TY  - CHAP
AB  - Purpose – First, to look closely and critically at Hayek's treatment of science in The Sensory Order. This provides hints as to the difficulties in maintaining a theory of scientific knowledge as a selective sum of the identifiable contributions of individual scientists. Second, to generalize from Hayek's theory of how the brain generates an individual's knowledge to a theory of how science generates scientific knowledge, knowledge that is not a simple sum of individual contributions. Third, to apply this picture of science to understanding developments in postpositivist philosophy and post-Mertonian sociology of science.Approach – We provide a short survey of the conventional understanding of science and scientific knowledge, including that of Hayek in The Sensory Order. We examine in more depth the ways in which developments in postpositivist philosophy and sociology have transformed our understanding of science. We describe how, by analogy with Hayek's theory of the brain, science can be seen as an adaptive system that adjusts to its environment by classifying the phenomena in that environment to which it is sensitive, and we apply this systemic picture of science with a view to integrating much of the more moderate content of recent philosophy and sociology of science.
VL  - 13
SN  - 978-1-84950-975-6, 978-1-84950-974-9/1529-2134
DO  - 10.1108/S1529-2134(2010)0000013004
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-2134(2010)0000013004
AU  - McQuade Thomas J.
ED  - William N. Butos
PY  - 2010
Y1  - 2010/01/01
TI  - Science and The Sensory Order
T2  - The Social Science of Hayek's ‘The Sensory Order’
T3  - Advances in Austrian Economics
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 23
EP  - 56
Y2  - 2024/04/26
ER  -