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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:54 2006 |
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There is an interesting letter in the Hayek archive at the Hoover
Institute from Hayek to Popper suggesting that Popper take a look at
a book title _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ by a young
historian of science named Thomas Kuhn. This was in 1962. The strong
impact of Kuhn's book on Hayek's own thinking is strongly suggested
in Hayek's 1964 Rikkyo University lecture "Kinds of Rationalism", esp.
where he writes, "In its more general form the main result of this
development is thus the insight that even man's capacity to think is
not a natural endowment of the individual but a cultural heritage, some-
thing transmitted not biologically but through examples and teaching --
mainly through, and implicit in, the teaching of language .. the structure
of language itself implies certain views about the nature of the world;
and by learning a particular language we acquire a certain picture of the
world, a framework of our thinking within which we henceforth move
without being aware of it."
Although these themes have their roots deeper in Hayek's past, the
particular emphasis on _examples_, and on _frameworks_ or ways of seeing
the world embodied in language learned through training is very
distinctly _Kuhnian_ in a way not seen earlier in Hayek's writings.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
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