The Road to Fallibilism (Part II)
The Methodological Missteps of Friedrich von Hayek, and the Popperian Cure
By John Saudino
14 October 2019
This is the second article in a three-part series. See Part I here.
3. Conjectures and Refutations and The Poverty of Historicism: Popper’s approach to science as compared to that of Hayek
3.1 Basic Similarities and Differences between Hayek and Popper
Before going into the differences between Popper and Hayek, I would like to point out some of the similarities between these two seminal thinkers of the 20th century who did not only share the common experience of being exiles from Austria achieving their groundbreaking work in the English speaking world, but were also close associates who collaborated and respected one another. They were both profound thinkers who launched some of the most powerful philosophical attacks on the great evils of their time, insightful analyses that penetrated to the deepest philosophical roots of the totalitarian scourges of the 20th century (See The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Road to Serfdom, among others). In this regard they both shared a deep suspicion of and launched systematic critiques of something they both believed was a basic precursor to totalitarian thinking, namely the doctrine of Historicism, witch Popper termed “Oracular Philosophy” in the second volume of the Open Society. For these reasons one cannot help but to consider both men to be passionate defenders of the freedom granted to man by the advent of traditional liberalism.
Nonetheless there were significant differences, both regarding their divergent approaches to the philosophy of science and regarding their political persuasions. There are some interesting tendencies among thinkers of a particular political bent to take on characteristic forms of methodology that at first would not seem to be at all related to their moral and political foundations in any way. Conservatives tend to maintain a certain suspicion of reason and science when it, in their view, dangerously challenges the existing order based on tradition or religion. This comes out in thinkers like Edmund Burke in his skepticism regarding the “Age of Reason” i.e. the 18th Century Enlightenment and his critique of even the initial liberal stage of the French Revolution. It also comes out in Hayek in The Counter Revolution of Science in its subtitle “Studies in the Abuse of Reason”, the work’s attack on “scientism” and later in his strong opposition to any form of “conscious control”[1] of society and the challenge reason poses to traditional religion and morality.[2]
These attitudes are, of course, endemic of a tendency to favor traditional class relations and power structures over dangerous, misguided “revolutionary” or utopian attempts to replace them. These conservative thinkers tend to have a more skeptical attitude toward the application of scientific principles to human society and a limited view of what is possible or desirable in the form of any broad sweeping reforms. They tend to favor rationalism and deduction over empiricism and experimentation as I have previously argued Hayek and his fellow Austrians do.
Thinkers of a more left leaning/social democratic or socialist bent, on the other hand, such as Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Noam Chomsky, and Karl Popper, tend to favor a much more empirical and scientific approach to understanding social processes and a more optimistic attitude toward the possibility of applying scientific knowledge to achieve fundamental progressive advances in human society.
The real world societal ramifications of these different approaches I will comment on in my conclusion; the specific methodological/epistemological distinctions between Popper and Hayek I will address presently.
3.2 The twin problems of Induction and Demarcation
3.2.1 Introduction
Popper first laid out his theories regarding these two problems, which he declared to be The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie) in his 1933 book bearing this title. He later refined and expanded on these ideas in Logik der Forschung in 1934. Popper saw in the solution of these problems the solution to much of the philosophical error that had taken place over the previous 200 years in the various faulty responses to Hume’s induction problem. Some philosophers, like John Stewart Mill for example, had responded to the induction problem by doubling down on empiricism, as it were, and developing probabilistic approaches that do not solve the problem; others, like the Austrian Economists, tried to circumvent the problem of induction and empiricism altogether by retreating into apriorism.
