Topic: Epistemology

Quotes

A.N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

• It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

• Like most arguments from analogy, [this] tends rather to amuse the fancy than to give any real information on the subject to which it refers.#

Andy Clark, Mindware (2000)

• Our imaginative (intrinsic) capacities do indeed support “synthetic transformations” in which components retain their shapes but are recombined into new wholes, but lack the “analytic” capacity to decompose an imagined shape into wholly new components. This is because the latter type of case (but not the former) requires us to first undo an existing shape interpretation.#

Andy Clark, “Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche” (2006)

• Explicit ‘thinking about thinking’ appears to be a good candidate for a distinctively human capacity and one that might be directly dependent upon language for its very existence. To formulate a thought in words (or on paper) is to create an object available to ourselves and to others, and, as an object, it is the kind of thing we can have thoughts about. . . . The process of linguistic formulation thus creates the stable attendable structure to which subsequent thinkings can attach.#
• Language works its magic not (or not solely) by means of translation into appropriate expressions of ‘Mentalese’ or the ‘Language of Thought’ but by something more like a coordination dynamics in which words and structured linguistic encodings act to stabilize and discipline (or ‘anchor’) intrinsically fluid and context-sensitive modes of thought and reason.#

Arjo Klamer, “Towards the Native’s Point of View: The Difficulty of Changing the Conversation” (1990)

• If, per impossible, we were able, in accordance with the objectivistic ideal, to divest ourselves of all of our culturally inherited presuppositions, we would find ourselves without anything to understand!#

Armand Borel, “Mathematics: Art and Science” (1983)

• Something becomes objective . . . as soon as we are persuaded that it exists in the minds of others in the same form that it does in ours, and that we can think about it and discuss it together.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines (2014)

• If the world is originally well ordered, then God is needed to explain that order. And if it is incurably disordered, then God is needed to save us from that disorder. Only if life is originally bad but fixable through human effort is it the case that God is neither a necessary hypothesis nor a fundamental need.#
• Reason is set in motion by the awareness of arbitrariness out contingency. It is driven to wonder at and to question everything accidental and ungrounded—driven to seek the cause, the explanation, the underlying necessity…. But custom if precisely the power to bestow on the contingent the appearance of necessity. It makes us feel that what is and has been must be, that it simply cannot be otherwise. #

Brian Arthur, Complexity and the Economy (2015)

• Agents generally do not optimize in the standard sense, not because they are constrained by finite memory or processing capability, but because the very concept of an optimal course of action often cannot be defined.#
• To the degree that outcomes are unknowable, the decision problems they pose are not well-defined. It follows that rationality—pure deductive rationality—is not well-defined either, for the simple reason that there cannot be a logical solution to a problem that is not logically defined. It follows that in such situations deductive rationality is not just a bad assumption; it cannot exist. There might be intelligent behavior, there might be sensible behavior, there might be farsighted behavior, but rigorously speaking there cannot be deductively rational behavior. Therefore we cannot assume it.#

Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (2006)

• The stronger a hypothesis or belief system, the less input is needed for confirmation.#

C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

• The meaning in any given composition is in inverse ratio to the author’s belief in his own literalness.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

• Unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.#
• It is a cliché among philosophers and historians of science that one of the most successful of all scientific theories, the theory of evolution, makes no predictions and is therefore unfalsifiable by prediction. With fruit flies and bacteria, to be sure, you can test the theory in the approved manner; but its main facts, its dinosaurs and multicolored birds, are things to be explained, not predicted.#
• Something is awry with an appeal for an open intellectual society, an appeal defending itself on liberal grounds, that begins by demarcating certain ways of reasoning as forbidden and certain fields of study as meaningless.#
• Precision means low variance of estimation . . . but if the estimate is greatly biased, it will tell precisely nothing.#

Doug North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005)

• Pattern recognition rather than abstract logical reasoning is at base the way human neural networks appear to operate. . . . In fact we are relatively poor at reasoning compared to our ability to understand problems and see solutions.#
• The process of learning is unique to each individual but a common institutional/educational structure will result in shared beliefs and perceptions. A common cultural heritage, therefore, provides a means of reducing the divergent mental models that people in a society possess and constitutes the means for the intergenerational transfer of unifying perceptions.#

