Abstract
F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is often considered to be a theory of cognitive psychology. While it contains a theory on the psychology of perception, it has the function of illustrating Hayek’s solution to the mind–body problem. The solution, which has been strongly influenced by Moritz Schlick’s epistemology, takes the form of a physicalist identity theory. An attempt is made to trace Schlick’s influence on Hayek to the latter’s stay in Zürich, which resulted in a manuscript (1920) that contains the main features of the 1952 book. One of the consequences of Hayek’s theory is that we cannot describe the functioning of our mind completely without using expressions that refer to subjective experiences. For Hayek this is not a fundamental problem but a practical one that does not jeopardize his physicalist identity theory. Unlike the manuscript, The Sensory Order contains a rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary research program. When Hayek elaborated that program later, though, he focused on cultural evolution rather than on the evolution of the mind.
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Notes
E.g., by Smith (2003), which is an extended version of his Nobel lecture.
This is what he told Axel Leijonhufvud in an interview (private communication).
The University of Zürich calendar shows that this practice was held daily.
To whom I was kindly directed by Ernst Fehr.
On p. 39 of the course calendar of the University of Zürich Einstein is mentioned as being in charge of a course (“Lehrauftrag”) without being part of the staff. From 1914 he was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin and professor at the university there.
According to Von Monakow (1853–1930), the brain consists of one widespread neural network, functioning as a whole, without specific functions being located in specific areas (cf. Finger et al. 2004).
What my brief voyage back in time did make clear is that Hayek could have make a worse choice than Zürich: it was one of the most advanced and renowned centers of scientific education and research in the world during the post-war period.
Ed Feser, in his excellent PhD thesis (1999), calls it a structural theory.
Notice that this suggests that Hayek also means a temporal order. That fits the developmental or “dynamic” character of his theory. See SO, 2.21.
I have made amends in Birner (2006).
Karl Popper never thought otherwise; cf. the critical letter he wrote to Hayek after receiving a copy of SO (I discuss it in my 1999a). In the preface, Popper is one of the people whom Hayek thanks for commenting on earlier drafts (the others are Ludwig von Bertalanffy and John Eccles). Feser (1999) contains a sophisticated analysis of Hayek’s mind–body theory.
Hayek explicitly rejects a reduction of economic phenomena to psychological mechanisms. The reasons lie in the “philosophical consequences” (the title of the last chapter of SO) he draws from his theory of mind. This is discussed in Birner (2010). See also below.
This idea is already clearly present in the ms.: “Gewiss ist es ein auf die Spitze Treiben des Empirismus wenn wir auch das Verhältnis der Empfindungen untereinander durch die Erfahrung entstehen lassen; aber gerade dadurch werden viele seiner Härten gemildert, da danach die uns mittels dieser Empfindungen vermittelten Erfahrungen sich immer innerhalb dieser Verhältnisse halten müssen und diese daher einen gewissen apriorischen Charakter erhalten“(p. 40) (“It is certainly taking empiricism to its extreme consequences if we let the relationship between sensory impressions emerge from experience, too; but it is precisely this that softens many of its hard aspects because as a consequence the experiences that have been transmitted to us by these impressions must remain within these relationships, which thus assume a certain a priori character”; my translation).
Cf. also the use of “developmental” in Bolhuis et al. (2011).
This is an elaboration of an idea in the manuscript (p. 29), where this “conservation principle” is expressed in stronger and cruder terms. Hayek says there that he finds it encouraging that nothing at all of anything we have experienced ever gets lost: “Die Vorstellung dass dies [the existence of intuition] darauf beruht, dass auch scheinbar entschwundene Kentnisse weiterwirken, dass also nichts, gar nichts, dass wir einmal erfahren haben, ganz verloren geht, is überaus ermutigend.”
