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This book argues for evolutionary epistemology and distinguishing functionality from physicality in the social sciences. It explores the implications for this approach to understanding in biology, economics, psychology and political science. Presenting a comprehensive overview of philosophical topics in the social sciences, the book emphasizes how all human cognition and behavior is characterized by functionality and complexity, and thus cannot be explained by the point predictions and exact laws found in the physical sciences. Realms of functional complexity – such as the market order in economics, the social rules of conduct, and the human CNS – require a focus on explanations of the principles involved rather than predicting exact outcomes. This requires study of the historical context to understand behavior and cognition. This approach notes that functional complexity is central to classical liberal ideas such as division of labour and knowledge, and how this is a far more powerfuland adequate account of social organization than central planning. Through comparison of these approaches, as well as its interdisciplinary scope, this book will interest both academics and students in philosophy, biology, economics, psychology and all other social sciences.

This second volume, Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order, overviews developments in the theory of spontaneously ordered complex phenomena, the psychology of inference and expectation, the nature of anticipatory systems in the psychological and economic domains, and the evolution of scientific thought and knowledge. The book applies these insights to the nature of markets and morals, what education should consist of, and the problems of alienation and our existential malaise as we move into an increasingly abstract society. In doing so it also shows the unscientific nature of the rationalist constructivist approach of progressivism, and the disastrous consequences that would arise from following these positions. The book shows the complex interplay between top-down or directed structures (what Hayek and others have called taxis organizations) and far more complex orders of the social or psychological cosmos in which they are embedded as constituents. It details how the key to the market orders of society depends upon their capacity to impersonally convey information to agents. Markets can serve unknown and unforeseen ends for individuals who do not know or have contact with other market participants. This is a vastly more powerful and productive system than anything that can arise in a tribal or face-to-face organization limited to personal contact, such as the sort proposed by the constructivists. The book will be of interest to academics and scholars in classical liberalism, economics and political philosophy.

This first volume, History and its Betrayal, traces the development of major themes of liberalism from the increase in human population beyond the limits of the face-to-face society of tribalism and small groups up until the present day. It shows that the principles underlying liberalism are the evolutionary development of social organizations that have resulted from the complexity of human action rather than any conscious design or purpose.This book draws out the differences between the classical liberalism dependent upon spontaneous and tacit ordering as a result of evolution, and the explicit or conscious or directed version of progressivism. It shows that the most important recent developments in the philosophy of rationality and the methodology of scientific research, as well as in evolutionary epistemology and the philosophy of biology, actually stem from the theories of complex social organization of the moralists such as Hume, Ferguson, and Smith. The book shows clearly that classical liberalism was never refuted—indeed, no attempt to do so has been offered—it has simply been ignored in favour of programs which sound beneficial and soothing but which cannot be instituted without returning to tribalism.