ABSTRACT
For the standard economist, one of the most central and also most unner-
ving features of Hayek’s social philosophy is his insistence on the ‘‘importance of our ignorance’’ (Hayek 1964: 39). Taking his cue from Popper’s
doctrine of science as being the ‘‘knowledge of our ignorance,’’ he writes in
his Studies that
What we must get rid of is the naı¨ve superstition that the world must be
so organized that it is possible by direct observation to discover simple
regularities between all phenomena and that this is a necessary pre-
supposition for the application of the scientific model. What we have by now discovered about the organization of many complex structures
should be sufficient to teach us that there is no reason to expect
this, and that if we want to get ahead in these fields our aims will have
to be somewhat different from what they are in the fields of simple
phenomena.
