The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek's epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek's own so- called "epistemic turn." The thesis defended here is that Hayek's dissatisfaction with his technical economics – in...

The present paper considers the implications of the postulate that the activities of scientists constitute complex phenomena in the sense associated with the methodological writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, methodologist, and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek. Although...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...

Although involved in projects of influent institutions like the Cowles Commission, the NBER, and the Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC), George Katona, the "pioneer student and chief collector of consumer anticipations data" (Tobin, 1959, p. 1) is virtually absent from accounts of the topics...

There is something extreme about Mises' apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element(s) of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises' epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have glossed...

Samuelson kept optimization-based problems separated from macroeconomic dynamics in his Foundations, where dynamics were defined in terms of difference and differential equations. Despite some criticism of his "correspondence principle" of stability analysis by D.F. Gordon, D. Patinkin and...

Wassily Leontief met with decades of success for the development of input-output analysis, and yet he remained a staunch critic of the economics profession throughout his life. To understand his success, its limits, and the origins of his discontent, I separate the scientific activities of...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

F.A Hayek is one of the most important and influential advocates of liberalism in the 20th century. His theory is famously based on the concept of spontaneous order, an order emerging from the interaction of individuals without central control and appears critical of every form of...