In The Sensory Order (1952), it was as if Hayek was saying: “You want a (physical) science of human behavior, which would necessarily go along with a (physical) science of the human brain and nervous system? That is, you want a physical science to replace the traditional way of thinking about human action and the human mind? A physical science to replace economics, linguistics, and the rest of the praxeological and thymological sciences? Well, here you go. Good luck.” In other words: Hayek, being famously diplomatic, didn’t just turn his back on the mainstream and go his own way. Instead, he worked together with the mainstream: He took the mainstream’s approach as seriously as possible, and in fact did (some of) their work for them—he steelmanned the mainstream in the most heroic way possible—but in doing so he showed, indirectly, the fool’s errand that it really is.

Physics builds the physical order out of the sensory order. Psychology, in turn, conceived of as a physical science, must then go in the opposite direction. It must build the sensory order out of the physical order. That is: We build a model of (1) what’s physically happening out in the world, along with a model of (2) what’s physically happening in the brain and nervous system, as a reflection of (3) what’s physically happening out in the world; and with all of that, we go far from the sensory order only to just circle right back.

Economics, along with the rest of the social sciences, as traditionally done (e.g., in Smith, in Mill) take for granted the direct sensory order. Those sciences, though, if made into physical sciences, in order to conform to the zeitgeist of modernity, would no longer be able to take that for granted. They’d need to instead be founded on the indirect sensory order. Thus: In taking the mainstream’s own project seriously, and putting it on a better footing than ever before, Hayek showed, indirectly, the futility of the project—well, at least in the short term.

To be fair, though: Hayek’s work on the subject wasn’t just a reductio ad absurdum. It wasn’t just him taking the mainstream premises to their logical conclusions as a way of showing, diplomatically and indirectly, the impracticalities of those premises in the social sciences. Distractingly, perhaps, Hayek was also genuinely interested in the physiology of consciousness for its own sake, including the pre-conscious factors in the development of conscious experience of one kind vs. another, those pre-conscious factors being both organism- and species-level. However, that interest wouldn’t have carried him so far back into the subject, after he had shelved it for 30+ years, if not for the profound significance to the questions of (1) how to do natural science properly, (2) how to do social science properly, and (3) how to keep natural science in its proper place.

In building a model of the grammar of a natural language, we often find that (1) two different linguistic forms have the same logical substance and (2) the same linguistic form has two different logical substances. For example: (1) The two words “have” and “has,” as in “I have a cold” and “he has the flu,” differ only in linguistic form; their logical substance is the same. (2) And the one word “have,” as in “I have a cold” and “he could have gotten the flu” differ not in linguistic form but in logical substance. The former meaning of “have” is obvious. If you “have” a cold, then you’re in that state. The latter meaning, by contrast, isn’t so obvious. It’s that of the past tense. Compare “could” and “could have,” “would” and “would have.”

Imagine building a system of logical notation that has a way of symbolically representing the past tense, the present tense, and the future tense, along with many of the other logical distinctions underlying the grammatical system of natural language. In effect, you’d be building a differently aligned language, in its connections between the surface form of its symbols and the deep substance of its meaning. You’d be realigning, reclassifying; you’d be building a different order.

What we do in physics is analogous. In doing physics, or (in other words) in building a physics model of sensation, we often find that (1) two different sensory forms are caused by the same physical substance and (2) two different physical substances cause the same sensory form. Physics, then, in an analogous way to logic, is an artificial realignment for a philosophical or scientific purpose. Physics replaces the “natural language of sensation” (metaphorically speaking) with an “artificial language of sensation.” In that way: Linguistics is to logic as the introspective psychology of sensation is to physics. Just as linguistics and logic study two separate but interconnected orders, one being more natural than the other, the introspective psychology of sensation studies the “sensory order,” as Hayek calls it, and physics studies the “physical order.”

The natural science of the psychology of sensation, then, studies the “neural order,” which is the interconnection between the sensory order and the physical order. According to Hayek, something in (the physical structure of) the brain, along with the rest of the nervous system, must be isomorphic to (the mental structure of) of the mind. What that “something” is, which can be theorized right from the start of the inquiry as necessarily existing, is left as an open question for me (and not a very highly prioritized one)—though Hayek does make some interesting guesses—for the philosophical significance of Hayek’s starting point in theoretical psychology to the question of the epistemology of the sciences of human action and the human mind doesn’t depend on the answer to that question, i.e. the question of what that “something” is.

