Quotes from The Sensory Order

By F.A. Hayek (1952)

• If qualities are, as we have maintained, subjective, then, if new discriminations appear for the first time, this means the appearance of a new quality. There is no sense in saying that, if a chemist learns to distinguish between two smells which nobody has ever distinguished before, he has learnt to distinguish between given qualities: these qualities just did not exist before he learnt to distinguish between them.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• Science thus tends necessarily towards an ultimate state in which all knowledge is embodied in the definitions of the objects with which it is concerned: and in which all true statements about these objects are analytical or tautological and could not be disproved by any experience. The observation that any object did not behave as it should, could then only mean that it was not an object of the kind it was thought to be.#
  EpistemologyScience
• Since the word ‘free’ has been formed to describe a certain subjective experience and can scarcely be defined except by reference to that experience, it could at most be asserted that the term [free will] is meaningless. But this would make any denial of the existence of free will as meaningless as its assertion.#
  Free Will
• Even though we may know the general principle by which all human action is causally determined by physical processes, this would not mean that to us a particular human action can ever be recognizable as the necessary result of a particular set of physical circumstances.#
  EpistemologyScience
• In discussing mental processes we will never be able to dispense with the use of mental terms, and . . . we shall have permanently to be content with a practical dualism, a dualism based not on any assertion of an objective difference between the two classes of events, but on the demonstrable limitations of the powers of our own mind fully to comprehend the unitary order to which they belong.#
  Epistemology
• Any explanation of mental phenomena which we can hope ever to attain cannot be sufficient to ‘unify’ all our knowledge, in the sense that we should become able to substitute statements about particular physical events (or classes of physical events) for statements about mental events without thereby changing the meaning of the statement.#
  EpistemologyScience
• A stimulus whose occurrence in conjunction with other stimuli showed no regularities whatever could never be perceived by our senses. This would seem to mean that we can know only such kinds of events as show a certain degree of regularity in their occurrence in relations with others, and that we could not know anything about events which occurred in a completely irregular manner. The fact that the world which we know seems wholly an orderly world may thus be merely a result of the method by which we perceive it.#
  Epistemology
• The ideal of science as merely a complete description of phenomena, which is the positivist conclusion derived from the phenomenalistic approach, proves to be impossible. Science consists rather in a constant search for new classes, for ‘constructs’ which are so defined that general propositions about the behaviour of their elements are universally and necessarily true.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• Precisely because all our knowledge, including the initial order of our different sensory experiences of the world, is due to experience, it must contain elements which cannot be contradicted by experience.#
  Epistemology
• There is, therefore, on every level, or in every universe of discourse, a part of our knowledge which, although it is the result of experience, cannot be controlled by experience, because it constitutes the ordering principle of that universe by which we distinguish the different kinds of objects of which it consists and to which our statements refer.#
  Epistemology
• A certain part at least of what we know at any moment about the external world is therefore not learnt by sensory experience, but is rather implicit in the means through which we can obtain such experience; it is determined by the order of the apparatus of classification which has been built up by the pre-sensory linkages.#
  EpistemologyScience
• The process of experience thus does not begin with sensations of perceptions, but necessarily precedes then: it operates on physiological events and arranges them into a structure or order which becomes the basis of their ‘mental’ significance; and the distinction between the sensory qualities, in terms of which alone the conscious mind can learn about anything in the external world, is the result of such pre-sensory experience.#
  EpistemologyScience
• Learning to discriminate does not necessarily produce a better reproduction of the physical order of the stimuli; it merely means the creation of a new distinction in the phenomenal order which, if it were the result of a non-recurring, accidental or artificial combination of stimuli during a particular period, might indeed prove later not a help but an obstacle to orientation and appropriate behavior.#
  EpistemologyScience
• In order to be able to give a satisfactory account of the regularities existing in the physical world the physical sciences have been forced to define the objects of which this world exists increasingly in terms of the observed relations between these objects, and at the same time more and more to disregard the way in which these objects appear to us.#
  Science
• No mere repetition but only knowledge of results of the attempts to discriminate will lead to an improvement of discrimination.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• It is often difficult to decide which of our visual experiences are determined immediately by sensation and which, on the contrary, are determined by experience and practice.#
  EpistemologyScience
• If frequently only certain abstract features of a perceived situation can be remembered, this is maybe a consequence of the fact that only those abstract features were perceived in the first place.#
  Science
• Perception is always an interpretation, the placing of something into one or several classes of objects. An event of an entirely new kind which has never occurred before, and which set up impulses which arrive in the brain for the first time, could not be perceived at all.#
  Epistemology
• The representation of the existing situation [in the mind of the subject] in fact cannot be separated from, and has no significance apart from, the representation of the consequences to which it is likely to lead.#
  Epistemology
• The question of what determines (or what is meant by) purposiveness is in the last instance really the same question as that of what ensures the continued existence of the organism.#
  Praxeology
• The question of whether the sensory qualities which one person experiences are exactly the same as those which another person experiences is, in the absolute sense in which it is sometimes asked, an unanswerable and strictly meaningless question. All we can ever discuss is whether for different persons different sensory qualities differ in the same way.#
  Epistemology
• The specific character of the effect of a particular impulse need be neither due to the attributes of the stimulus which caused it, nor to the attributes of the impulse, but may be determined by the position in the structure of the nervous system of the fibre which carries the impulse.#
  Science
• The fact that the problem of psychology is the converse of the problem of the physical sciences means that while for the latter the facts of the phenomenal world are the data and the order of the physical world the quaesitum, psychology must take the physical world as represented by modern physics as given and try to reconstruct the process by which the organism classifies the physical events in the manner which is familiar to us as the order of sensory qualities.#
  Science
• Much that we believe to know about the external world is, in fact, knowledge about ourselves.#
  Epistemology
• The problems of the physical sciences arise thus from the fact that objects which appear alike to us do not always prove to behave in the same way towards other objects; or that objects which phenomenally resemble each other need not be physically similar to each other, and that sometimes objects which appear to us to be altogether different may prove to be physically very similar.#
  Science

Thomas Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (1884)

• Without relation any simple idea would be undistinguished from other simple ideas, undetermined by its surroundings in the cosmos of existence.#
  Epistemology