Some Implications of Hayek's Cognitive Theory

Strong’s essay in Critical Review (vol. 25, nos. 3-4, 2013, pp. 461-472; reprinted as a chapter in Hayek’s Political Theory, Epistemology, and Economics) draws a theory of innovation out of the Hayek book economists usually skip, The Sensory Order. Hayek’s cognitive claim is that perception is classification: one sees only what one is already prepared to see, because sensory data reach us already sorted into abstract categories that are mostly implicit and physiologically mediated. Strong’s extension is that learning consists of using received categories while innovation consists of creating new ones — or moving data from one category into another, usually in an attempt to resolve an anomaly — which makes freedom a precondition for genuinely new conceptual categories rather than merely a source of efficiency.

Michael Strong is a recurring presence on the list itself: he appears as editor of Be the Solution in the capitalism and morality section, and McCord’s acknowledgements credit him with kicking the project off in 2022 with seventeen pages of notes on which rabbit holes to go down.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s science, technology and epistemology section beside The Sensory Order and Fuster’s paper on Hayek and cognitive neuroscience — the run that connects Hayek’s psychology to his economics, and the closest the list comes to an explicit theory of where new things come from.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Science, Technology, and Epistemology. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Innovation — what the essay derives from Hayek’s cognitive theory.
• Epistemology — the section this sits in and the essay’s method.
• Neuroscience — the field The Sensory Order anticipated.
• Knowledge — classification as the substrate of both learning and innovation.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.