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900)

• Correct judgments and false ones … have causal antecedents and consequences like all mental phenomena. Such natural connections do not, however, interest the logician …. He aims not at a physics, but an ethics of thinking.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

• [Individualism] does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can only exist in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of value exist – scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s.#
• It is infinitely more difficult rationally to comprehend the necessity of submitting to forces whose operation we cannot follow in detail than to do so out of the humble awe which religion, or even the respect for the doctrines of economics, did inspire. . . . The only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.#

F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1949)

• In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.#
• To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.#
• Another misleading phrase, used to stress an important point, is the famous presumption that each man knows his interests best. In this form the contention is neither plausible nor necessary for the individualist’s conclusions. The true basis of his argument is that nobody can know who knows best and that the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do.#
• The concept of equilibrium itself and the methods which we employ in pure analysis have a clear meaning only when confined to the analysis of the action of a single person and we are really passing into a different sphere and silently introducing a new element of altogether different character when we apply it to the explanation of the interactions of a number of different individuals.#
• We never observe states or governments, battles or commercial activities, or a people as a whole. When we use any of these terms, we always refer to a scheme which connects individual activities by intelligible relations; that is, we use a theory which tells us what is and what is not part of our subject. #
• All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. . . . The theory itself, the mental scheme for the interpretation, can never be “verified” but only tested for its consistency. It may be irrelevant because the conditions to which it refers never occur; or it may prove inadequate because it does not take account of a sufficient number of conditions. But it can no more be disproved by facts than can logic or mathematics.#
• if, of the infinite variety of phenomena which we can find in any concrete situation, only those can be regarded as part of one object which we can connect by means of our mental models, the object can possess no attributes beyond those which can be derived from our model. Of course, we can go on constructing models which fit concrete situations more and more closely – concepts of states or languages which possess an ever richer connotation. But as members of a class, as similar units about which we can make generalizations, these models can never possess any properties which we have not given to them or which do not derive deductively from the assumptions on which we have built them. Experience can never teach us that any particular kind of structure has properties which do not follow from the definition (or the way we construct it).#
• Just as the existence of a common structure of thought is the condition of the possibility of our communicating with one another, of your understanding what I say, so it is also the basis on which we all interpret such complicated social structures as those which we find in economic life or law, in language, and in customs.#

F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)

• Much that we believe to know about the external world is, in fact, knowledge about ourselves.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• No mere repetition but only knowledge of results of the attempts to discriminate will lead to an improvement of discrimination.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#

F.A. Hayek, The Counterrevolution of Science (1955)

• 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.#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.#
• That we ought not believe anything which has been shown to be false does not mean that we ought to believe only what has been demonstrated to be true.#

F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#

F.A. Hayek, “The Moral Imperative of the Market” (1986)

• The essential function of prices [is] to tell people what they ought to do in the future and … prices [can] not be based on what they [have] done in the past.#

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988)

• While it is true that traditional morals, etc., are not rationally justifiable, this is also true of any possible moral code.#

F.Y. Edgeworth, “The Value of Authority Tested by Experiment” (1888)

• All that authority can do is—what, according to Horace, all that philosophy can do—to get rid of a large portion of error.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921)

• We live in a world full of contradiction and paradox, a fact of which perhaps the most fundamental illustration is this: that the existence of a problem of knowledge depends on the future being different from the past, while the possibility of the solution of the problem depends on the future being like the past.#Quoted in George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)

Fritz Malchup, “The Problem of Verification in Economics” (1955)

• To stay away from metaphysics one has to know a good bit about it.#
• To establish or verify “historical facts,” we must rely on the acceptance of numerous general hypotheses (theories); and to verify general hypotheses we must rely on the acceptance of numerous data representing “facts” observed or inferred at various times and places. We always must take something for granted, no matter how averse we are to “preconceptions”.#
• The strength of belief in a hypothesis depends, even more than on any direct empirical tests that it may have survived, on the place it holds within a hierarchical system of inter-related hypotheses.#

G.L.S. Shackle, Time in Economics (1958)