What Hayek does discuss in the manuscript is a form of competition between sense impressions. Only those that arouse the most widely connected neural pathways become part of consciousness (p. 25). In his later work (for instance, in The Fatal Conceit), competition is mentioned as a basic mechanism of evolution.
And when he did, he eventually distanced himself from Darwinism, preferring a Lamarckian explanation of evolution in The Fatal Conceit. For a discussion, cf. Birner (2001).
Hayek mentions as a reason for abstracting from the phylogenesis of the mind that not enough was known about it at the time (SO, 4.7).
Feser mentions Chalmers as one of the two philosophers (except for Feser himself; the other one mentioned is Howard Robinson) who recognize (and reject) the combination of a structural theory of the external world with a structural theory of the mind that one finds in Hayek. Feser himself, on the other hand, endorses Hayek’s theory as a very important and original innovation (Feser 2003, pp. 6–7).
The paper may be considered to be a precursor of AI; cp. Birner (2009), Second afterthought.
Cf. Schlick (1974, p. 299; italics in the original): “The resulting relationship between immediately experienced reality and the physical brain is then no longer one of causal dependency but of simple identity. What we have is one and the same reality, not ‘viewed from two different sides’ or ‘manifesting itself in two different forms,’ but designated by two different conceptual systems, the psychological and the physical.”
Cp. Hayek (1964).
If such a translation were considered to be the “reduction” of one conceptual system to the other we would still be left with a form of reductionism. This raises difficult problems about reduction, description, and explanation that I do not want to address here. I refer the reader to what Hayek says about reduction and explanations of the principle in "The Theory of Complex Phenomena," for example on p. 39 (Hayek 1964).
It would be fairer to say that he endorsed this methodology earlier, or rather, adopted it from his predecessors in the Austrian School. In Chap. 8 of SO the conclusion is provided with an underpinning that is based in Hayek’s mind–body theory. I have deliberately not addressed the problem of the possible reciprocal influences between Hayek’s mental research program and his methodology. They are discussed in Birner (Birner 1999a, b).
I doubt whether this has been realized in science, and I find it difficult to understand how, for instance, evolutionary psychology may help to make macro- and microeconomics mutually consistent. Cf. Vromen (2003).
This hides a host of problems. One is the speed of evolution. At the physiological and biological levels, evolution is (usually) rather slow. The speed of mental evolution is a more contested problem. If primitive hunter-gatherers have evolved a mind that is adapted to their situation, how fast has it evolved? Apparently (but here lurks the danger of circularity) fast enough to survive. But then, why should the evolution of our mind have lagged behind the evolution of culture? On this and related problems cf. Bolhuis et al. (2011) and Callebaut (2011).
Cf. SO, 2.23.
“The point from which I could then [between 1946 and 1949] start was the conviction that the different attributes of mental entities—conscious or not—could be reduced to differences in effects as guides to human action. But the crudities of behaviorism (which I had in the meantime encountered in the social sciences) had too much repelled me (particularly in the person of the social science specialist of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists [Hayek means Otto Neurath; cf. Kresge and Wenar, p. 50]) to make the effect on observable conduct more than a final visible outcome of a complex process we had to reconstruct (Hayek 1982, p. 289).”
Cf., e.g., Hayek (1976), Chap. 11, “The Discipline of Abstract Rules and the Emotions of the Tribal Society.”
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Acknowledgments
I thank Bruce Caldwell for permission to quote from unpublished texts in the Hayek Archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I am very grateful to Dr. Heinzpeter Stucki, the archivist of the University of Zürich, for a copy of the 1919–1920 course calendar of the University of Zürich and many other important details. For similar help with calendars, etc., of the other academic institution in that city, the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule, I wish to express my thanks to Dr. Corina Tresch De Luca of the ETH archives. I gratefully acknowledge comments by Werner Callebaut. What I have done with them remains, of course, my responsibility.
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Birner, J. F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order: An Evolutionary Perspective?. Biol Theory 10, 167–175 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0189-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0189-4