As I have pointed out above, Austrian economists, to a significant degree, and Hayek in particular to a somewhat lesser degree, tend to favor the primacy of theory/deduction over empirical evidence. This eschewing of empiricism, which is an essential aspect of science, can be seen in two ways. On the one hand it has tremendous implications detrimental to the very nature of truth, rationality and objectivity of any science that employs such methods. On the other hand it raises interesting problems regarding the demarcation, according to Hayek a very strict one, to be made between the natural and the social sciences. Thus there are two key questions to be addressed here:
- One: To what extent is Hayek’s method to be viewed as scientific or unscientific? and
- Two: Does Hayek’s contention that economics as a social science must be essentially and qualitatively different from the natural sciences, both in its methods and standards of objectivity, legitimately exempt his methodology from such criticism?
My answer to the first question is “It’s not terribly scientific at all” and my answer to the second is “No, it does not exempt his unscientific methodology because Hayek’s dichotomy between the natural and the social sciences is unfounded”.
My reason for giving these answers is based on Popper’s work, which was in part conducted in direct engagement with Hayek. In chapter 10 of Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper stresses “the significance of one particular aspect of science—its need to grow”[3]. It is certainly no mere coincidence that this book was in fact dedicated to F.A von Hayek, for it has implications regarding the problematic aspects of Hayek’s epistemology. Popper spells out his purpose quite clearly in the preface as follows:
THE ESSAYS and lectures of which this book is composed are variations upon one very simple theme–the thesis that we can learn from our mistakes. They develop a theory of knowledge and of its growth. It is a theory of reason that assigns to rational arguments the modest and yet important role of criticizing our often mistaken attempts to solve our problems. And it is a theory of experience that assigns to our observations the equally modest and almost equally important role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though it stresses our fallibility it does not resign itself to skepticism, for it also stresses the fact that knowledge can grow, and that science can progress–just because we can learn from our mistakes.[4]
Already in this brief preface we can derive much of the Popperian, critical rationalist, approach to science. Popper acknowledged Hume’s proof of the logical impossibility of induction, i.e. of knowledge expanding and truth preserving inferences from observation. However, unlike many others, he did not see this as a reason to adopt skepticism or to fall into the many traps and assorted rabbit holes of, for example, idealism, romanticism, solipsism or of the kind of hair splitting constructivism and relativism emanating from Wittgenstein and the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy. Popper’s epistemic humility, or modesty as he refers to it above, consists not in the rejection of truth and objectivity, but in the very wise realization that in order to achieve knowledge of the truth, which always has and must remain the aim of science, we must give up the outdated notion that it is the role of science to provide us with absolutely certain and proven true statements. The mistake made by previous philosophers, in the Popperian view, has been to conflate the concept of truth with the concept of certainty.
Through his study of the work of logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) Popper became convinced that an approach to truth in the empirical sciences was possible. It consisted in acknowledging that, although we lack truth criteria, i.e. we cannot know “the truth” per se, we can nonetheless employ the truth as a regulatory factor. Popper achieved this in a way that was decidedly distinct from the apriorism of the Austrians or the probabilistic approaches of Mill and others that relied on probability calculus. For Popper these represent faulty responses to Hume’s induction problem.
In his 1934 book Logik der Forschung Popper developed different solutions to the twin problems of induction and demarcation and it was at the suggestion of Gottfried Haberler, who was impressed by this book, that Hayek invited Popper to join him at the London School of Economics. It was in part because of his collaboration with Popper that Hayek later reconsidered some of his epistemological views and was able, at least partially, to go down the road to fallibilism.
In Conjectures and Refutations, 1962, Popper developed an approach to the problem of truth and objectivity in science. After reading Tarski, who had developed what Popper believed was a tenable “correspondence theory of truth”, he found a different criterion as the standard by which to evaluate scientific theories. It is the concept of similarity to the truth or verisimilitude.[5] How this concept enables Popper to preserve truth as “a regulative idea”[6] is explained in Conjectures and Refutations in which Popper shows that it is indeed possible to preserve the rationality and objectivity of science which entails acknowledging its empirical nature and its ability to getcloser and closer to the truth as it progresses.
