By Ryan Smith
The Austrian Nobel laureate, economist, philosopher, and social theorist F.A. Hayek is perhaps best known for his work on economics. But he was also, in turn, a pioneer in the fields of epistemology and psychology. In this article I attempt to present a few of his points on those topics.
The starting point of Hayek’s analysis, in economics as well as in psychology, is Ludwig von Mises’s pivotal insight that the formation of prices in a free economy represents a sophisticated compression of billions of variables into singular handy numbers (prices). No single human being (or group of human beings) will ever be able to survey the totality of the information that went into the formation of a given price, and for this reason no planned economy will ever be as effective as a free market economy (that is – at least not in Hayek’s or Mises’s view).
It is this insight from economics that Hayek applies to his theory of psychology and the social sciences as well. According to Hayek, physicists are the lucky ones: Theirs is the privilege of dealing with uniform and simple objects. But as soon as the scientist moves from physics and on to something like biology, he will no longer be consigned to working with simple entities. In fields that have to deal with complex objects, the scientist cannot hope to reduce the objects of his study to definite formulas.
In the humanities and social sciences, the properties of the objects under scrutiny depend on a series of variables, all of which affect each other in a multitude of ways. Just like the billions of variables that went into the formation of a single price quote will never be available to any one agent, so the full range of variables that would be necessary to “exhaust” a complex object like the economy or like the human personality will never be available in any one analysis and consciousness. In Hayek’s view, the social sciences have made impressive progress when it comes to uncovering the qualitative generalities that govern the objects of their study in the abstract. But they have failed to achieve much in the way of quantitative certainty in a way that we have come to expect of modern physics.
In Hayek’s view, the discovery of abstract patterns and parameters in the social sciences often seduces people into thinking that we are just “a few steps away” from exhausting the truth about fields like psychology, sociology, and economics. In the same way, a lot of people in the field of psychological typology seem to believe that we are just “a few steps away” from discovering the objective and scientific foundations of type. That may or may not be true, of course. But according to Hayek, that is just what is never going to happen. In his view, the social sciences will always be consigned to working on the general and qualitative level, where they have patterns and partial information but little predictive empirical certainty.
According to Hayek, when social scientists think that they are supposed to act like physicists, they tend to overstress those parameters that are available to them at the expense of those unknown and difficult parameters that are not. In economics, Hayek gives the example of J.M. Keynes who proposed to solve the problem of unemployment by focusing on a single parameter that is readily available for analysis and known to have an effect on the employment rate – namely that of public spending. According to Hayek, by over-focusing on a parameter like public spending simply because it is there and easy to work with, we blot out the influence of more difficult, but perhaps equally important, parameters like economic bottlenecks and inhibitions to the free formation of prices. Worse still, by focusing exclusively on the few parameters we do know, at the expense of those we do not know, we end up with a misleading and distorted theory of unemployment altogether.
Likewise, the field of psychology tends to experience similar distortions when psychologists focus exclusively on those parameters that are known to them: Freudians famously wanted to make everything about sex and the body, typology enthusiasts often want to make everything about psychological type, and contemporary social psychologists only want to deal with things that they can measure empirically. In Hayek’s view, each of these cases represents an instance of the conceited belief that exactly those parts that are available to the individual are also the ones that are cardinal to the whole. And thus, in turn, each of these cases is representative of the type of mindset that leads to the formation of a distorted and misleading theory of personality altogether.
Hayek’s Theory of Sensation
Hayek also had a good deal to say about psychological functioning and about Sensation, specifically. In Hayek’s day (as today) the empiricist view that the senses merely register bundles of particular and concrete data, which the mind then generalizes into universals, abstractions, and logic, was quite popular. But to Hayek, this view is simply wrong: There was never any phase in a cognitive process where the “higher faculties” had access to the totality of the unmediated sense data. On the contrary (and following Kant) Hayek sees the senses as geared towards perceiving abstractions from the get-go. On this point, Hayek finds himself largely in agreement with Jung who writes that an act of pure Sensation is an extraordinarily rare thing, typically the prerogative of the artist or the man with a highly differentiated Sensation function (Psychological Types §794).
