Causeffect

The "cause" of some historical situation is all other historical events. Indeed, there is no causation here but simultaneity. Calling something a cause and something an effect is arbitrary. There is just concatenate things happening.

Causation is logical, not chronological. Causation, in general, is not useful to forecast history. It's useful just to explain abstract features of simultaneous situations. As soon as causation is unavoidably established, future disappears. It is just present.

Mises paraphrasing Friedman's "The Methodology of Positive Economics"

"The answer to the question whether or not definite theorems of praxeology apply to a definite problem of action depends on the establishment of whether or not the special assumptions that characterize this theorem are of any value for the cognition of reality. To be sure, it does not depend on the answer to the question whether or not these assumptions correspond to the real state of affairs that the praxelolgists want to investigate. The imaginary constructions that are the main―or, as some people would rather say, the only—mental tool of praxeology describe conditions that can never be present in the reality of action. Yet they are indispensable for conceiving what is going on in this reality." Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, page 37.

A law of iterated preference

The self cannot choose a change in its own preferences. Changes in preferences can be only externally determined.

The mind, to be sure, can prefer that the body could react differently to stimuli. The mind could think: "I wished I could stop to eat disorderly" but that deals with the mind (the first "I") making reference to something external (the second "I"): the bodily reaction. It is not different, in essence, to having a pet animal and think "I wished my dog could stop eat disorderly".

But a preference on the own preferences cannot change those preferences. They already are what they are, by the very choice.

An application of this idea to the economic theory is that, an agent, by definition, cannot know about shifts in his own demand or supply curves.

This assertion (that the self cannot consciously change its own preferences) is comparable to the Law of Iterated Expectations: "if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan).