Hayek's "Scientism" essay: the social aspects of objectivity and the mind

In his Scientism and the Study of Society, Hayek wishes to show the errors to which the moral scientist is led by emulating the methods of the natural sciences. The present paper argues that Hayek’s argument relies on a differentiation between the natural sciences and what he calls “ordinary experience” that is based on an unacceptable appearance-reality distinction and an implausible ontology. An alternative justification for the differentiation is offered by appealing to the manifold goals and social contexts of inquiry. Also, according to Hayek, the moral scientist needs to understand agents’ attitudes, and such understanding is possible because there is a similarity between the mind of the moral scientist and that of the agent. This paper tries to elucidate what Hayek thinks such similarity to be and how it may lead to the understanding of others. It proposes two alternatives: first, understanding as the projection of mental categories from behavioral evidence, and second, by looking forward to Hayek’s The Sensory Order, understanding as a functional correspondence between structures in the central nervous system.