#Hayek
Yilin Publishing House , Fonkley translation
1. The impact of natural science on social science
The study of economic and social phenomena, during the slow development of the 18th and early nineteenth centuries, when it chose its own method, it was mainly guided by the nature of the problems it faced. It gradually developed a technique suitable for these problems without thinking too much about the characteristics of those methods or their relationship with other knowledge disciplines. Researchers of political economy can call this science a branch of science or a branch of moral philosophy or social philosophy, and never mind whether their topic belongs to science or philosophy. At that time, the term "science" had not yet obtained the special narrow meaning of today, nor did it exist to separate natural science and give it special dignity. In fact, people who are devoted to these fields are happy to choose the name philosophy when studying more general aspects of their problems. We can sometimes even see the comparison between " Natural Philosophy " and "moral science".
In the first half of the 19th century, a new attitude emerged. The term "science" is increasingly limited to referring to physics and biology disciplines, and they also begin to require themselves to have special rigor and certainty that distinguishes them from all other studies. Their success fascinated workers in other fields and immediately emulated their teachings and terms. As a result, there has been a narrow sense of science (Science) methods and technology authoritarianism on other disciplines. To prove that they have equal status, these disciplines are increasingly eager to show that their methods are the same as their cousin who has achieved great success, rather than applying their methods more to their own special issues. However, for about 120 years, imitating scientific methods rather than their spiritual substance have always dominated social research, and it has contributed little to our understanding of social phenomena. It continues to cause chaos in social research, lose credibility, and the demand for further efforts in this direction is still shown to us as the latest revolutionary initiative. If these initiatives are adopted, the dream of progress will be quickly shattered.
However, it should be pointed out immediately that the people with the highest tone when making these requirements are almost not the ones who significantly enrich our scientific knowledge. From the prototype of Justice Francis Bacon, the so-called eternal "scientific hype" to August Conde and our today's "physicalsts", the proposition that professional methods of natural science are extremely superior are mostly doubtful people who speak on behalf of scientists, and in many cases, they show as much stubborn prejudice against science itself as they do other disciplines. Francis.Bacon opposes Copernicus' astronomy" Conde claims that any overly subtle study of phenomena with tools like microscopes is harmful, so the spiritual power of empirical society should be prohibited because it may subvert the laws of empirical science. Since this doctrinist attitude often makes such figures lose their direction in their own fields, there is no reason to respect their views too much for other issues that are far from the areas that make them inspire.
Readers should also remember a limitation when reading the discussion below. The methods that scientists or people obsessed with natural sciences often try to use in social sciences may not be the methods that scientists actually adopt in their own field. It is better to say that they think they are using. Both are not necessarily the same thing. Scientists who think about their own methods and theorize them may not always be reliable guides. Over the past few generations, the views on the nature of scientific methods have experienced different fashions, but we must assume that the actual methods are still the same in nature.However, since what affects social sciences is what scientists think they are doing, or even their views held in the past by
, the following comments on natural science methods may not necessarily be a truthful explanation of the actual work of scientists. It is better to say that it is an explanation of the mainstream views on the nature of scientific methods recently.
The history of this influence, the channels through which it plays a role, and its invasion of the direction of social development, are the themes of a series of historical research, and this article is just an introduction to them. Before tracing the historical process of this influence, we must first describe its general characteristics and the nature of the problems caused by the unfounded and unfortunate expansion of the mindset of physical sciences and biological sciences. We will encounter some typical factors of this attitude again and again, which seem reasonable, so we must act with caution when evaluating them. From specific historical examples, it is not always possible to reveal how these typical views have to do with scientists' thinking habits or how they arise from this habit, and it is easier to do this through systematic examination.
almost need to be emphasized. Everything we are talking about is not against the methods adopted by science in its proper fields, nor does it want people to doubt their value at all. But in order to eliminate this misunderstanding, when talking about the prejudice of " only scientism " or "scientism only", no matter what we are discussing, we do not refer to the general spirit of objective exploration, but to the imitation of scientific methods and language in a very slapstick manner. Although these concepts are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from French. In recent years, they have been widely used in French with their meanings expressed in English. It should be pointed out that in terms of the meaning we adopt, these concepts do reflect an attitude that has no scientificity in the correct sense at all, because it uses it indiscriminately and applies certain thinking habits to areas that are different from the areas where such habits are formed. Only the scientific view is different from the scientific view. It is not a non-biased method, but a severely biased method. Without thinking about its own problems, it announces that it knows the most appropriate way to study it.
