Abstract
Building on Friedrich A. Hayek’s work in social philosophy, the paper gives an account of the central role of ignorance in institutional epistemology. The first part of the paper argues that if individuals involved in the search for knowledge are constitutionally ignorant and guided by norms, as Hayek saw them, they are more likely to attain knowledge if they follow different norms, including those that are redundant. The second part of the paper argues that the market as an institutional arrangement, preferred by Hayek for its epistemic features, may lead to an epistemically detrimental reduction of agents following redundant norms.
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Notes
Boettke specifically recognizes Hayek’s project as epistemological institutionalism.
Even if they were fully benevolent and outstandingly wise, the central board of planners (experts or elected officials), to whom all epistemic labour is delegated within a centralized system, would still firstly foreclose the ability of the population to make use of dispersed information (and thus epistemically unjustifiably reduce the inferential and conceptual capacity of the social epistemic system in the search for knowledge), and secondly are still ignorant (only supposedly relatively less so according to particular standards) and still themselves may only bet. With regards to experts’ ignorance, see Gaus 2008 and, on the particular issues with the foundational problem for development of expertise with regards to the wider concerns of policy and system design, see Rittel and Webber 1973.
An additional clarification must be made. Agents are of course capable of various epistemic activities, have various epistemic resources at their disposal and may produce significant epistemic outcomes when lacking these conditions. However, the system which fails to constrain social epistemic exclusion is, from the standpoint of institutional epistemology, a system (in which agents are) less likely to attain knowledge. The inconsistent and defective provision of sustenance and access to epistemic resources as well as the diminished possibility of Epistemic Contribution put agents at a significant disadvantage in their search for knowledge. Their counterparts which have these conditions satisfied are more likely (but given their suboptimality, in no way guaranteed) to attain knowledge.
There could be further arguments against social epistemic exclusion upon bad betting. For instance, it could be argued that the exclusion cannot ever be fully epistemologically justified due to the judging of the epistemic status of the bet itself being a bet. The presently recognized bad bets may be falsely recognized as such (Berg 2003, p. 414-415). Moreover, given all agents are epistemically suboptimal, no agent can with full justification predict any agent’s future bets from their history of betting (Sunstein 2006, p. 87).
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Zubčić, ML. Ignorance, norms and instrumental pluralism: Hayekian institutional epistemology. Synthese 198, 5529–5545 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02420-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02420-5