3.2.2 The Problem of Demarcation between the Natural and the Social Sciences
Before going further into the idea of verisimilitude and other aspects of Popper’s epistemology with regard to Hayek, I will first address the second of the above questions, namely the demarcation problem in light of Popper’s naturalism and Hayek’s anti-naturalism with regard to the social sciences. It is Hayek’s contention that there is an essential and unbridgeable distinction that must be made between the natural and the social sciences, economics in particular. Hayek not only believes that a “scientistic” approach to the social sciences is methodologically flawed; he believes it is dangerous and could destroy all of civilization.[7] It follows from Popper’s analysis of this false dichotomy that it is based on a faulty understanding of the nature of the physical sciences and on philosophical error related to a faulty response to the problem of induction on the part of Hayek and many others of his time.
In a way not unlike Quine or indeed Hayek himself, Popper acknowledges the central importance of theory in that he stresses that science does not begin with observations, but with problems. For Popper this is true for two reasons 1) Theory ladenness: even the most elementary act of observation is inherently theory laden and 2) The Intuitive nature of initial theory: a scientific theory is not principally derived from observations; it is rather conceived of first by means of speculations or “conjectures” and then is put to the test of falsifications or “refutations”.
3.2.3 The Objectivity and the Unity of Science: Demarcation and the Problem of Induction
Although both Hayek and Popper acknowledge the principle of theory ladenness, the conclusion Popper comes to is quite different. Theory ladenness is part of the two divergent approaches to the induction problem on the part of the two scientists. Hayek’s solution leads him to virtually abandon empiricism, as I have detailed above, and Popper’s leads him to a different approach by which he is able to preserve both the objectivity and the unity of science. Popper correctly embraces the empirical nature, and hence objectivity, of all sciences, both natural and social.
Popper’s ability to eliminate the false dichotomy between the natural and the social sciences, a dichotomy that Hayek so vehemently attempts to establish in his Counter Revolution of Science, lies in unmasking the mistaken assumptions upon which this dichotomy is based. Hayek’s mistake rests on the point Popper, politely, makes in The Poverty of Historicism, namely, that Hayek’s thinking bears several misconceptions regarding the methodology of the natural sciences. One of those mistakes is him not understanding the intuitive nature of initial theory. The Popperian solution posits that it is not the source of the theory but rather the testing and eventual falsification of a theory that are essential to science. Hayek makes the false assumption that theories must be based on observation and because the kind of observations he believes to be characteristic of the natural sciences are not possible in the social sciences, the two sciences are essentially and qualitatively different.
Popper shows that this is not the case by citing passages from Hayek himself. It is quite curious that Popper supports his doctrine in favor of the unity of the two sciences by citing the arguments of his friend Hayek, who was in strong opposition to this unity. Popper explains why theories do not rely on observation and, in consequence thereof, why Hayek’s distinction between the social and the natural sciences is unfounded. For Popper the formulation of the theory, the conjecture, can be entirely intuitive. In his seminal 1957 book The Poverty of Historicism, a book that focused on the social rather than the physical sciences, Popper writes the following: “…it is irrelevant from the point of view of science whether we have obtained our theories by jumping to unwarranted conclusions or merely by stumbling over them (that is, by ‘intuition’).”[8]
The key methodological difference here between Popper and Hayek is that it is not the source of the theory but rather its falsification that Popper is concerned with. He continues in the same paragraph: “The question ‘How did you first find your theory?’ relates, as it were, to an entirely private matter, as opposed to the question, ‘How did you test the theory?’ which alone is scientifically relevant.” [9]
Thus when, in the passages quoted by Popper, Hayek writes in his comparison of physics to social science that a naturalistic approach would require the scientist’s observation to penetrate into the “insides of atoms”, he is basing his distinction on a misapprehension of natural science caused by his mistaken notion regarding the source of theory.