If there is a similar word that can be used to describe the typical thoughts and attitudes of an engineer, it may be much more convenient. This attitude is closely related to scientism in many ways, and although it is different from it, we intend to discuss it here with scientism. Since we cannot find a word with equal expressiveness, we have to be satisfied with referring to the latter typical factor in the 19th and 20th century thoughts as "engineering engineering type of mind).
2. Problems and methods of natural science
To understand the intrusion of scientism, we must first understand the struggle of science itself to resist those concepts and concepts that hinder its progress, just like the scientism bias that is currently threatening the progress of social research. We now live in an atmosphere where the ideas and habits in our daily lives are deeply influenced by scientific thinking. However, we must not forget that science had to open the way for itself in such a world, and most of the ideas were formed in our relationship with others in our interpretation of their behavior. The motivation gained by this struggle has taken science over the head and created an opposite dangerous situation, that is, the domineering scientism hinders the progress of understanding society, which is a natural thing. However, although now pendulum has swung explicitly in the opposite direction, if we do not find out the factors that cause this attitude and provide legitimacy to it in the right field, the result it causes can only be confusion.
Since modern science was born in the Renaissance, its progress has been facing the three major obstacles it must fight against; most of its history of progress can be written based on the process it gradually overcomes these difficulties.The first (although not the most important obstacle) is that scholars are increasingly accustomed to spending most of their energy on analyzing other people's opinions for different reasons. This is not only because they were the practical research objects of the most advanced disciplines at that time, such as theology and law, but also because in the decline of science in the Middle Ages, there seemed to be no better way to obtain truths about nature besides studying the works of great men in history. More importantly, the second fact is that we believe that the "idea" of things has a certain prior reality. Through the analysis of ideas, we can learn some knowledge or all of the knowledge about the attributes of real things. The third and perhaps most important fact is that people in all places initially interpret things in the outside world in reference to their own image, believing that something like their own mind gives them life. Therefore, natural sciences encounter explanations everywhere through analogies of human mind mechanisms, through the theory of "anthropomorphism" or "animistic". These theories are all looking for some purposeful design, and they will be satisfied if they find that there is a proof that a mind engaged in design is at work.
In response to this situation, modern science has been working hard to return to "objective facts". It no longer studies people's views on nature, nor does it think that existing ideas are the truthful reflection of the real world, especially abandoning all such doctrines: they impose a certain dominant factor similar to our mind on the phenomenon, so they think they explain it. On the contrary, its main task is to modify and reconstruct ideas formed in daily experience based on systematic examination of these phenomena so that special phenomena can be better understood that they are just examples of universal rules. In this process, not only the temporary classification provided by the concepts commonly adopted, but also the preliminary division of the different perceptions conveyed by our senses to us must give way to another completely new way we use to sort out or distinguish the events of the outside world.
in the discussion of the outside world, and its most extreme development even led to the belief that the requirement of "explanation" itself is based on the anthropomorphic interpretation of events, and the only goal of science should be a complete description of nature. We will see that the first part of this claim has a component of truth, that is, we can understand and explain human behavior in a method that cannot be used for natural phenomena, so the word "explanation" still contains meanings that are not applicable to natural phenomena. The behavior of others is likely to be the first experience that makes people ask the following question: Why, for events other than human behavior, he cannot expect to draw the same "explanation" as the explanation he hopes to draw for human behavior. He spent a long time studying and still did not fully understand this problem.
