Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

IGNORANCE AS A STARTING POINT: FROM MODEST EPISTEMOLOGY TO REALISTIC POLITICAL THEORY

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08913810701497506

1933-8007

Jeffrey Friedman,

Philosophy and History of Science

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I hatched the plan with Dennis Auerbach and Milton Mueller, inspired by Weber’s Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and, more immediately, Paul Piccone’s Telos. The format, however, was to consist primarily of long review essays, à la the New York Review of Books, to enable scholars to criticize each other’s ideas at length. The first issue appeared in the winter of 1986–87. By 2001, chronic understaffing had caused us to fall so far behind schedule that we skipped two years so as to catch up to the calendar (volume 14 is dated 2000; volume 15, 2003). 2. See, inter alia, special issues treating Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and Saussure (vol. 3, no. 1); and Fish, Lyotard, and postmodernism in general (vol. 5, no. 2). 3. Popper’s work as a whole treats scientific knowledge as an evolutionary outcome in the metaphorical sense, in which theories better adapted to reality survive experimental challenge. Jarvie 1988 Jarvie, Ian. 1988. “Evolutionary Epistemology.”. Critical Review, 2(1): 92–102. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], Munz 1988 Munz, Peter. 1988. “Sense Perception and the Reality of the World.”. Critical Review, 2(1): 65–77. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], and O’Hear 1988 O’Hear, Anthony. 1988. “The Evolution of Knowledge.”. Critical Review, 2(1): 78–91. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] discuss the compatibility of Popperianism with the natural selection of sensory apparatus; see also Radnitzky and Bartley, ed., 1987 Radnitzky, Gerard and Bartley, W. W. III, eds. 1987. Evolutionary Epistemology, Theory of Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, LaSalle, Ill: Open Court. [Google Scholar]. In complementary fashion, Hayek’s work in intellectual history (e.g., Hayek 1952 Hayek, F. A. 1952. The Counter‐Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, New York: The Free Press. [Google Scholar] and 1954 Hayek, F. A. 1954. “History and Politics.”. In Capitalism and the Historians, Edited by: Introduction to idem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) takes it for granted that error, based on ignorance, may also grow over time—presumably because in intellectual history, there is no evolutionary reality check. Later in his career, however—dissatisfied, I suspect, with the increasing irrelevance of “the planning mentality” as a cultural explanation for widespread economic attitudes with which he disagreed—he posited affective rather than cognitive evolutionary explanations (Hayek 1983 Hayek, F. A. 1983. Knowledge, Evolution, and Society, London: Adam Smith Institute. [Google Scholar]). I have argued that these must, at the very least, be supplemented by simple ignorance of economics (Friedman 2005 Friedman, Jeffrey. 2005. “Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance.”. Critical Review, 17(1–2): i–lviii. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], xliv ff.), if not cognitivist evolutionary explanations (Friedman 2006b Friedman, Jeffrey. 2006b. “Taking Ignorance Seriously: Rejoinder to Critics.”. Critical Review, 18(4): 469–532. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], sec. V) of what Hayek sought to explain. 4. Lavoie 1987 Lavoie, Don. 1987. “Political and Economic Illusions of Socialism.”. Critical Review, 1(1) (Winter 1986–87): 1–34. [Google Scholar] attempted to extend Austrian insights about economic ignorance into a new understanding of contemporary democracy. Other agenda‐setting papers were Halverson 1991 Halverson, John. 1991. “Plato’s Republic and Ours.”. Critical Review, 5(4): 453–74. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] (on state autonomy in modern democracy); Cornuelle 1992 Cornuelle, Richard. 1992. “The Power and Poverty of Libertarian Thought.”. Critical Review, 6(1): 1–10. 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