You are HayekGPT, a language model that extensively knows the work and life of Friedrich Hayek. I need you to summarize and point out key points of this chapter from the book The counter-revolution of science:
 
THE PROBLEM AND THE METHOD OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES
BEFORE WE CAN understand the reasons for the trespasses of scientism we must try to understand the struggle which Science itself had
to fight against concepts and ideas which were as injurious to its
progress as the scientistic prejudice now threatens to become to the
progress of the social studies. Although we live now in an atmosphere where the concepts and habits of thoughts of everyday life
are to a high degree influenced by the ways of thinking of Science, we
must not forget that the Sciences had in their beginning to fight their
way in a world where most concepts had been formed from our
relations to other men and in interpreting their actions. It is only
natural that the momentum gained in that struggle should carry
Science beyond the mark and create a situation where the danger is
now the opposite one of the predominance of scientism impeding
the progress of the understanding of society. But even if the pendulum
has now definitely swung in the opposite direction, only confusion
could result if we failed to recognize the factors which have created
this attitude and which justify it in its proper sphere.
There were three main obstacles to the advance of modern
Science against which it has struggled ever since its birth during the
Renaissance; and much of the history of its progress could be
written in terms of its gradual overcoming of these difficulties. The
first, although not the most important, was that for various reasons
scholars had grown used to devoting most of their effort to analyzing
other people's opinions: this was so not only because in the disciplines
most developed at that time, like theology and law, this was the actual
object, but even more because, during the decline of Science in the Middle Ages, there seemed to be no better way of arriving at the
truth about nature than to study the work of the great men of the
past. More important was the second fact, the belief that the "ideas"
of the things possessed some transcendental reality, and that by
analyzing ideas we could learn something or everything about the
attributes of the real things. The third and perhaps most important
fact was that man had begun everywhere to interpret the events in
the external world after his own image, as animated by a mind like
his own, and that the natural sciences therefore met everywhere
explanations by analogy with the working of the human mind, with
"anthropomorphic" or "animistic" theories which searched for a purposive design and were satisfied if they had found in it the proof of
the operation of a designing mind.
Against all this the persistent effort of modern Science has been
to get down to "objective facts," to cease studying what men thought
about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the
real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to
explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our
own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the
concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize
the particular as an instance of a general rule. In the course of this
process not only the provisional classification which the commonly
used concepts provided, but also the first distinctions between the
different perceptions which our senses convey to us, had to give way
to a completely new and different way in which we learned to order
or classify the events of the external world.
The tendency to abandon all anthropomorphic elements in the
discussion of the external world has in its most extreme development
even led to the belief that the demand for "explanation" itself is
based on an anthropomorphic interpretation of events and that all
Science ought to aim at is a complete description of nature. There
is, as we shall see, that element of truth in the first part of this contention that we can understand and explain human action in a way we
cannot with physical phenomena, and that consequently the term
"explain" tends to remain charged with a meaning not applicable
to physical phenomena. The actions of other men were probably
the first experiences which made man ask the question "why?" and
it took him a long time to learn, and he has not yet fully learned,
that with events other than human actions he could not expect the
same kind of "explanation" as he can hope to obtain in the case of
human behavior.
That the ordinary concepts of the kind of things that surround us
do not provide an adequate classification which enables us to state
general rules about their behavior in different circumstances, and
that in order to do so we have to replace them by a different classification of events is familiar. It may, however, still sound surprising
that what is true of these provisional abstractions should also be
true of the very sense qualities which most of us are inclined to regard
as the ultimate reality. But although it is less familiar that science
breaks up and replaces the system of classification which our sense
qualities represent, yet this is precisely what Science does. It begins
with the realization that things which appear to us the same do not
always behave in the same manner, and that things which appear
different to us sometimes prove in all other respects to behave in
the same way; and it proceeds from this experience to substitute
for the classification of events which our senses provide a new one
which groups together not what appears alike but what proves to
behave in the same manner in similar circumstances.
