Saturday, March 2, 2013
Friedrich August Hayek
I mention this because this historical relativism is a typical product of that so-called "historicism" which is, in fact, a product of the misapplication of the scientistic prejudice to historical phenomena—of the belief that social phenomena are ever given to us as the facts of nature are given to us. They are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other people's intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind. Where we could no longer interpret what we know about other people by the analogy of our own mind, history would cease to be human history; it would then, indeed, have to run in purely behavioristic terms such as the history we might write of an ant heap or the history an observer from Mars might write of the human race.
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The Facts of the Social Sciences
ReplyDeleteIndividualism and Economic Order
by Friedrich August Hayek
I mention this because this historical relativism is a typical product of that so-called “historicism” which is, in fact, a product of the misapplication of the scientistic prejudice to historical phenomena—of the belief that social phenomena are ever given to us as the facts of nature are given to us. They are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other people’s intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind. Where we could no longer interpret what we know about other people by the analogy of our own mind, history would cease to be human history; it would then, indeed, have to run in purely behavioristic terms such as the history we might write of an ant heap or the history an observer from Mars might write of the human race.
ReplyDeleteIf this account of what the social sciences are actually doing appears to you as a description of a topsy-turvy world in which everything is in the wrong place, I beg you to remember that these disciplines deal with a world at which from our position we necessarily look in a different manner from that in which we look at the world of nature. To employ a useful metaphor: while at the world of nature we look from the outside, we look at the world of society from the inside; while, as far as nature is concerned, our concepts are about the facts and have to be adapted to the facts, in the world of society at least some of the most familiar concepts are the stuff from which that world is made. 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.
The Methodology of the Austrian School Economists
ReplyDeleteLawrence H. White
5
Friedrich A. Hayek
http://mises.org/mofase/ch5.asp
Hayek emphasizes that, unless we adopt a purely behavioristic stance, such a procedure is unavoidable. The nature of social phenomena is such that they “are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other people’s intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind.”