Quotes from Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

By F.A. Hayek (1968)

• Until we have definite questions to ask we cannot employ our intellect; and questions presuppose that we have formed some provisional hypothesis or theory about the events.#
  EpistemologyScience
• The statistical method is of use only where we either deliberately ignore, or are ignorant of, the relations between the individual elements with different attributes, i.e., where we ignore or are ignorant of any structure into which they are organized.#
  Epistemology
• Nobody would probably seriously contend that statistics can elucidate even the comparatively not very complex structures of organic molecules, and few would argue that it can help us to explain the functioning of organisms. Yet when it comes to accounting for the functioning of social structures, that belief is widely held.#
  ScienceEconomics
• Nor is the claim invalidated that we can explain the principle on which a certain mechanism operates if it is pointed out that we cannot say precisely what it will do at a particular place and time. From the fact that we do know that a phenomenon is determined by certain kinds of circumstances it does not follow that we must be able to know even in one particular instance all the circumstances which have determined all its attributes.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• Even if the assertion of a universal determinism were meaningful, scarcely any of the conclusions usually derived from it would therefore follow.#
  Free Will
• If what is called the Sprachgefühl consists in our capacity to follow yet unformulated rules, there is no reason why, for example, the sense of justice (the Rechtsgefühl) should not also consist in such a capacity to follow rules which we do not know in the sense that we can state them.#
  Epistemology
• The capacity to respond to signs of which we are not conscious decreases as we move from members of our own culture to those of different cultures, but in some measure it also exists in our mutual relations to (and also between) higher animals. . . . It guides not only our perception of expression but also our recognition of action as directed or purposive; and it colours also our perception of non-human and inanimate phenomena.#
  Epistemology
• Our capacity to imitate someone’s gait, postures, or grimaces certainly does not depend on our capacity to describe these in words. We are frequently unable to do the latter, not merely because we lack the appropriate words but because we are unaware both of the elements of which these patterns are made up and of the manner in which they are related. . . . In one sense we thus know what we observe, but in another sense we do not know what it is that we thus observe.#
  Epistemology
• The phenomenal (sensory, subjective, or behavioural) world in which an organism lives will therefore be built up largely of movement patterns characteristic of its own kind (species or wider group). These will be among the most important categories in terms of which it perceives the world and particularly most forms of life. Our tendency to personify (to interpret in anthropomorphic or animistic terms) the events we observe is probably the result of such an application of schemata which out own bodily movements provide. It is they which make, though not yet intelligible, at least perceivable (comprehensible or meaningful) complexes of events which without such perceptual schemata would have no coherence or character as wholes.#
  EpistemologyScience
• Recognizing an action pattern as one of a class determines merely that it has the same meaning as others of the same class, but not yet what that meaning is. The latter rests on the further pattern of action, or set of rules, which in response to the recognition of a pattern as one of a certain kind the organism imposes upon its own further activities.#
  EpistemologyPraxeology
• Intelligibility is certainly a matter of degree and it is a commonplace that people who are more alike also understand each other better. Yet this does not alter the fact that even in the limiting case of the restricted understanding which occurs between men and higher animals, and still more in the understanding between men of different cultural backgrounds or character, intelligibility of communications and other acts rests on a partial similarity of mental structure.#
  Epistemology
• The ‘final cause’ or ‘purpose’, i.e., the adaptation of the parts to the requirements of the whole, becomes a necessary part of the explanation of why structures of the kind exist: we are bound to explain the fact that the elements behave in a certain way by the circumstance that this sort of conduct is most likely to preserve the whole—on the preservation of which depends the preservation of the individuals, which would therefore not exist if they did not behave in this manner. A ‘teleological’ explanation is thus entirely in order so long as it does not imply design by a maker but merely the recognition that the kind of structure would not have perpetuated itself if it did not act in a manner likely to produce certain effects, and that it has evolved through those prevailing at each stage who did.#
  Epistemology

Konrad Lorenz, “The Comparative Method in Studying Innate Behaviour” (1950)

• No important scientific fact has ever been ‘proved’ that has not previously been simply and immediately seen by intuitive gestalt perception.#
  MethodologyScience