur” as “acting man exclusively seen from the aspect of the uncertainty inherent in every action” (1966, p. 253). The pure entrepreneur is as destitute in Mises’ system as he is in Kirzner’s system. He “does not own any capital” and “remains propertyless” because assets equal liabilities (1966, p. 253). If his venture succeeds, he will acquire property in the form of profits. (Losses fall entirely on the capitalist.) The entrepreneur, Mises explains, is a function and plays an essential role in the theory of “functional distribution” (1966, p. 254).
In the sense just given, Kirzner’s entrepreneur would seem to be present in Mises’ system. Mises’ entrepreneur speculates and takes his chances. Such a figure is peering into the future and making up his mind about its probable shape. These passages in Mises are hard to understand unless they are taken to express two related ideas, namely, that ends and means change and that entrepreneurship is the functional type who makes the change. We have, therefore, evidence in favor of Kirzner’s claim that “It’s all in Mises.”
Other parts of Mises’ system, however, suggest a different conclusion. When discussing the “scale of values,” Mises qualifies the “customary” statement that “acting man has a scale of wants or values in his mind when he arranges his actions.” Mises has “no objection” to this mode of expression as such. But “the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action.” Mises, goes beyond the insight that observation is the “only source from which of our knowledge” of the scale of values derives. His point is deeper than that valid epistemological insight. He says also that such “scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals.” Indeed, “these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man’s acting.” For this reason, “action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants” (Mises 1966, pp. 94-95).
In the praxeological representation of action, then, it is recognized that preferences do not exist apart from action. Nevertheless, the scale of values is a given of praxeological theory; there is no attempt to understand its process of formation. This point is made very clearly in Theory and History. In it, Mises states unambiguously “praxeology is not concerned with the events which within a man’s soul or mind or brain produce a definite decision between an A and a B” (1957, p. 271). It would seem that Schutz was true to Mises when he said, as we saw earlier, that the marginal principle requires us to view economic actors “as if they had to choose between pregiven problematic possibilities” (1951, pp. 83-84). Economists proceed, Schutz explained, “as if” choice “occurred within a unified field of true alternatives” (1951,p. 84, emphasis in original).
From this perspective, Kirzner’s contribution to praxeology would seem to be original. If so, it is indeed a contribution to praxeology and not “thymology.” Praxeological concepts, Mises held, have “universal validity for all human action” (1966, p. 36). The element of novelty in all human situations implies that all human actions entail an element of alertness. Thymology, by contrast, is historical. Mises defined it as “the knowledge of human valuations and volitions” and equated it with the “mental process of the historians” (1957, pp. 264-265).[6] Thymology thus concerns the particular and contingent in human action, not the universal elements.
It is not clear whether “it’s all in Mises.” Some evidence suggests that Kirzner’s entrepreneur is in fully present in Mises’ work; some evidence suggests it is not. The evidence that it is not raises another difficult point. On the one hand, alertness is concerned with the events within a man’s soul which produce a decision between A and B. On the other hand, praxeology is the logic of human action and thus explicates the universal elements of it. Alertness is a universal element in human action, but emerges from a process unfolding in the chooser’s soul. I think it is fair to say that Mises’ demarcation between praxeology and thymology, his dividing line between theory and history, may be imperfectly drawn. (I have touched on the theme already in Koppl 1997 and 2002.) This, however, is not the occasion to pursue such a possibility.
What Kirzner calls “alertness” is the propensity to problematize open possibilities. The ongoing process of deciding is the process of formulating problematic possibilities. Kirzner does not exam or explain the process itself, but merely points to its existence and notes (correctly) that without it change in any meaningful sense cannot occur within the realm of human action. Alertness would seem to be an aspect of all action. It is a praxeological category, just as Kirzner argues. If an action has been taken, then means have been deployed for the attainment of ends. The ends and means are “given” in traditional marginalist analysis. Whether given or not, however, they came from somewhere, namely, the active mind of the choosing agent. Any action implies a prior process of interpretation and reinterpretation of the agent’s environment. Israel Kirzner has drawn our attention to this necessary aspect of human action.
References
Augier, Mie. 1999. ‘Some Notes on Alfred Schütz and the Austrian School of Economics: Review of Alfred Schutz’s Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Edited by H. Wagner, G. Psathas and F. Kersten,’ Review of Austrian Economics, 11 (1/2): 145-162.
Encyclopedia Britannica. “Carneades,” 11th edition, 1910.
Kirzner, Israel. 1973. Competition and Entrepreneurship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Koppl, Roger. 1997. “Mises and Schutz on Ideal Types,” Cultural Dynamics, 1997, 9(1): 67-76.
Koppl, Roger. 2000. “Machlup and Behavioralism,” Industrial and Corporate Change, 9(4): 595-622.
Koppl, Roger. 2001. “Schutz and Shackle: Two Views of Choice,” Review of Austrian Economics, 14(2/3): 181-191.
Koppl, Roger. 2002. Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations, London: Palgrave Press, forthcoming.
Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter. 2001. “On Rationality, Ideal Types and Economics: Alfred Schütz and the Austrian School,” Review of Austrian Economics, 14(2/3): 119-143.
Minniti, Maria and Roger Koppl. 1999. “The Unintended Consequences of Entrepreneurship,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, 9(4): 567-586.
Schutz, Alfred. 1951[1962]. “Choosing Among Projects of Action,” in Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life World, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Mises, Ludwig. [1957] 1969. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, Westport, Connecticut: Arlington House Publishers.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1966. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
Prendergast, Christopher. 1986. “Alfred Schutz and the Austrian School of Economics,” American Journal of Sociology, 92: 1-26.
[1] Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a philosopher whose teaching career was spent in Germany. In Vienna, he studied under the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) from whom he learned the important concept of the “intentionality of consciousness.” Husserl’s “phenomenological psychology” attempted to be a close record, based on a kind of disciplined introspection, of the empirical structure of human consciousness. His “transcendental phenomenology” attempted to go beyond description and to ground all knowledge on such (rehabilitated) Cartesian meditations. Husserl’s writings spawned the phenomenological movement. Existentialism is an offshoot of Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl’s chief works include Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, and The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.
[2] Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) was an Austrian social sociologist and philosopher who migrated to the United States as a refugee scholar. His principle work is The Phenomenology of the Social World. Schutz is famous for using Edmund Husserl’s “phenomenolgical psychology” to rehabilitate Max Weber method of ideal types.
[3] Carneades (214-129 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher and a student of Diogenes and Hegesinus. According an unattributed article in the so-called scholar’s edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the works of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, were the “chief objects of his studies.” This same article calls him “the most important of the ancient sceptics” and “practically a 5th-century sophist.” He “left no written works.” But his student Clitomachus seems to have copied out his opinions and systematized them.
[4] Schutz and Luckmann reduce all four cases of “‘imposed’ thematic relevance” to this first, primary case. “The first form is in a certain sense the most important. It is at the basis of other forms” (1973, p. 187).
[5] Schutz and Luckmann continue, “The unfamiliar total situation which one approaches is already thematized from the begining. Whereupon the different elements of this situation are subthematized according to sequence until they can be ordered and arranged as more or less typical and familiar” (1973, p. 191).
[6] If thymology is the “mental process of the historians,” then it is also known as “Verstehen” or “understanding.” I discuss Mises’ way of distinguishing “understanding” from “conception” in Koppl (1997).