While the naive mind tends to assume that external events which
our senses register in the same or in a different manner must be
similar or different in more respects than merely in the way in which
they affect our senses, the systematic testing of Science shows that
this is frequently not true. It constantly shows that the "facts" are
different from "appearances." We learn to regard as alike or unlike
not simply what by itself looks, feels, smells, etc., alike or unlike,
but what regularly appears in the same spatial and temporal context.
And we learn that the same constellation of simultaneous sense perceptions may prove to proceed from different "facts," or that different
combinations of sense qualities may stand for the same "fact." A
white powder with a certain weight and "feel" and without taste
or smell may prove to be any one of a number of different things
according as it appears in different circumstances or after different
combinations of other phenomena, or as it produces different results
if combined in certain ways with other things. The systematic
testing of behavior in different circumstances will thus often show
that things which to our senses appear different behave in the same
or at least a very similar manner. We may not only find that, e.g.,
a blue thing which we see in a certain light or after eating a certain
drug is the same thing as the green thing which we see in different
circumstances, or that what appears to have an elliptical shape may
prove to be identical with what at a different angle appears to be
circular, but we may also find that phenomena which appear as
different as ice and water are "really" the same "thing."
This process of re-classifying "objects" which our senses have
already classified in one way, of substituting for the "secondary"
qualities in which our senses arrange external stimuli a new classification based on consciously established relations between classes of
events is, perhaps, the most characteristic aspect of the procedure
of the natural sciences. The whole history of modern Science proves
to be a process of progressive emancipation from our innate classification of the external stimuli till in the end they completely disappear
so that "physical science has now reached a stage of development
that renders it impossible to express observable occurrences in language appropriate to what is perceived by our senses. The only
appropriate language is that of mathematics," i.e., the discipline
developed to describe complexes of relationships between elements
which have no attributes except these relations. While at first the
new elements into which the physical world was "analyzed" were
still endowed with "qualities," i.e., conceived as in principle visible
or touchable, neither electrons nor waves, neither the atomic structure nor electromagnetic fields can be adequately represented by
mechanical models.
The new world which man thus creates in his mind, and which
consists entirely of entities which cannot be perceived by our senses,
is yet in a definite way related to the world of our senses. It serves,
indeed, to explain the world of our senses. The world of Science
might in fact be described as no more than a set of rules which
enables us to trace the connections between different complexes
of sense perceptions. But the point is that the attempts to establish
such uniform rules which the perceptible phenomena obey have been
unsuccessful so long as we accepted as natural units, given entities,
such constant complexes of sense qualities as we can simultaneously
perceive. In their place new entities, "constructs," are created which
can be denned only in terms of sense perceptions obtained of the
"same" thing in different circumstances and at different times—a
procedure which implies the postulate that the thing has in some
sense remained the same although all its perceptible attributes may
have changed.
In other words, although the theories of physical science at the
stage which has now been reached can no longer be stated in terms
of sense qualities, their significance is due to the fact that we possess rules, a "key," which enables us to translate them into statements about perceptible phenomena. One might compare the relation
of modern physical theory to the world of our senses to that between
the different ways in which one might "know" a dead language
existing only in inscriptions in peculiar characters. The combinations
of different characters of which these inscriptions are composed and
which are the only form in which the language occurs correspond to
the different combinations of sense qualities. As we come to know
the language we gradually learn that different combinations of these
characters may mean the same thing and that in different contexts
the same group of characters may mean different things. As we
learn to recognize these new entities we penetrate into a new world
where the units are different from the letters and obey in their relations definite laws not recognizable in the sequence of the individual
letters. We can describe the laws of these new units, the laws of
grammar, and all that can be expressed by combining the words
according to these laws, without ever referring to the individual
letters or the principle on which they are combined to make up the
signs for whole words. It would be possible, e.g., to know all about
the grammar of Chinese or Greek and the meaning of all the
words in these languages without knowing Chinese or Greek characters (or the sounds of the Chinese or Greek words). Yet if Chinese
or Greek occurred only written in their respective characters, all
this knowledge would be of as little use as knowledge of the laws of
nature in terms of abstract entities or constructs without knowledge
of the rules by which these can be translated into statements about
phenomena perceptible by our senses.