In Hayek’s view, biological organisms are wired to detect general patterns in their environment and these patterns can – by way of their general nature – be realized by a multitude of differing combinations of particulars. Abstraction must therefore always precede the particular and the environment we perceive is therefore by no means the starting point of a cognitive process, but rather a sophisticated end point, owing to the multifarious abstractions that stand between our cognition and the “sense data” in itself. In many cases, the person who perceives by way of Sensation only perceives the end point of such a process and has no access to the “sense data” that led him to perceive as he did in the first place. Hence, Sensation is actually quite abstract and – colloquially speaking – “intuitive,” as it were.
Hayek and Falsification
The epistemological consequences of regarding sensations as an end product (and not as a starting point) are as radical as they are fundamental: For one thing, they entail that if the “essentially complex” sciences, like biology and the social sciences, can never fully know the objects of their study, but only their emergent consequences, then these sciences will forever be destined to remain on the general and qualitative level where they postulate conjectural relations between patterns. Rather than being a source of embarrassment for these sciences, then, their lack of empirical certitude is proof that they are doing it right. In Hayek’s view, the people who claim to have uncovered the quantitative and empirical truth about complex objects like the economy or the human personality are exactly the people to avoid – their claims to have found the truth about such objects only serve to show that they have over-focused on whatever parameters that were available to them, be that public spending in economics or Jung’s theory of psychological types in psychology.
It might be objected, however, that if all that we are able to perceive about complex objects like the economy and the human personality are abstract patterns, and the tentative relations between them, with only partial information about their empirical properties, then what is to prevent arbitrary ideologies from stealing the show? If a given ideology informs the backdrop of one’s thinking, then that ideology will be likely to influence the abstract patterns that one is prone to perceive (a Freudian perceives sex symbols, a Marxist perceives capitalist exploitation, and so on). Hayek recognizes that in the absence of the kind of empirical certitude that we know from physics, ideologies do indeed pose a danger to the integrity of the social sciences. His solution (following Karl Popper) is to have social scientists look to the kind of information that could prove their theories wrong. As the credo goes, “any theory of something is at the same time a theory of something else that is unlikely to happen.” Hayek thus proposes to relax Popper’s criteria for falsification – in Hayek’s view (and contra Popper) falsification can also be used to gauge the merit of theories dealing almost exclusively with abstract patterns and which are meager in empirical content. However, as Hayek also recognizes, the more comprehensive a theory is, the smaller its empirical content will be (and thus the theory will be more difficult to confirm by demonstrating its resilience in the face of falsification). In such a case, it can be extraordinarily difficult to resolve a dispute between competing theories (or between competing interpretations of the same theory) and real progress can only be arrived at by the judgment of trained experts, duking it out over long stretches of time.
Jungian typology, of course, is just such a field: It is a wide-ranging theory featuring only a modicum of empirical content. Like other fields of its type, it is rife with sectarianism and would-be experts when what is needed is really something akin to a peer-reviewed journal where the experts can duke it out. To our knowledge, only one such journal exists, and it is not very well regarded. Perhaps it is high time to launch one. Time will tell.
Postscript: Hayek’s Epistemology and the Complexity of Jungian Typology
Hayek recognizes that the more comprehensive a theory is, the smaller its empirical content will be and thus the more difficult the correct application of the theory will be. As we have said, Jungian typology is a theory that is vastly comprehensive and features only a minuscule amount of empirical material (since its proper sphere of application is consciousness, not behavior or traits). This means that while the extreme amounts of theoretical nuance and scholarly hair-splitting that goes into Jungian typology might look like a concession at first (“it doesn’t really work!”), this forbidding level of complexity is actually exactly what we should expect of a comprehensive and non-empirical theory like Jungian typology. Hence, as Hayek also says, only experts will be competent to apply such a theory correctly and hence anyone who claims that the application of Jungian typology is “straightforward” or “obvious” is likely to not know what they are talking about.
REFERENCES
Hayek: The Market and Other Orders University of Chicago Press 2014
Hayek: The Sensory Order University of Chicago Press 2012
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Image of Hayek in the article especially commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.