New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas Quotes

“I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas

“These several dispositions towards kinds of movements can be regarded as adaptations to typical features of the environment, and the ‘recognition’ of such features as the activation of the kind of disposition adapted to them. The perception of something as ‘round’, for example would thus consist essentially in the arousal of a disposition towards a class of movements of the limbs or the whole body which have in common only that they consist of a succession of movements of the several muscles which in different scales, dimensions and directions lead to what we call a round movement.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas

“What I contend, in short, is that the mind must be capable of performing abstracting operations in order to be able to perceive particulars, and that this capacity appears long before we can speak of a conscious awareness of particulars. Subjectively, we live in a concrete world and may have the greatest difficulty in discovering even a few of the abstract relations which enable us to discriminate between different things and to respond to them differentially. But when we want to explain what makes us tick, we must start with the abstract relations governing the order which, as a whole, gives particulars their distinct place.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas

“...the formation of abstractions ought to be regarded not as actions of the human mind but rather as something ,which happens to the mind, or that alters that structure of relationships which we call the mind, and which consists of the system of abstract rules which govern its operation. In other words, we ought to regard what we call mind as a system of abstract rules of action (each ‘rule’ defining a class of actions) which determines each action by a combination of several such rules; while every appearance of a new rule (or abstraction) constitutes a change in that system, something which its own operations cannot produce but which is brought about by extraneous factors.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas

“These several dispositions towards kinds of movements can be regarded as adaptations to typical features of the environment, and
the 'recognition' of such features as the activation of the kind of disposition adapted to them. The perception of something as 'round', for example would thus consist essentially in the arousal of a disposition towards a class of movements of the limbs or the whole body which have in common only that they consist of a succession of movements of the several muscles which in different scales, dimensions and directions lead to what we call a round movement.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas

“What I contend, in short, is that the mind must be capable of performing abstracting operations in order to be able to perceive particulars, and that this capacity appears long before we can speak of a conscious awareness of particulars. Subjectively, we live in a concrete world and may have the greatest difficulty in discovering even a few of the abstract relations which enable us to discriminate bchween different things and to respond to them differentially. But when we want to explain what makes us tick, we must start with the abstract relations governing the order which, as a whole, gives particulars their distinct place.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas