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发帖数: 10518 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 PKU 讨论区 】
发信人: keats (生活在别处), 信区: PKU
标 题: Re: 关注哈耶克
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Sat Jul 31 22:51:51 1999), 转信
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)
As a defender of the free market and of classical liberal
(i.e. libertarian) principles, F.A. Hayek lived to see his
doctrine and warnings justified by the failure of command
and socialist economies in the late 1980's. The
influence of the Kant-Friesian tradition on Hayek is evident
in his use of two precepts: Hume's principle that the
propositions of ethics cannot be proven, and Popper's
principle that scientific knowledge proceeds by
falsification, not by verification.
Hume's principle was really just a reformulation of
Aristotle's doctrine that the first principles of demonstration
cannot themselves, by definition, be proven. Kant's conception of synthetic
a priori propositions thus sought the truth of such
propositions in some external ground that would unite
subjects and predicates whose meanings are not analytically
related. Hume is commonly misunderstood to doubt the reality
of the principle of causality or of moral propositons
expressing "oughts"; but Kant
realized that Hume had no doubt of the truth of such
matters and famously said that Hume's critics
(showing little more
understanding than many of his advocates today),
"were ever taking for granted that which he
doubted, and demonstrating with zeal
and often with impudence that which he never
thought of doubting..." [Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics p. 259].
Hume merely denied that we are rationally acquainted with the necessary
ground for them, as he says:
My practice, you say, refutes my doubts. But you mistake the purport
of my question. As an agent, I am quite satisfied
in the point; but as a philosopher, who has some share of curiosity,
I will not say scepticism, I want to learn the
foundation of the inference. No reading, no enquiry has yet been able
to remove my difficulty, or give me satisifaction in
a matter of such importance. Can I do better than propose the
difficulty to the public, even though, perhaps, I have
small hopes of obtaining a solution? We shall at least,
by this means, be sensible of our ignorance, if we do not
augment our knowledge. [An Inquiry Concerning Human Undertanding, p.32]
Hayek's entire approach to economics, in line with the Austrian School,
emphasized the limited nature of knowledge. The price
mechanism of the free market serves to convey information
about supply and demand that is dispersed among many consumers
and producers and which cannot be assembled or coordinated
efficiently in any other way. The abyssmal failure of command
economies, or of command devices in mixed capitalistic
economies, vindicated the prediction originally made by Ludwig von Mises
in 1920, and later promoted by Hayek, that only a free market
could coordinate an efficient allocation of resources into
productive industries. Hayek thus shared with Hume a profound
conviction that we should be "sensible of our ignorance."
Hayek also shared
with Hume the conviction that the "foundation of the inference"
to propositions of ethics or politics was not necessarily available
to
us. Like Hume too, Hayek had a strong sense that history was a
discovery process when it came to ethics and politics.
Hayek's theory in that respect, however, reflected Karl Popper's
view that propositions of ethics or politics can be tested with the
same mechanism of falsification used by scientific method. History
as a discovery process could then be a comparison of predictions
with consequences. In Friesian terms, that leads us back to the virtues
and weaknesses of Popper's theory, since falsification does
not provide the Kantian ground for the truth of synthetic a priori
propositions. Nevertheless, Hayek's Kantian understanding of
Hume and his use of Popper's Friesian logic do provide us with
epochal principles of political economy that are ultimately
conformable to Kant-Friesian principles.
Hayek's personal and professional relationship
with Popper, whom he helped in his career, was
somewhat ironic considering that Hayek was a
cousin of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951), with whom Popper disagreed on
almost every conceivable philosophical issue.
Popper's critique of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in
the footnotes to The Open Society and Its
Enemies, was devastating; and after World War
II there was a famous incident when Wittgenstein
furiously stalked out of a talk by Popper. Popper
was told that he had been the first person to
interrupt Wittgenstein the way Wittgenstein
interrupted everyone else. |
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