Quotes from “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics”

By Ralph Rector (1990)

• Sense organs, prejudices, scientific theories, and language are alike in that they are blind to phenomena which they do not anticipate.#
  EpistemologyScience
• From an interpretive point of view, rational agents cannot respond automatically to ‘objective’ events, such as price changes, because there are no events that could elicit such responses.#
  EconomicsEpistemology

Israel Kirzner, “Method, Process, and Austrian Economics” (1982)

• No matter how calculative a man’s behavior may be, it seems impossible to avoid having accepted, without calculation, some framework within which to self-consciously engage in cost-benefit comparisons.#
  Epistemology

Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1979)

• Knowledge never begins from nothing, but always from some background knowledge—knowledge which at the moment is taken for granted—together with some difficulties, some problems. These as a rule arise from the clash between, on the one side, expectations inherent in our background knowledge and, on the other side, some new findings, such as out observations or some hypotheses suggested by them.#
  ScienceEpistemology