Popper quotes Hayek as follows:
The physicist who wishes to understand the problems of the social sciences with the help of an analogy from his own field would have to imagine a world in which he knew by direct observation the inside of the atoms and had neither the possibility of making experiments with lumps of matter nor the opportunity to observe more than the interactions of comparatively few atoms during a limited period.[10]
Subatomic particles are, of course, never observed. Scientific theories regarding the structure of atoms and many other things are based on models in the same way that an institution or any other complex constructed entity relative to the social sciences is likewise based on models. Popper writes:
Now all this [intuitive nature of initial theory], I believe, is not only true for the natural but for the social sciences. And in the social sciences it is even more obvious than in the natural sciences that we cannot see and observe our objects before we have thought about them. For most of the objects of social science, if not all of them, are abstract objects; they are theoretical constructions…These objects, these theoretical constructions used to interpret our experience, are the result of constructing certain models (especially of institutions), in order to explain certain experiences—a familiar theoretical method in the natural sciences.
Therefore models are used in both sciences and in essentially identical ways. Hayek’s dichotomy between the natural sciences is therefore unfounded.
This strong advocacy of using models both in the natural and in the social sciences is, incidentally, a very current tendency in contemporary philosophy of science. [11] The importance of this turn toward models in both the natural and social sciences regarding Hayek here is quite significant. That is because it enables Popper, based on Hayek’s text, to come to a very different conclusion than did Hayek, namely that Hayek’s own arguments are not arguments for a radical demarcation between the natural and the social sciences, but rather for their essential unity.
Though he does not label Hayek an inductivist, per se, Popper does point out the misconception inherent in his text. It is a misconception related to a faulty solution of the induction problem. Popper argues that Hayek’s depiction of social sciences in his passage, which he acknowledges is an accurate description of the method of the social sciences, does not differ from the natural sciences because it
differs only from such interpretations of the method of the natural sciences as we have already rejected. I have in mind, more especially, the ‘inductivist’ interpretation which holds that in the natural sciences we proceed systematically from observation to theory by some method of generalization, and that we can ‘verify’, or perhaps even prove, our theories by some method of induction.[12]
As Popper establishes in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959 (Logik der Forschung, 1934) and more explicitly in Conjectures and Refutations, 1963, theory does not come about this way and it is the testing of the theory, not its conception, that matters. It is in this latter work that Popper explains how this distinction is so essential to the growth and objectivity of science.
3.2.4 The Question of Complexity
There is another fallacy upon which Hayek bases his strict distinction between natural and social science, the problem of complexity. Both in The Counter Revolution of Science and in his 1974 Nobel Memorial Lecture “The Pretense of Knowledge” Hayek makes much of the problem of complexity as an argument for the essential difference between the natural and the social sciences.
Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the events to be accounted for about which we can get qualitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed will be directly observable and measurable.[13]
The fallacy here regarding measurement was dealt with above; Popper already dealt with the fallacy of “complexity” in 1957 in The Poverty of Historicism:
The widely held prejudice that social situations are more complex than physical ones seems to arise from two sources. One of them is that we are liable to compare what should not be compared; I mean on the one hand concrete social situations, on the other hand artificially insulated experimental situations…The other source is the old belief that the description of a social situation should involve the mental states and perhaps even physical states of everybody concerned (or perhaps that it should even be reducible to them). But this belief is not justified; it is much less justified even than the impossible demand that the description of a concrete chemical reaction should involve that of the atomic and sub-atomic states of all the elementary particles involved.[14]
Here again Hayek’s stubborn insistence, in spite of Popper’s repeated arguments to the contrary, that there is an essential difference between the natural and social sciences is founded on Hayek’s lack of understanding of the natural sciences.
Popper puts the cherry on the cake in the next paragraph when he writes the following:
But in fact, there are good reasons, not only for the belief that social science is less complicated than physics, but also for the belief that concrete social situations are in general less complicated than concrete physical situations. For in most social situations, if not all, there is an element of rationality.[15]
I would argue that the combined effect on the part of Austrian economists of eschewing empiricism as described above and banning “scientism” from their field as Hayek has done is obscurantist by design and represents a kind of immunizing strategy that shields their theories from legitimate challenges that they should and would be exposed to if they were to adopt an authentically fallibilist and hence more scientific approach. I will expand on this idea and its repercussions in my conclusion.
