The Brain, its Sensory Order, and the Evolutionary Concept of Mind: On Hayek's Contribution to Evolutionary Epistemology

Abstract

Based on Hayek's early treatment of the brain/mind problem in his "The Sensory Order", this article attempts to develop a non-inductivist and non-falsificationist evolutionary epistemology. I confront Hayek's psychoneural monism with Popper's "world 3" concepts, and following the Hayekian analysis of the brain I show that falsification is a wrong analogy to evolutionary selection. This is expanded into a naturalistic interpretation of the Sneed/Stegmüller structuralistic approach to theories, which is applied both on physical theories and on the Piagetian view of cognitive development. Finally, I show that this approach can be based on some fundamental ontological assumptions about probability.

Keywords: Sensory Order, Hayek versus Popper, non-falsificationist theory evolution, naturalization of structuralist theory of science, probabilities and propensities

JEL Classification: B40, C70, Z00