As in our description of the structure of the language there is no
need for a description of the way in which the different units are
made up from various combinations of letters (or sounds), so in our
theoretical description of nature the different sense qualities through
which we perceive nature disappear. They are no longer treated as
part of the object and come to be regarded merely as ways in which
we spontaneously perceive or classify external stimuli.
The problem how man has come to classify external stimuli in the
particular way which we know as sense qualities does not concern
us here. There are only two connected points which must be briefly
mentioned now and to which we must return later. One is that, once
we have learnt that the things in the external world show uniformity
in their behavior towards each other only if we group them in a way
different from that in which they appear to our senses, the question
why they appear to us in that particular way, and especially why
they appear in the same way to different people becomes a genuine
problem calling for an answer. The second is that the fact that different men do perceive different things in a similar manner which does
not correspond to any known relation between these things in the
external world, must be regarded as a significant datum of experience
which must be the starting point in any discussion of human behavior.
We are not interested here in the methods of the Sciences for their
own sake and we cannot follow up this topic further. The point
which we mainly wanted to stress was that what men know or think
about the external world or about themselves, their concepts and even
the subjective qualities of their sense perceptions are to Science never
ultimate reality, data to be accepted. Its concern is not what men
think about the world and how they consequently behave, but what
they ought to think. The concepts which men actually employ,
the way in which they see nature, is to the scientist necessarily a
provisional affair and his task is to change this picture, to change
the concepts in use so as to be able to make more definite and more
certain our statements about the new classes of events.
There is one consequence of all this which in view of what
follows requires a few more words. It is the special signficance
which numerical statements and quantitative measurements have in
the natural sciences. There is a widespread impression that the main
importance of this quantitative nature of most natural sciences is then greater precision. This is not so. It is not merely adding precision to
a procedure which would be possible also without the mathematical
form of expression—it is of the essence of this process of breaking
up our immediate sense data and of substituting for a description in
terms of sense qualities one in terms of elements which possess no
attributes but these relations to each other. It is a necessary part
of the general effort of getting away from the picture of nature
which man has now, of substituting for the classification of events
which our senses provide another based on the relations established
by systematic testing and experimenting.
To return to our more general conclusion: the world in which
Science is interested is not that of our given concepts or even sensations. Its aim is to produce a new organization of all our experience
of the external world, and in doing so it has not only to remodel our
concepts but also to get away from the sense qualities and to replace
them by a different classification of events. The picture which man
has actually formed of the world and which guides him well enough
in his daily life, his perceptions and concepts, are for Science not an
object of study but an imperfect instrument to be improved. Nor is
Science as such interested in the relation of man to things, in the way
in which man's existing view of the world leads him to act. It is
rather such a relation, or better a continuous process of changing
these relationships. When the scientist stresses that he studies objective facts he means that he tries to study things independently of
what men think or do about them. The views people hold about
the external world is to him always a stage to be overcome.
But what are the consequences of the fact that people perceive the
world and each other through sensations and concepts which are
organized in a mental structure common to all of them? What
can we say about the whole network of activities in which men
are guided by the kind of knowledge they have and a great part of
which at any time is common to most of them? While Science is all
the time busy revising the picture of the external world that man
possesses, and while to it this picture is always provisional, the fact
that man has a definite picture, and that the picture of all beings
whom we recognize as thinking men and whom we can understand
is to some extent alike, is no less a reality of great consequence and
the cause of certain events. Until Science had literally completed its
work and not left the slightest unexplained residue in man's intellectual processes, the facts of our mind must remain not only data
to be explained but also data on which the explanation of human
action guided by those mental phenomena must be based. Here a
new set of problems arises with which the scientist does not directly
deal. Nor is it obvious that the particular methods to which he has
become used would be appropriate for these problems. The question
is here not how far man's picture of the external world fits the facts,
but how by his actions, determined by the views and concepts he
possesses, man builds up another world of which the individual
becomes a part. And by "the views and concepts people hold" we
do not mean merely their knowledge of external nature. We mean all
they know and believe about themselves, about other people, and
about the external world, in short everything which determines their
actions, including science itself. This is the field to which the social studies or the "moral sciences" address themselves.