• Time as we seem to experience it has a character profoundly and radically different from that of a mere algebraic abstraction capable of being adequately represented by the symbol of a scalar quantity.#Quoted in Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)

Gabriel Zanotti, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2013)

• In Euclidean geometry we know a priori of experience that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees. However, this result does not hold in non-Euclidean geometries. . . . Still, one does not announce a refutation of Euclidean geometry if a measurement of the internal angles of a triangle does not equal 180 degrees. . . . The introduction of assumed real world conditions does not affect the aprioristic character of economics just like the assumption of the type of surface does not change the aprioristic character of geometry.#
• Since Austrians and non-Austrians work under different paradigms constructed over a different set of non-observable fundamental assumptions, the debate between Austrian economics and non-Austrian economics is not, or should not be, an empirical one, but a foundational one. The underlying question is which economic geometry – the Austrian, the non-Austrian, or a third one – is a more plausible reflection of the real world.#
• Because a paradigm is built on unquestioned fundamental assumptions, some of which may not be observable, and [because] a paradigmatic shift is the result of a persuasion exercise and not the result of efficient empirical tests, nothing guarantees that a change in paradigm is a step forward; it may just as well mean a step back.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point. . . . Our whole life, from the point of view of consciousness, consists in experiencing and judging values, and it acquires meaning and significance only from the fact that the mechanically unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite variety of values beyond their objective substance. . . . Even objective perception can arise only from valuation – we live in a world of values which arranges the contents of reality in an autonomous order.#
• Epistemology here encounters a typical hazard. In analysing itself, it judges its own case. It needs a vantage point outside itself, and is confronted with a choice between excepting itself from the test or rule imposed on all other knowledge, thus leaving itself open to attack from behind; or else subjecting itself to the laws and the process which it has discovered and thereby committing an act of circular reasoning, as is clearly illustrated by the self-negation of scepticism.#
• It makes no difference how one expresses it: either that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an infinite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an infinite process.#
• Our mind has no substantial unity, but only the unity that results from the interaction between the subject and object into which the mind divides itself. . . . To have a mind means nothing more than to execute this inner separation, to make the self an object, to be able to know oneself.#
• The idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy.#
• Our intellect can grasp reality only as a modification of pure concepts, which, no matter how much they diverge from reality, are legitimized by the service they render in the interpretation of reality.#
• What we term the objective significance of things is, in practice, their validity for a larger circle of subjects.#
• Even if we presuppose that the whole of objective reality is determined by the functions of our mind, we still identify as intelligence those functions of our mind through which reality appears to us as objective in the specific sense of the word, regardless of how much intelligence itself may also be enlivened and directed by other forces.#
• Artistic realism makes the same mistake as scientific realism by assuming that it can dispense with an a priori, with a form that—springing from the inclinations and needs of our nature—provides a robe or a metamorphosis for the world of our senses. This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.#

George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)

• It is futile to attempt, pace Hayek, to explain “why [people] should ever be right.” Rather, acceptance of the fact that people can be right is a requirement imposed by the rules of reason themselves.#

Gottlob Frege, Logic

• Logic is concerned with the laws of truth, not with the laws of holding something to be true, not with the question of how people think, but with the question of how they must think if they are not to miss the truth.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893)

• If being true is thus independent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations (1918)

• Error and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition. Whether what you take for true is false or true, your so taking it comes about in accordance with psychological laws. A derivation from these laws, an explanation of a mental process that ends in taking something to be true, can never take the place of proving what is taken to be true.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (1966)

• Language is by no means simply an instrument, a tool. For it is in the nature of the tool that we master its use, which is to say we take it in hand and lay it aside when it has done its service. That is not the same as when we take the words of a language . . . such an analogy is false because we never find ourselves as consciousness over and against the world and, as it wore [sic], grasp after a tool of understanding in a wordless condition . . . we are always encompassed by the language that is our own.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975)

• Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

Henry Rogers, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• The concentration of the faculties on some one object is indispensably necessary to profound investigation; and on the contrary, the diffusion of the faculties over a large surface is, generally speaking, absolutely inseparable from a comparatively superficial knowledge.#