3.2.5 Inductivism as a Cognitive Bias[16]
The problems involved here relate not so much to the demarcation problem regarding natural vs. social sciences, but more directly to the first of Popper’s “two fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge”, namely the problem of induction as it relates to the growth of scientific knowledge. Popper sketches the basics in the second paragraph of Chapter 10 of Conjectures and Refutations: “…it is not the accumulation of observations which I have in mind when I speak of the growth of scientific knowledge, but the repeated overthrow of scientific theories and their replacement by better or more satisfactory ones.”[17]
The epistemic humility that shines through this brief passage demonstrates Popper’s belief in the necessary critical attitude that is one of the chief virtues of a scientist, a virtue quite lacking in F.A. Hayek for the most part. However, it is more than tone and humility that is at work here; there is an essential difference here between Hayek and Popper, namely their understanding of how scientific knowledge progresses. Popper refers to different theories as T1 and T2 whereas Hayek prefers to refer to earlier and later theories as if they were building blocks of one theory and insists that the later building block be based on similar “logical foundations” to the previous one. This supposedly scientific construction of an axiomatic system through deduction, that Mises termed praxeology as opposed to fallibilism and empiricism, seems to me to facilitate a kind of immunizing strategy. In contrast to Popper’s insistence that scientists strive to refute their own theories for the sake of adopting better ones, Hayek and the other Austrians are far more interested in “theory for its own sake”, as I pointed out above quoting Hayek, which means that their axioms are protected from falsification by the supposed fundamentally different nature of the social sciences, in that those of the social sciences are considered exclusively qualitative and not quantitative, and because Hayek is not engaging in falsification, but rather, because of the conceptual rigidity I have described above, has a natural tendency to seek not falsification but corroboration of his own theory as a consequence.
After roundly refuting and rejecting several subjectivist positions in section 2 of Conjectures and Refutations, Popper proceeds to outline how, through Tarski’s correspondence theory of truth, it is possible to preserve the idea of truth as a “regulative idea”[18]. Popper explains that this approach to objectivity requires that we give up certainty for truth, that there is a standard of objective truth that can dispense with the misguided quest for absolute certainty. He points out that the mistake of the “verificationists” is to “demand that we should accept a belief only if it can be verified, or probabilistically confirmed.”[19]
He goes on to explain that both the irrationalists and the fallibilists (like Popper) believe that the positivist program of certainty or verification is impossible, but that
…we falsificationists believe that we have also discovered a way to realize the old ideal of distinguishing rational science from various forms of superstition, in spite of the breakdown of the original inductivist or justificationist program. We hold that this ideal can be realized, very simply, by recognizing that the rationality of science lies not in its habit of appealing to empirical evidence in support of its dogmas-astrologers do so too–but solely in the critical approach—in an attitude which, of course, involves the critical use, among other arguments, of empirical evidence (especially in refutations).[20]
When one critically examines a statement by Hayek, like the one quoted above, claiming that statistical analyses “can, at best, afford merely a verification of existing theories”[21], one can indeed get the impression that he is behaving like an astrologist, as Popper describes. What distinguishes the astrologer from the astronomer, and the pseudoscience from the genuine science, is precisely Popper’s critical focus on refutation rather than verification. This is what is so lacking in Hayek.
Popper lays out three “meta-logical” requirements for a new theory to be a good candidate to replace an old one. The theory should
- 1. be “simple, new, and powerful, unifying”
- 2. be “independently testable”
- 3. “pass some new, and severe, tests”[22]
It is in particular the third of these that preserves the empirical nature of science and, as I have pointed out, is missing from Hayek’s approach.
