>> Weintraub wrote:
>> I hope folks are not suggesting that Hayek "got" this from nowhere. 
>> My copy of Pearson's /Grammar of Science/ (3rd ed. 1911, printed in 
>> Austria) has its Chapter 2 concerned with just such 
>> experience-processing. And Bruce Caldwell has been showing how 
>> /Sensory Order/ grew from Kant as well as Hayek's own student paper.
> About which Steve Horwitz wrote:
>
> Of course Roy.  But because Hayek is, as far as I know, the only 
> *economist* to be recognized as having contributed to that line of 
> thinking in cognitive theory, it made sense in posting it here to 
> emphasize how it was evidence for his work.
>
>

Steve Horwitz's useful observation raises an extremely interesting 
historiographic issue. Suppose that Economist X, because of some 
economist-reason, writes a paper on something, Y, that can be connected 
to ongoing controversies in another field about which X is non-expert 
judged from that other field's perspective. But that paper is taken up 
by other economists and lives a real life among economists. Should we 
treat X as a serious intellectual figure with respect to Y-studies? Or 
should X be understood as an economist-figure who applied, with more or 
less understanding, serious work initiated by others in other fields? We 
have many examples of this. Think Friedman on assumptions, Samuelson on 
operationalism, Becker on family sociology, Hayek on psychology, Keynes 
on probability, etc. How much of our study of Friedman say should focus 
on his contribution's  importance among economists in contrast to his 
lack of sophistication viewed from the perspective of philosophers of 
science?

The larger question of course is that of the nature and life of 
intellectual communities and the border crossings that occur among them. 
Peter Galison's discussion of "trading zones" ["Trading Zone: 
Coordinating Action and Belief" in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario 
Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 137-160] seems relevant, as of 
course does Randall Collins's important book The Sociology of Philosophies.
 
E. Roy Weintraub