But differences in perception, however deep they run, are not the same as differences in manipulative ability. Stating your subjective opinion or even explaining the subjectivity of yourself and others is not equivalent to making the world and the people in it do what you want or turn out the way you wish. Only by being in touch with the way the world really is, at least in part, can such transport be made. Communists and their supporters praised the Soviet-style command econ omy for decades, to take another example, but they could not make it work. The natural sciences proceed in significant part by way of impossibility theories devoted to stating what cannot happen according to known principles.
Social science ought to do more of that.
In the 1920s and l930s Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, adherents of the subjectivist Austrian school of economics, which they helped create, argued negatively that no economy based on central command principles could succeed in growing over time and positively that only economies based on spontaneous interactions as found in markets could grow over time. For decades their ideas were largely rejected because command economies did grow. So far as we know now, Mises and Hayek have been proven correct, though, as is only proper, all theories are conditional in the sense that they may be overtaken by still better ones. The integrity of science, as Michael Polanyi noted in his seminal essay, The Republic of Science, does not depend on the integrity of individual scientists but on a competitive system that separates the best from the worst independent of any single person s will. By insisting that no one s authority is final, and by demanding the replication of experiments, far-flung and dispersed communities of scientists are able to do better for science than anyone can do alone.