The daily concepts of things around us do not provide appropriate classifications so that we can explain the general laws of their performance in different environments; in order to do this, we must replace them with another classification of things, which is a very common situation. However, it still sounds strange that the view that is correct for these temporary abstractions is equally correct for those sense qualities that most of us tend to see as ultimate reality. Although science breaks and replaces the classification system presented by our sensory nature, this is not very familiar, but it is exactly what science does. It starts with the realization that what seems to us the same thing does not always move in the same way; what seems to us the same thing, sometimes in all other ways, move in the same way. It goes further from this experience, replacing the classification of things provided by our senses with new classifications, which do not classify what looks the same, but what is proven to move in the same way in the same environment.
The childish mind tends to assume that external events recorded by our senses in the same or different ways are certainly the same or different not only in their role on our senses, but also in more aspects.However, scientific systematic verification shows that this is often wrong. It constantly proves that "facts" are different from "appearances". We are used to thinking that not only those same or different things in terms of vision, touch or taste are the same, but also those that appear regularly in the same space-time background. We know that similar constellation of sense perception may come from different "facts", or combinations of different sensory properties may represent the same "facts".
white powder with a certain weight and "tactile" but no smell can be any of different things depending on the different environment it appears, or after different combinations with other phenomena; or after being combined with other things in some way, completely different results will be produced. Therefore, systematic examination of phenomena in different environments often proves that our senses feel different things play a role in the same or at least very similar ways. For example, we can not only find that the blue objects we see in a certain light or after taking a certain drug are the same as we see green objects in another environment; or something that looks oval, may be something that looks round from another angle; and we can also find that things that look different like water and ice are "in fact" the same "thing".
reclassifies the "objects" that our senses have been classified in some way, and replaces our senses with the "second" properties of external stimuli based on the relationships consciously established between things. This process is probably one of the most typical aspects of natural scientific methods. The entire history of modern science is a process of increasingly getting rid of our classification of external stimuli until they eventually disappear completely. At this time, "natural science has reached such a stage of development: a language that can express the things captured by our senses can no longer express observable phenomena. The only appropriate language is mathematical language ", that is, an advanced discipline that describes the complex relationship between various factors, and except for this relationship, there are no other attributes between the factors. The various factors that were initially "analyzed" from nature are still considered to have some "essence", at least in principle they are visible or touchable; however, neither electrons nor waves, nor atom structures or electromagnetic fields, can be properly explained using mechanical modes.
This new world created by human beings in their own mind is entirely composed of entities that our senses cannot perceive, but is also connected with our sense world in some way. In fact, this world of science can be described simply as a set of rules that allow us to find the relationship between different sensory bundles. However, the key is that as long as we regard existing things, that is, stable complexes with sensory properties that we can perceive simultaneously, as natural units, this effort to establish a unified rule followed by perceived phenomena will not be successful. Instead, a new entity, "constructs", is defined only by the sensory perception obtained from "same" objects at different environments and at different times. This method means the assumption that things remain unchanged in a sense, although all of its perceptible properties may have changed.
In other words, although at the stages currently reached by various theories of natural sciences, these theories can no longer be described according to their sensory nature, the importance of these theories comes from the fact that we master the rules or "tricks" that can enable us to transform them into statements of perceived phenomena. It is better to compare the relationship between modern natural science theory and our sensory world to the relationship between people's different "cognition" ways of dead language , which exists in the inscription in some special character form. These inscriptions are the combination of different characters that make up the only expression of the language, consistent with different combinations of sensory properties.As we understand this language, we gradually know that different combinations of these characters can refer to the same thing; in different contexts, the same set of characters can refer to different things. As we understand these new entities, we have reached a new world where units are different from letters, and their relationship follows the clear law of arrangement order that is not seen in a single letter. We can describe the laws of these new units, that is, the laws of grammar, and the meaning expressed in sentences combined according to such laws, without having to refer to these individual letters or the principle that they are combined as symbols for all words. For example, it is possible to know the entire grammar of Chinese or Greek and the meaning of all words in these languages without having to know the characters of Chinese or Greek (or pronunciation of Chinese and Greek characters). But if Chinese or Greek only appear in the writing form of their characters, then all this knowledge, as knowledge of natural laws in the sense of abstract entities or structures, is of little use unless we know that some rules can be used to transform them into statements of sensory perceived phenomena.
