My most significant early influences were David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1940). The former author and book are part of the school of thought called “British empiricism,” and the latter author and book are part of the school of thought called “Austrian economics.” Nothing has influenced me more than (a) reading Hume in my late teens, (b) reading Mises at the same time, and then (c) realizing that I could use Humean phenomenalism as a foundation for Misesian economics.

Interestingly, though, it wasn’t that I wanted to use Hume’s insights in order to put Misesian economics on a stronger foundation for the sake of economics. It was that I was working on an artificial language, a language natural-language-like in some aspects but not others, and nothing had been more helpful to me in that endeavor than putting Hume and Mises together.

Ultimately, I decided to:

1. Put Misesian economics on a foundation of Humean phenomenalism. That is, integrate Austrian economics with British empiricism.
2. Use that Humean-Misesian phenomenalism-economics synthesis as a model science. Build a science analogous to that model science except for linguistics.
3. Use that new kind of linguistics in order to better build the artificial language.