ȃǿǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and PhilosophyLanguage is itself the product of interwoven biological and cultural
evolution.
Still another type of experience besides his own direct current experi-
ence helps shape the individual’s current perceptions. His own past expe-
rience does so by having affected physical and chemical conditions within
his body, such as nerve connections governing the travel of impulses to
and from the brain. People do not first have sensations that are then pre-
served by memory. Rather, it is as a result of physiological memory that
physiological impulses received are converted into sensations.
We need not go into what Hayek says further about physiology and
about what experiments do or would tend either to support or to refute his
theory. It is worth mentioning, though, that while Hayek (like almost all
scientists) is a mechanist as opposed to a vitalist, he is no reductionist. He
does not believe that the life sciences and social sciences can be “reduced”
to physics and chemistry in such a way as to recommend banishing the
language of seeing, hearing, thinking, consciousness, purposes, intentions,
decisions, and actions and requiring all propositions about such matters
to be phrased exclusively in physical and chemical terms instead.
Hayek argues, in short, that the individual’s cognitive apparatus, shaped
by his biological and cultural inheritances and by his own past experiences,
brings a predisposition to each new situation to perceive it and organize its
aspects in particular ways. No such thing operates as raw, pure, unfiltered
perception. Rather, the observer largely shapes what he perceives.
Knowledge does indeed have an a priori aspect then (though its nature
and sources are not quite what Kant had supposed). It is not true that
all we know must be subject to confirmation or contradiction by sense
experience, that is, by current or future sense experience. At least part of
what we know at any moment about the external world is implicit in the
means through which we can obtain experience.
Many observations tend to support or illustrate Hayek’s theory, or at
least to provide illuminating parallels. George Stigler and Gary Becker
(ȀȈȆȆ), in a well-known methodological article, tacitly accept something
like the theory. Ļey warn against hastily chalking up a change in a per-
son’s behavior to a change in his tastes. Ļey recommend postulating a
stable basic structure of tastes within which the accumulation of experi-
ence may alter the response even to otherwise unchanged circumstances.
A person may respond differently than before to a given set of oppor-
tunities, including perhaps prices, if in the interval he has acquired, for
example, more “music appreciation capital.”