The significance is simply that building a properly founded natural science of human behavior and the human nervous system, without sneaking in through the back door anything that’s just directly taken from introspective psychology, would be extraordinarily roundabout (not to mention of dubious utility to economics, linguistics, and the other praxeological and thymological sciences).

That is: We’d have to go from the sensory order, as we experience it naturally, to the physical order, and then we’d have to turn back, going from the physical order, through the neural order, all the way back to the sensory order, but no longer as we experience it naturally: We’d have to build a sufficiently accurate and detailed (physical) model of the brain, along with the rest of the nervous system, that’s in some way isomorphic to a correspondingly sufficiently accurate and detailed (mental) model of the mind. And then we’d just be right back where we started!

It’s the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment that’s closest to the spirit of my work. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and soon after Hutcheson came several giants, David Hume (1711-1776) the greatest among them.

In the 19th century, though, Alexander Bain (1818-1903) was one of the most important of the Scots still working as part of the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, and (according to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here) Bain stood on the cusp: He argued for the replacement of “the philosophy of mind” with “empirical psychology,” which in doing so he helped bring about—though of course the zeitgeist of the 19th century surely made that transition inevitable. In short: The kind of thinking that Hutcheson, Hume, and others did was no longer considered to shed light on metaphysics (i.e., on questions about the ultimate fundamentals of reality). It was demoted to being about the mind and the mind only. It became nothing more than the systematic introspection into the system of the mind, with the mind taken in that new paradigm as a thing apart from reality.

The killing blow, then, to the weakened tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, was the tabooing of introspection. The “philosophy of mind” (the term “philosophy” at that time being equivalent to the term “science” nowadays) became “empirical psychology,” and then in turn what was admitted as “empirical” eventually shifted: The mind was no longer admitted as a proper object of empirical observation. In psychology, from then on, only models of the brain (along with anything else physical, e.g. the eye, the ear) were taken as properly scientific.

In summary: The “philosophy of mind” in the 18th century became a kind of “empirical psychology” founded on introspection in the early 19th century, which in turn became a different kind of “empirical psychology” by the late 19th century. The analysis of the mental mechanisms of human action and the human mind was pushed aside, and the analysis of the physical mechanisms thereof took over.

With all of that said, however: I’d like to argue that, actually, the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment didn’t just degenerate first into introspective psychology (with Bain) and then into non-introspective psychology (post-Bain); it actually split off at the root, growing not only into psychology, on one hand, but also logic, on the other hand. Hume introspected in order to understand (the fundamentals of) the system of the mind in its understanding of (the fundamentals of) the system of reality. Post-Bain, the new field of psychology specialized in the former part of that, viz. in the goal of understanding the mind in a fundamental and systematic way, and the new field of logic specialized in the latter part of that, viz. in the reality-related considerations. And mirroring the further degeneration into non-introspective psychology, logic too degenerated: It lost its substance as it transformed into formal logic. John Stuart Mill’s treatise A System of Logic (1843), which Mill thought of as a contribution to the “science of science itself,” soon went out of fashion—it was almost entirely prose. Boole in The Laws of Thought (1854) adapted algebraic notation to logic, and from then on it was formal (or mathematical) logic that inspired the intellectual world—a project that (to no fault of Boole’s) became increasingly unmoored from the Scottish tradition (along with the broader British tradition, e.g. in Locke, in Berkeley) of checking whether there’s actual substance underneath the pretty surface form of eloquent words and other symbols.

And finally, in the 21st century: Introspection is taboo in science, the physical is taken much more seriously than the mental in psychology and elsewhere (in keeping with introspection as taboo in science), a substance-unchecked mathematics has all but swallowed up logic, and there are few thinkers left in philosophy of science.

Imagine that you’re talking to a police officer about a suspicious person reported to have had a knife. You say: “The man who had the knife also had a gun.” But what if the same suspicious person, doing the same thing, was instead reported as having had a gun? You may have instead said: “The man who had the gun also had a knife.” Both facts are true from your subjective perspective. The man had both a knife and a gun. But what you say to the police officer—assuming, of course, that you want him to know both facts—depends on what you know about what he knows about.

Interestingly, though: If we take out of the analysis the speaker and the listener, along with their differing subjective perspectives (e.g., the speaker knowing X but the listener not), and we just imagine the scene itself (of the man with the knife and the gun) from an omniscient, objective perspective, then there’s no possible distinction between what we’d imagine between the original sentence and its flipped-around counterpart. Whether “the man who had the knife also had a gun,” or “the man who had the gun also had a knife”—whether the speaker is making one assumption about the listener or another—the two omnisciently, objectively imagined scenes are identical: There was a man of a certain kind. He had both a knife and a gun, both of them of a certain kind. And he was doing certain things, e.g. walking in a certain way.