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.#Quoted in Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know (2003)

• There is such a thing as self-evidence, but it should never be mistaken for what is evident to the isolated self.#

James Buchanan, Cost and Choice (1969)

• If idealized market interaction process—pure or perfect competition—is used as the standard for deriving conditions which are then to be employed as norms for interference with actual market process, the question of objective measurement must be squarely faced. If prices ‘‘should’’ be brought into equality with costs of production, as a policy norm, costs must be presumed objective, in the sense that they can be measured by others than the direct decision-maker.#

Jan Pavlik, “Austrian Economics and the Problem of Apriorism” (2006)

• According to Kant, to have a priori knowledge does not mean that we possess it before having sensory experience (i.e., as a set of inborn ideas); we find it within experience when we cease to be interested solely in its contents and turn − in the mode of reflection − our attention to its form. Then we find out that any further inter-subjectively valid experience cannot correct the a priori knowledge or even falsify it; it is because the a priori knowledge is a necessary presupposition of any inter-subjectively valid experience.#
• If the functioning of human mind includes some kinds of necessary a priori relationalisations (such as the teleological order of thought, the principle of constantly operating causes, formal logic, universal grammar, etc.), and if human mind is a part of nature and stems from it, then nature, too, must contain some sorts of necessary relations and interconnections; namely, it is impossible that the necessity of mind’s functioning could stem from a fully contingent nature.#

John Piper, Martin Luther: Lessons From His Life And Labor (2012)

• [M]any say this assertion [of the authority of scripture] nullifies or minimizes the crucial role of the Holy Spirit in giving life and light. . . . One might [also] argue that emphasizing the brightness of the sun nullifies the surgeon who takes away blindness. #

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.#

Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject” (1968)

• The epistemology of induction breaks down even before having taken its first step. It cannot start from sense data or perceptions and build our theories upon them, since there are no such things as sense data or perceptions which are not built upon theories (or expectations, that is, the biological predecessors of linguistically formulated theories).#

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.#Quoted in Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

Leland Yeager, “The Significance of Monetary Disequilibrium” (1986)

• One cannot consistently both suppose that the price system is a communication mechanism—a device for mobilizing and coordinating knowledge dispersed in millions of separate minds—and also suppose that people already have the knowledge that the system is working to convey.#

Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)

• Any experience made conveys knowledge to us only insofar as it fits, or fails to fit, into a pre-existent frame of knowledge.#
• Ex ante it is by no means sure which technological changes will signify “progress” and which not.#
• The knowledge we gain from economic study is not knowledge about things but knowledge about knowledge.#

Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber (1971)

