Thomas McQuade

In the social science literature spawned by Friedrich Hayek’s “The Sensory Order,” the questions asked were: In what ways does Hayek’s cognitive theory fit with his social theory and with Austrian economics in general? Do we need “The Sensory Order” at all to do our social science, and how does it make a difference in providing insight toward understanding the social realm? This chapter surveys this literature and, by drawing out the ramifications from both Hayek’s work on epistemology and psychology and the ongoing experimental investigations of individual economic behavior, it points to the possibility of a coherent new view of economic and other social systems in which individuals have realistic capabilities, where emergent effects are recognized as macro-phenomena that supervene on micro-activity rather than being simply reducible to it and where systemic characteristics such as adaptation and knowledge generation are given their due.

We treat science as a Hayekian social order whose distinctive emergent characteristic is the generation of knowledge. We model modern science as an institutional form that principally relies on publication with citation and its effects on individual reputation in order to study the possible effects of funding on science. We develop a taxonomy of three broad categories of effect: those having to do with the direction followed by scientific activity, those involving the operational and financial stability of both the physical institutions integral to scientific work and the scientists themselves, and those due to distortions of the basic knowledge-generating procedures of science. It is argued that, while directional effects of funding are ubiquitous, destabilizing and distorting effects are much more likely to emerge when funding sources are concentrated than when they are decentralized. Further, when funding is accompanied by regulatory oversight, the possibilities for distortion are significantly increased. Examples of such effects actually occurring under the current U.S. funding regime are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative approach to introductory logic courses. Traditional logic courses usually focus on the method of natural deduction or introduce predicate calculus as a system. These approaches complicate the process of learning different techniques for dealing with categorical and hypothetical syllogisms such as alternate notations or alternate forms of analyzing syllogisms. The author's approach takes up observations made by Dijkstrata and assimilates them into a reasoning process based on modified notations. The author's model adopts a notation that addresses the essentials of a problem while remaining easily manipulated to serve other analytic frameworks. The author also discusses the pedagogical benefits of incorporating the model into introductory logic classes for topics ranging from syllogisms to predicate calculus. Since this method emphasizes the development of a clear and manipulable notation, students can worry less about issues of translation, can spend more energy solving problems in the terms in which they are expressed, and are better able to think in abstract terms.