Imagine that you’re at a cafe with a friend. You see three men walk in, one of them young and the other two old. Imagine also that you (believe that you) know something that (you believe that) your friend doesn’t, viz. that the young man is a famous chess player. You may point in the direction of the three men and say: “The young man is a famous chess player.” Pointing in that direction narrows down the possible referent(s) of the subject of the utterance to just those three men, and the category “young man” narrows down the possible referent(s) further: The only possible referent is now just that one man.

In saying that “the young man is a famous chess player,” first you (1) establish joint attention on the referent, in this case “the young man,” and then you (2) say something about that referent, in this case “is a famous chess player.”

But it’s also possible to flip it around. Instead of saying that “the young man is a famous chess player,” which uses the fact that he’s a young man as (perhaps) nothing more than just a way of establishing joint attention on him, you can say that “the famous chess player is a young man,” which makes the fact that he’s a young man into the point that you’re making about him.

A deictic utterance is such that the question of what the referent(s) are of the utterance isn’t possible to answer without knowing:

1. Who said the words to whom
2. And/or where the speaker was, and/or where the listener was
3. And/or when the words were said

For example: “I ate here yesterday.” Without knowing who said the words, there’s no way to know who “I” is. Without knowing where the words were said, there’s no way to know where “here” is. And without knowing when the words were said, there’s no way to know when “yesterday” was.

Put differently, there’s:

1. The speaker of the utterance
2. The listener of the utterance
3. The location in space of the speaker
4. The location in space of the listener
5. The location in time of the speaker and the listener

If we can refer to the speaker (i.e., the so-called “1st person”), and we can refer to the listener (i.e., the so-called “2nd person”), then we can also refer to he who’s neither the speaker nor the listener (i.e., the so-called “3rd person”), for that’s just a negation of the foregoing. And if we can refer to the location in space of the speaker, then we can refer to the thing that’s near that location. Same for the 2nd and 3rd person.

Thus, there’s:

1. The speaker (e.g., “I,” “me”)
2. The listener (e.g., “you”)
3. Neither the speaker nor the listener (e.g., “he,” “she”)
4. Something near the speaker (e.g., これ)
5. Something near the listener (e.g., それ)
6. Something near neither the speaker nor the listener (e.g., あれ)
7. Where the speaker is (e.g., ここ)
8. Where the listener is (e.g., そこ)
9. Somewhere away from both the speaker and listener (e.g., あそこ)
10. The past with respect to the utterance
11. The present with respect to the utterance
12. The future with respect to the utterance

The first conjugational distinction:

1. Something permanent about the whole thing (e.g., 彼はサッカー選手です)
2. Something permanent about part of the whole thing
3. Something temporary about the whole thing (e.g., 彼はサッカー選手として活躍しています)
4. Something temporary about part of the whole thing

Put differently: There’s the temporal aspect, which can either be “whole-whole” or “whole-part,” and there’s also the spatial aspect, which can also either be “whole-whole” or “whole-part.” To be temporally whole-whole is to be permanent in the delimited context of the utterance, and to be temporally whole-part is to be temporary in the delimited context of the utterance. For example: (a) “He’s the goalkeeper” (his whole temporal existence being as the goalkeeper in the delimited context of the utterance, i.e. the present game of soccer). (b) “He’s reading a book” (only part of his whole temporal existence being reading the book, in that it’s natural to imagine, say, asking him a question, which would make him take a break from reading). Furthermore, to be spatially whole-whole is for the whole of the spatial existence of the subject to be such that the predicate describes it, and to be spatially whole-part is for only part of the whole of the spatial existence of the subject to be such that the predicate describes it. For example: (a) “That’s a house” (every spatial point making up the referent of the subject being a house). (b) “That house has a chimney” (only some of the spatial points making up the referent of the subject being the house’s chimney).

