Quotes from The Counterrevolution of Science

By F.A. Hayek (1955)

• The objects of economic activity cannot be defined in objective terms but only with reference to a human purpose.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)
  PraxeologyEconomics
• So long as it was naïvely assumed that all the sense qualities (or their relations) which different men had in common were properties of the external world, it could be argued that our knowledge of other minds is no more than our common knowledge of the external world. But once we have learned that our senses make things appear to us alike or different which prove to be alike or different in none of their relations between themselves, but only in the way in which they affect our senses, this fact that men classify external stimuli in a particular way becomes a significant fact of experience.#
  Epistemology
• If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation.#
  MethodologyEconomicsScience

Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature (1931)

• If, then, social phenomena depend upon more factors than we readily manipulate, even the doctrine of universal determinism will not guarantee an attainable expression of laws governing the specific phenomena of social life. Social phenomena, though determined, might not to a finite mind in limited time display any laws at all.#
  EpistemologyMethodologyScience