• As regards initial situations, a human situation can never be defined exclusively in observable terms because all human action is also concerned with an unknown and unknowable future. . . . Human action cannot be regarded as mere reaction to stimulus. To understand it we have to understand what image of the future the actors are bearing in their minds.#
• Textual interpretation is the prototype of Verstehen. . . . It will be readily appreciated how little all this has to do with ‘intuition’. The procedure is a rational procedure of discursive study.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason.#
• The champions of logically incompatible theories claim the same events as the proof that their point of view has been tested by experience. The truth is that the experience of a complex phenomenon – and there is no other experience in the realm of human action – can always be interpreted on the ground of various antithetic theories.#
• He who addresses fellow men, who wants to inform and convince them, who asks questions and answers other people’s questions, can proceed in this way only because he can appeal to something common to all men – namely, the logical structure of human reason.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• The viciousness of positivism is not to be seen in the adoption of this principle [of “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant”], but in the fact that it does not acknowledge any other ways of proving a proposition than those practiced by the experimental natural sciences and qualifies as metaphysical – which, in the positivist jargon, is synonymous with nonsensical – all other methods of rational discourse.#
• It may even be doubted whether it is possible to separate the analysis of the epistemological problem from the treatment of the substantive issues of the science concerned. The basic contributions to the modern epistemology of the natural sciences were an accomplishment of Galilei, not of Bacon; of Newton and Lavoisier, not of Kant and Comte. What is tenable in the doctrines of logical positivism is to be found in the works of the great physicists of the last hundred years, not in the “Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”#
• If there were nothing permanent in the manifestations of the human mind, there could not be any theory of knowledge, but merely a historical account of the various attempts made by men to acquire knowledge.#
• [The] truth or validity [of the a priori categories] cannot be proved or refuted as can those of a posteriori propositions, because they are precisely the instrument that enables us to distinguish what is true or valid from what is not.#
• If there were no regularity, nothing could be learned from experience. In proclaiming experience as the main instrument of acquiring knowledge, empiricism implicitly acknowledges the principles of regularity and causality.#
• There is no way to eliminate from an analysis of the universe any reference to the mind. Those who try it merely substitute a phantom of their own invention for reality.#
• Any doctrine that teaches that some “real” or “external” forces write their own story on the human mind and thus tries to reduce the human mind into an apparatus that transforms “reality” into ideas in the way in which the digestive organs assimilate food is at a loss to distinguish between what is true and what is not.#
• The failure of the attempts to apply the methods and the epistemological principles of the natural sciences to the problems of human action is caused by the fact that these sciences have no tool to deal with valuing. In the sphere of the phenomena they study there is no room for purposive behavior.#
• If one eliminates any reference to judgements of value, it is impossible to say anything about the actions of man, i.e., about all the behavior that is not merely the consummation of physiological processes taking place in the human body.#
• What distinguishes the descriptions of history from those of the natural sciences is that they are not interpreted in the light of the category of regularity.#
• The positivist doctrine that denies the legitimacy of any metaphysical doctrine is no less metaphysical than many other doctrines at variance with it.#
• There is no reason to ascribe to the operation the mind performs in the act of becoming aware of an external object a higher epistemological dignity than to the operation the mind performs in describing its own ways of procedure.#
• Historical experience is not laboratory experience. It is experience of complex phenomena, of the outcome of the joint operation of various forces.#
• The Christian doctrine according to which God creates the soul of every individual cannot be refuted by discursive reasoning as it cannot be proved in this way.#
• The human mind in its search for knowledge resorts to philosophy or theology precisely because it aims at an explanation of problems that the natural sciences cannot answer.#
• In a universe lacking [regularity] there could not be any thinking and nothing could be experienced. For experience is the awareness of identity in what is perceived; it is the first step toward a classification of events. And the concept of classes would be empty and useless if there were no regularity.#Quoted in George Selgin, Praxeology and Understanding (1990)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus (1922)

• What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.#
• Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.#

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

• When something stands in broad daylight, and a mass of evidence for it is in broad daylight also, it does not matter whether there is any evidence for it in the dark.#

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.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Counterrevolution of Science (1955)

Peter Boettke, “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: Exploring the Weber-Austrian Connection” (1998)

• Since the scientific goal in interpretative sociology (i.e., praxeology) is Verstehen, not prediction and falsifiability, broadening of the concept of rationality to near tautological status does not present the problem it would in alternative concepts of science. #
• Economic calculation provides economic actors with vital knowledge which enables the social system of production to separate endeavors which are economically feasible from those which are technologically feasible.#

Peter Boettke, Calculation and Coordination (2000)

• We did not design rules through our reason, but rather we developed reason because we followed rules. This is not conservatism, because no social rule is exempt from our critical scrutiny, but it is a position which insists that the critique must of necessity always privilege some rule context while holding others up for examination – it is impossible to step outside of all context and employ reason. The critical rationalist, as opposed to the rational constructivist, realizes that social experimentation takes place against a backdrop of the customary beliefs and traditions of society. Experimentation cannot be of the root and branch sort, but instead is limited to bold acts on the margin which, if successful, often loop back and mutate previously held beliefs, thus leading to social change.#

Peter Boettke, “From The Philosophy of Mind to the Philosophy of the Market” (2002)