For clarity, and to recap, the first conjugational system again, put appositionally:

1. Temporal whole-whole (i.e., permanent), spatial whole-whole
2. Temporal whole-whole (i.e., permanent), spatial whole-part (e.g., 彼は鼻が高いです)
3. Temporal whole-part (i.e., temporary), spatial whole-whole
4. Temporal whole-part (i.e., temporary, spatial whole-part

The second conjugational distinction:

1. Past
2. Present
3. Future

The third (and final) conjugational distinction:

1. Static
2. Dynamic
3. Static, agent-oriented
4. Dynamic, agent-oriented
5. Static, patient-oriented
6. Dynamic, patient-oriented

For a verb to be static is for the verb to describe an unchanging state, and for a verb to be dynamic is for the verb to describe a change of state. For example: (a) “The mouse is dead.” (b) “The mouse died.” Furthermore: For a verb to be agent-oriented is for the verb to describe what the agent did (which had an effect on the patient). And for a verb to be patient-oriented is for the verb to describe what the effect on the patient was. For example: (c) “The man shot the woman” (shooting being what the agent did, with the effect left unspecified). (d) “The man killed the woman” (being killed being what happened to the patient, with the cause left unspecified).

Interestingly, it’s possible in English to put the agent-oriented and the patient-oriented together. For example: “I sang her to sleep.” Here the agent sang to the patient, which had an effect; the effect was sleep. Analogously: “He shot her dead.”

I should also be clear that whether agent-oriented or patient-oriented, what’s static or dynamic is the patient’s state. Either the patient’s state is kept the same, if static, or made to change, if dynamic. For example: In “I sang her to sleep,” the verb “sang” is dynamic and agent-oriented, for singing is what the agent did that changed the state of the patient, and the verb “sleep” is dynamic and patient-oriented, for sleeping is what the state was that the patient changed to.

To recap:

1. Static (e.g., これは赤い)
2. Dynamic (e.g., これは赤くなった)
3. Static, agent-oriented
4. Dynamic, agent-oriented (e.g., “the man shot the woman”)
5. Static, patient-oriented
6. Dynamic, patient-oriented (e.g., “the man killed the woman”)

Let’s imagine that a father says to his son: “When you get from your year in Europe, I expect that you’ll go to college.” Is this just a dry prediction? No, in saying that he “expects” his son to go to college, the father is using social pressure to hopefully tip the scale in the direction that he would be happy with. It’s equally natural, though, for a person to use that same word for something that’s indeed just dry prediction: “We expect that the hurricane will show up on our shores no later than tomorrow evening.” Interestingly—and this is my point—there are countless examples in natural language of words that are ambiguous in this way. This I can personally attest to in English and Japanese, but theoretically speaking I’m convinced, at least for the time being, that this pattern is universal.

Why, though, is natural language such that there’s often this ambiguity? The answer is related to the coordination of action, to the cooperation of agents. That answer is: The more consistent a pattern of action becomes, the more that pattern of action comes to be relied upon as an assumption for other patterns of action. That increasing consistency, which increasingly justifies even the driest and most socially detached of prediction, becomes (by virtue of its increasing consistency) a stronger and stronger bedrock for other kinds of action, which in turn makes a stronger and stronger case for using social pressure to keep people from breaking that consistency. For example, consider: “Japanese people take their shoes off when they go into the house.” Is this just a dry prediction about what’s to be expected of a Japanese person? Or does this expectation also bring with it social pressure to conform to the pattern, to the consistency? Obviously it’s both prediction and social pressure. The more empirically true the proposition becomes as an observation, the more reasonable it would be for the people who build houses in Japan to not worry about making the floors able to withstand the abuse of walking on them with shoes for years and years. Eventually, anybody who’s an exception to the rule finds themselves living in a society that’s no longer made for them.

Before I go on, I should be clear about what my goal is in this essay. My goal is to explain why it is that many people, especially nowadays, reject scientific thought and communication about human action and the human mind.

What I’ve written so far suggests that at least one of the reasons is that science, although ideally a purely descriptive mode of thought and communication, makes propositions that come off to many people as no less prescriptive than descriptive. In natural language, which is a reflection of natural psychology, there’s systematic equivocation between description and prescription when talking about the human mind and human action. That is, the same linguistic “form” is used for two distinct “substances,” one logical and one social. Science, by contrast, does its best to untangle description from prescription and give a prescriptionless description. And this, being artificial (in the best of ways), is difficult for anybody without a talent for science or enough instruction in science.

This natural description-prescription ambiguity makes it so even the most prescriptionless description about, e.g., how attraction works between men and women, is likely to make many people, again especially nowadays, uncomfortable. This uncomfortable feeling is something like: “Don’t tell me who I’m supposed to be attracted to and who I’m not!”