When describing language structure, we do not need to describe various characters (or pronunciations) in the way they are combined into different units. Similarly, in our theoretical description of nature, the different sensory properties according to which we perceive nature disappear. They are no longer considered part of the object, but are only regarded as ways in which we spontaneously perceive or distinguish external stimuli.
How humans use special methods to classify external stimuli that we know as sensory properties is not the issue we are going to discuss here. Here we just need to briefly point out two related points that will be discussed below. One is that once we realize that the question of why they present to us in that particular way, and especially why they present to different people in the same way, becomes a real question to answer when we realize that we are classified different things in the outside world differently than they present to our senses. The second point is that different people do perceive different things in the same way, and any known relationship between this and these things in the outside world is not - to this fact, this fact must be regarded as an important material of experience, and any discussion of human behavior must be based on it.
What we are concerned about here is not the scientific method itself, so we cannot discuss this topic further. We mainly want to emphasize that humans' thinking about the external world, the knowledge they have mastered or thoughts, as well as their ideas, and even their subjective nature of sensory perception, are definitely not the ultimate reality for science, nor are they recognized materials. It is not about humans’ thinking about the world, and how they act accordingly, but about what they should think about. The concepts that people actually adopt, the way they observe nature, must be temporary in the eyes of scientists. His task is to change this schema and change the concept of habit, so that our statements on the classification of new things will be more precise and accurate.
From the following point of view, I need to say a few more words about the result caused by doing this. In natural science, digital expressions and quantitative calculations are of great significance. The general impression is that the importance of this quantitative nature of most natural sciences is mainly because of their greater accuracy. However, this is not the case. Without mathematical expression, the accuracy of a method can also be improved, breaking our intuitive material, and replacing the description of elements with sensory properties with no attributes but only these interrelationships is the essence of this process. It is part of the entire effort to get rid of people's existing natural landscapes, and is part of the process of sorting things provided by our senses with classification based on the relationships determined by systematic testing and experiments.
Return to our more general conclusion: the world studied by science is not the world of our existing ideas or feelings.It is committed to reorganizing all our experiences about the outside world, and in doing so it not only changes our conceptual patterns, but also abandons the sensory nature and replaces them with another category of things. For science, the world schema that humans actually formed, which in their daily life, perception and concept, guided him well is not its research object, but an imperfect tool to be improved. Science itself is not interested in the relationship between people and things, and in the way they act due to their existing worldview. It is better to say that it is this relationship itself, or a continuous process that changes these relationships. When a scientist emphasizes that he studies objective facts, he means to study things independently of people's thoughts or behaviors about them. The views people hold on to the outside world are always a stage that he wants to overcome.
People understand the world and their relationship through feelings and concepts, and these feelings and concepts are organized in a spiritual structure they share. What consequences does this fact cause? People are guided by the knowledge they have in an activity framework (network of activities), and most of its content is shared by them at any time. What can we say about this entire activity framework? Science is busy modifying the world schemas held by people at any time. In its opinion, this schema is always temporary. However, the fact that humans have some clear schema, and the fact that all those schemas that we see as thinking and we can understand have a certain degree of similarity, is equally significant reality and cause of certain events. Until science actually completes its work without leaving any unexplained factors for the intellectual process of humanity, the facts in our minds will always retain the material to be explained, and will retain the material that human beings must rely on when interpreting behaviors dominated by the thinking process. Here are some new problems that scientists do not directly deal with. Whether the specific methods he is familiar with apply to these questions is not so obvious. The question here is not to what extent the human schema about the external world conforms to the facts, but how humans act according to the perspectives and concepts he possesses, thus forming another world in which the individual belongs to one of them. By "the views and concepts that people hold" we refer not only to their knowledge of external nature; we refer to all their thoughts and beliefs about themselves, others, and the external world. In summary, they refer to all the factors that determine their entire behavior, including scientific research.
This is the field of social research or "moral science" writing.