• The argument that cuts against the case for conceiving of the economic problem that society confronts as one in principle capable of solution through centralized planning is strikingly similar to the one that cuts against conceiving the mind as a hierarchical system under the command of a single unifying will.#
• General equilibrium theory was able to capture in abstract form the interconnectedness of all markets in an economic system, but it did so at the cost of assuming away the processes through which the division of knowledge in society is coordinated so that the interconnectedness can be realized. . . . Similarly, work in hard AI is able to replicate the mind as a ‘thinking machine’ and the interconnectedness of different parts of the brain, but at the cost of losing the human attributes of meaning and intentionality.#
• Problems of computational complexity can be solved through advancements in computing technology; problems of the contextual nature of decision-making cannot be addressed outside an examination of the institutions within which those decisions are being made.#
• Humans are able to zero in on relevant features of their environment and ignore the irrelevant features precisely because they experience the objects of the world as already interrelated and full of meaning.#

Phillip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know? (2005)

• We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly.#Quoted in Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

• Sense organs, prejudices, scientific theories, and language are alike in that they are blind to phenomena which they do not anticipate.#
• 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.#

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#
• Faith in this sense is prior to all reasoning, for without a cause – let it be truth, or life, or reason itself – we do not reason.#
• Such trust, to be sure, is mated with a kind of objective uncertainty; but it is not the uncertainty that makes it faith. To argue so is to be like a moralist who defines duty as that conduct that runs counter to inclination.#

Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

• No “analytic” use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of “synthetic” uses of that same concept.#
• We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing.#
• A mind that “consists of rules” cannot intelligibly be interpreted either as making rules (as though it might have left them unmade), or as having rules imposed on it (as though it might have been free of them).#

Roderick Long, “Realism and Abstraction in Economics” (2006)

• Those who criticize neoclassical models for their lack of realism are not seeking a precisive abstraction that more closely approximates reality; rather, they are seeking an abstraction that is not precisive at all. The right question to ask is not “How closely should our theories approximate reality in order to yield useful predictions?” but rather “How much specificity should our theories incorporate in order to yield useful explanations?”#

Roger Koppl, Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations (2002)

• Methodological dualism is not the doctrine that the social sciences are “deductive” and the natural sciences “inductive.” It is the doctrine that “understanding” is a method of the social sciences, but not of the natural sciences.#
• To say that we “apply” an ideal type to our experience implies that we have a conscious experience and then bring in an ideal type. But in order that the experience be conscious, it must already be interpreted and thus classified by means of an ideal type.#
• The interpretive sociologist uses ideal types of varying degrees of anonymity. What we call either “history” or “applied economics” entails the use of relatively concrete ideal types. “Theory” uses more anonymous types. The distinction, therefore, between theory and history is not the categorical one Mises imagined. We use the term “theory” for arguments and explanations that use only relatively anonymous types; we use the terms “history” and “applied theory” when relatively concrete types are used.#

Roger Koppl, “Does The Sensory Order Have a Useful Economic Future?” (2003)

• The epistemological uncertainty in Hayek’s theory is not simply (and in some sense, trivially) a result of uni-directional calendar time, as emphasized by Shackle and Lachmann, but also a result of abstract and inherent constraints on what can be known cognitively.#

Stephen Davies, “Why We Need a Liberal Theory of History” (1999)

• When historians try to write without a theory then assumptions are smuggled in rather than spelt out and value judgments are implied instead of being stated.#

Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

• Language and money do not reveal some pre-existing mental constructs or preferences [respectively], rather they constitute the way in which we express those constructs and preferences. Just as we cannot help but think in terms of the words that language provides us, we cannot help but act in the market in terms of the money prices of what we want to exchange.#
• Communication in language is not a veil for reality; it is reality.#
• [R]ules and traditions pre-form the ways in which we act and understand in the world. . . . [T]his is not a disadvantage of rules and traditions, because there is nothing to compare them to by which they fall short. To the contrary, this is the great power of rules and traditions; it is they that make all other reason and knowledge possible.#

Steven Horwitz, “From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-rationalist Liberalism” (2000)

• If the mind can never exhaustively describe and know itself, any one mind or group of minds can surely never direct economic processes that can only be understood in terms of the phenomenal pictures (i.e., expectations) held in the minds of all of the actors in the economy.#
• Changes in the prices of capital goods signal changes in the knowledge that underlies entrepreneurial plans and expectations.#

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.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)

Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)

• The scientist often seems rather to be struggling with facts, trying to force them in conformity with a theory he does not doubt.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)