3.2.6 Truth or Certainty
Hayek’s conflation of truth and certainty shows how attached he was to the inductivist fallacies that Popper had so systematically refuted in Logik der Forschung in 1934. The faulty belief that science consists in the generation of statements or laws that are proven absolutely certain or highly probable was quite widespread during the past two centuries. The search for certainty is misguided according to Popper in part because it is rendered impossible by the problem of induction and in part because this unattainable goal is not the foundation of the growth of science; it is rather through the falsification of theories that scientific knowledge is able to progress.
“Necessity” as a Remnant of German Idealism
Hayek’s bias towards certainty over empiricism comes out in Monetary Theory and The Trade Cycle most prominently in his constant use of the concept of necessity, a feature of his thought that I would argue is caught up in some of the old errors that gave rise to German idealism, and all the philosophical error it left in its wake. Hayek seems to reject fallibilism to a certain extent when he writes that statistical analyses “cannot, in themselves, provide new insight into the causes or the necessity of the Trade Cycle.” [23]
What Hayek really means when he writes “the necessity of the trade cycle” here is that it is a logical truism based on the axiomatic theory that his likeminded economists have constructed in their heads. An observation can tell you what is contingently true in a particular instance, but only theory can tell you what is necessarily true. This arbitrary and scientifically irrelevant division of “truths” about an entity between that which merely happens to be a certain way and that which must be a certain way comes out of German Idealism. It is related to Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy and the way he explained the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.[24] Kant’s response to Hume’s induction problem, the one that woke him from his “dogmatic slumber” led, unfortunately, to something of a dogmatic coma in the form of his so-called “synthetic a priori”, which is an epistemological and ontological impossibility. Such a concept developed with such obscurantist verbiage by such an unquestionable authority like Kant cannot help but tempt later thinkers to adopt fruitless a priori approaches to knowledge. Both Kant and Hayek develop theories that are completely caught up with the question of the source of knowledge, which is shown above to be irrelevant to science. For the sake of science it is irrelevant where the theory comes from and so the distinction between contingent and necessary truth is completely moot. The question for science is whether or not something is true, not where the knowledge of it came from. It is because of Hayek’s yearning for certainty that he is compelled to insist on the concept of necessity and hence on axiomatic reasoning over empirical testing or observation. Hayek returns to the idea of necessity here: “Empirically established relations between various economic phenomena continue to present a problem to theory until the necessity for their interconnections can be demonstrated independently of any statistical evidence.”[25]
Here again we see Hayek’s anti-empiricist bias and his favoring of theoretical certainty, which is only a product of combining axioms and might be completely false, over observations made in the form of statistical evidence.
Verisimilitude or Similarity to the Truth
The sanctity of truth both as a necessary component of science and of morality was something central to the thinking of both philosophers. They also shared a commitment to liberalism and individualism as opposed to totalitarianism, the latter being anathema to both truth and morality. In his highly influential work of political philosophy The Road to Serfdom Hayek included a chapter entitled “The End of Truth” in which he establishes this connection of truth and objectivity to morality and shows how these values are utterly destroyed by the collectivism of a totalitarian state:
…the effect of propaganda in totalitarian countries is different not only in magnitude but in kind from that of propaganda made for different ends by independent and competing agencies …The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we must now consider are, however, of an even more profound kind. They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.[26]
Although he was a socialist and differed from Hayek significantly on the issue of trade unions and the role of monopoly in capitalism, George Orwell could not help being profoundly influenced by Hayek’s ideas in this book. It helped Orwell to see the commonalities between fascism and Stalinism and to develop the ideas that led to him writing the most monumental indictment of totalitarianism ever written, namely 1984, in which the pernicious influence of real and fictitious “Newspeak”, “doublethink” as well as the mutability of the past, all concepts utterly contemptuous of truth and objectivity, are laid out in full relief as an eternal warning to future generations.
