Only now, more than half a century after the publication of his theoretical book (Hayek, 1952), is the reaction to Hayek’s argument beginning to be heard. And it’s a positive reaction, now supported by facts. He used to say that without a theory the facts are silent. Now, belatedly reacting to his book, we can confidently say that modern facts speak eloquently for his theory. In order to understand how modern facts meet Hayek, it is necessary to understand where his thinking came from and where cognitive neuroscience has been going in the past 50 years. Only in this manner can we fully appreciate the happy convergence of two trends of cognitive neuroscience that for most of the 20th century have developed far apart from each other. One is the ‘‘modular’’ trend (one cerebral module for each cognitive function), the other the ‘‘distributed’’ or reticular trend (brain networks of distributed knowledge participating in all the cognitive functions that adapt the individual to his environment). In his The Sensory Order, Hayek was the first to theoretically adopt the latter trend, which has lately developed greatly. Yet, astonishingly, to this day, most of the main actors in the field of cognitive neuroscience don’t even know of Hayek. In my opinion, the chief reason for this lingering neglect of his ideas is the language he used in his book. For example, he used terms that are unusual in physiological psychology, such as ‘‘following’’ and ‘‘map,’’ to characterize what in modern translation corresponds to synaptic association and neural network, respectively. Three powerful intellectual currents shaped Hayek’s psychology: Vienna’s logical positivism, Gestalt psychology, and psychophysics. Curiously, he tried to disown all three, yet ended up modifying them and incorporating them in his thinking.Afourth current, the dynamic systems theory of Von Bertalanffy (1950), came natural to him to theorize about the brain after having accepted the relational code of Gestalt (Koffka, 1935). After all, Hayek had been applying general complex systems theory to economics. With his application of that theory to psychology came the acceptance of a cortical dynamics in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts and irreducible to them: a cortical dynamics in which relationships were established by cell connections. Yet, in his time, little was known about the connectivity or physiology of the brain to support the relational anatomical code or the dynamics of the perceptual system that he devised. Now we know much more about them. Like the positivists of the ‘‘Vienna Circle,’’ Hayek advocated the use of the scientific method devoid of metaphysics as the only valid approach to human knowledge. In dealing with perception, however, he rejected the purely empiricist tenets of the positivists (like his friend Karl Popper, another quasi-renegade among them). According to Hayek, no perception was reducible to raw sensation. The concept of the brain as tabula rasa or passive recipient of sensations was to him unacceptable. The ‘‘elementary sensations’’ (e.g., a pure color) proposed by Ernst Mach (1885), the famous psychophysicist, were literally meaningless as a foundation for perception. Even the simplest of sensations is based on prior experience, either by the self or by the species – thus, in the latter case, inherited.
Colin McGinn locates his position within philosophy of mind. Though not a fashionable position, I’m very sympathetic to it – and of course, it is a position that has much in common with Hayek.
The “mysterianism” I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history – as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.
Daniel Kahneman’s recently released book Thinking, Fast and Slow aimed at a popular audience is certainly generating a great deal of press, so far as I can tell, most of it very positive. Here he is outlining his experimental work in a Ted Talk. As a behavioral economist much of what he says about rationality will have resonance for Hayek and Simon and other situated cognitive theorists. I think that much of what Kahneman says is consistent with Gunderman from the previous posting though they are of course very different thinkers.
Here is an uncorrected proof (do not cite) of my introduction to Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. Further details will be made available just as soon as the publisher has updated the webpage for this book (according to Amazon the book will be made available on December 13th). A dedicated website to the volume can be found here.
Check out this recent paper by Herb Gintis entitled Hayek’s “Contribution to a Reconstruction of Economic Theory.” Herb’s paper is, I think, going to be part of an edited collection that I’m also contributing to and am still polishing up. I had the pleasure of meeting Herb just over a year ago at the Society for Behavioral Economics conference in San Diego. I recently read Herb’s The Bounds of Rationality – the title a clear nudge and a wink to that other Herb – H. A. Simon’s famous phrase. And it’s endorsed by none other Nobel laureate Vernon Smith who I happened to meet this past May at a conference.