Although
he strived for objectivity, Hayek was not
able to achieve it, in part, because of the methodological errors I have
detailed above and because of certain biases that I will elaborate on later.
As a natural scientist Popper’s approach is much
more “scientistic” in Hayek’s use of the word and, in consequence of the false
dichotomy Hayek adopts between the natural and the social sciences, much more
suited to the preservation of the objectivity and truth value of scientific
theories in both branches of science. His approach rests on the rejection of
apriorism and of probabalism which is necessary because they are failed
attempts to achieve the impossible goal of certainty in science that, as I have
shown, are based on inductivist biases. Under the influence of Tarski, Popper
is able to develop a way of increasing the “truth content” and decreasing the
“falsity content” of theories by focusing on the falsification of theories and
their replacement by better ones, an approach very different from Hayek’s. Popper
does so by making them more similar to the truth, that is to say by increasing
their verisimilitude.[27]
It is a truthlikeness that embraces and enriches the empirical content of
theories rather than diminishing it in favor of rationalistic axiomatic systems
that are often devoid of it.
[1] F. A. Hayek, The Counter Revolution of Science, 1952, p. 87
[2] Ibid, pp. 94-95
[3] Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, BASIC BOOKS, Publishers NEW YORK LONDON, 1962, p. 215
[4] Ibid, p vii
[5] Ibid, ch. 10
[6] Ibid, p. 229
[7] F. A. Hayek, The Counter Revolution of Science, 1952.
[8] The Poverty of Historicism, by Karl Popper, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957 p 125
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid, p. 126
[11] See, e.g., Gabriele Contessa, „Scientific Models and Representation” , 2011, Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 , and Mary S. Morgan, “Learning from Models” Ch. 12 of Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[12] The Poverty of Historicism, by Karl Popper, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957 p 127
[13] “The Pretense of Knowledge”, FA von Hayek, American Economic Review, Dec 1989. Originally delivered on December 11, 1974
[14] The Poverty of Historicism, by Karl Popper, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, pp. 129-150
[15] Ibid, p. 150
[16] I do not mean this term in the sense commonly meant in the field of psychology, but rather in the sense of habits of thought based on philosophical error and the further philosophical error they engender in later philosophers.
[17] Conjectures and Refutations, by Karl Popper, BASIC BOOKS, Publishers NEW YORK LONDON, 1962, p. 215
[18] Ibid, pp. 228-229
[19] Ibid, p. 228
[20] Ibid, pp. 228-229
[21] Hayek, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, p. 27
[22] Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 241-242
[23] Hayek, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, p. 27
[24] I would point to a good example of this from Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft: “wenn ich sage: alle Körper sind ausgedehnt, so ist dies ein analytisch Urteil. Denn ich darf nicht über den Begriff, den ich mit dem Körper verbinde, hinausgehen, um die Ausdehnung, als mit demselben verknüpft, zu finden, sondern jenen Begriff nur zergliedern, d.i. des Mannigfaltigen, welches ich jederzeit in ihm denke, mir nur bewußt werden, um dieses Prädikat darin anzutreffen; es ist also ein analytisches Urteil. Dagegen, wenn ich sage: alle Körper sind schwer, so ist das Prädikat etwas ganz anderes, als das, was ich in dem bloßen Begriff eines Körpers überhaupt denke.“ Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Immanuel Kant: Werke in zwölf Bänden. Band 3, Frankfurt am Main 1977, S. 52-55. From an objective rather than idealist point of view the fact that all objects have both extension and mass/weight is what is relevant; what an 18th Century philosophy professor in Königsberg arbitrarily chooses to associate or not associate with his own particular concept (Begriff) of “body” is not important. From the point of view of science what I associate (ich verbinde) with the object is utterly irrelevant. What is true about an object is true; there is no reason to distinguish between different kinds of truths in this way either as analytic vs. synthetic or as necessary vs. contingent.
[25] Ibid, pp. 30-31
[26] Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 1944, p 168
[27] Conjectures and Refutations, p. 233