Here is the table of contents for my forthcoming (in press) edited volume focusing on The Sensory Order – this is the first salvo of shameless promotion.
CONTENTS
“SOCIALIZING” THE MIND AND “COGNITIVIZING” SOCIALITY
Leslie Marsh
“MARGINAL MEN”: WEIMER ON HAYEK
Walter Weimer
PART I: NEUROSCIENCE
HAYEK IN TODAY’S COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Joaquín Fuster
THE NON-CARTESIAN VIEW AND THE BRAIN
Erol Başar
PART II: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
HAYEK’S QUESTION: HOW CAN PARTS OF THE WORLD COME TO MODEL THE REST OF THE WORLD
Joshua Rust
HAYEK’S SPECULATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, THE NEUROSCIENCE OF VALUE ESTIMATION AND THE BASIS OF NORMATIVE INDIVIDUALISM
Don Ross
HAYEK, POPPER AND THE CAUSAL THEORY OF THE MIND
Edward Feser
PEIRCE AND HAYEK ON THE ABSTRACT NATURE OF COGNITION AND SENSATION
Having just delivered an edited volume entitled Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology to the publisher, this is an opportune time to make widely available, for the first time, some photographs so generously sent to me by Walt Weimer (contact made through the good offices of a few of his students, some featured in the photos below). But before that, the first shameless plug for the volume which amazingly includes a contribution from Weimer himself!
Hayek’s philosophical psychology as set out in his The Sensory Order (1952) has, for the most part, been neglected. Despite being lauded by computer scientist grandee Frank Rosenblatt and by Nobel prize-winning biologist Gerald Edelman, cognitive scientists — with a few exceptions — have yet to discover Hayek’s philosophical psychology. On the other hand, social theorists, Hayek’s traditional disciplinary constituency, have only recently begun to take note and examine the importance of psychology in the complete Hayek corpus.
This volume brings together for the first time state-of-the-art contributions from neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, economists, and social theorists to critically examine many aspects of Hayek’s philosophical psychology.
Weimer was the co-convenor along with the late David Palermo of The Second Penn State Conference on Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Weimer was so instrumental in rehabilitating (or perhaps more accurately, resuscitating) Hayek’s philosophical psychology. Here are my two previous Weimer posts. The photographs below are annoted precisely as Walt did in the hardcopy he sent me. (I have held back a couple of photos of Hayek since there is a dearth of good shots and I would like to have first dibs at using them should the occasion arise.)
I know that I may well cop a lot of flack disclosing that I’m a fan of David Stove. One colleague called Stove the worst curmudgeon he’d ever come across, a writer that had the ability to rub many constituencies up the wrong way. Be that as it may, I find Stove a great writer and a worthwhile voice against the prevailing milieu in which he wrote – I like a “damn the torpedoes” attitude from time to time, Dennett being the best current practitioner. The reason I mention Stove is that I had the good fortune to meet Jim Franklin, Stove’s literary executor. I learned from Jim that a new and the last posthumous collection of Stove’s has just been published, edited by Andrew Irvine at UBC. Here is the Stove page maintained by Jim Franklin and an article by Roger Kimball (who has also written the forward to this latest work). For what it’s worth here is Stove’s Wikipedia entry. A good link is to Scott Campbell’s bio-sketch of Stove. For the more technically minded here is a reference to Stove’s The Problem of Induction.
Update: I now have a copy of the book courtesy of the editor Andrew Irvine. The title essay (the only essay) comprises some 100 pages. Another 100 or so pages is devoted to Stove’s bibliography. I see that Roger Scruton is featured on the dust-jacket blurb and that Andrew (rightly) takes on Hayek in his introduction. Kimball presents a very good portrait of Stove.
At the “social” in the cabin-in-the-woods.
