How does the picture of knowledge & understanding of Hayek, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, Michael Scriven, Thomas Kuhn, and Larry Wright compare to the work of the Post Modernists descending from Nietzsche, French structuralism, Husserl, Marx, neo-Kantian thought & the Frankfurt School?

Here is what Hayek & friends have in common with the Post-Modernists: they reject the foundationalist & justificationalist tradition in epistemology & the philosophy of language & science, the tradition extending back to Euclid, Plato & Aristotle & forward to Descartes & Carnap.

Here is what Hayek & friends don't share with the Post Modernists: they don't share the relativism & historicism of Post Modernism & they offer a rival picture of how social cooperation works & how knowledge advances, built on a grasp of our share natural underlying competencies.

Wittgenstein, Hayek, Wright, Hume, Kuhn, and Polanyi show how we share innate common capacities to go on together when offering everyday explanations, using language, classifying the world, developing our skills, or providing skilled scientific explanations.

None of this can be reduced to logical or math operations plus atomic givens whether "empirical", "physical", or "conceptual".

The first insight then is this: when you have disproven and rejected Descartes, Plato, logical positivism and the analytic philosophy branch of neo-Kantian thought represented paradigmatically by Carnap, you have NOT established Post Modernism as the only exclusive alternative.

Let's talk a bit about how Hayek & friends detonated the foundationalist and justificationist tradition and how Hayek & friends explain their rival account of how to understand social cooperation and the advance of knowledge.

Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Hayek & Hume show that our common ways of going on together embedding in the structures everyday ways of engaging & classify the world are as robust as anything in science & when in conflict science constantly falls to the everyday world of sensory experience.

But Hayek, Kuhn, Wright, Wittgenstein & others show that the achievements of science cannot be reduced to phenomenal particulars + logic or math & the achievements of science in no way allow us to eliminate the everyday world in which scientific problems are embedded & explained.

The take away here is that detonation of the false justification model of knowledge & science and the associated Received View of theories & explanation descending from Aristotle, Descartes & Carnap does not undermine the fact that we get along in the world and we explain it.

Post Modernists have essentially never given up the false justification view and they believe in it so deeply that they believe no knowledge and no commonalities between people can exist. Everything is radically perspectival and radically socially relative.

Let's turn to comparing the the individual, the "subject" as understood by Hayek & his compatriots with the "subject" as understood by the Post Modernists & friends.

The Hayek and friends individual is a person of immense capacities and remarkable competencies, and among these capacities is the ability to acquire new competencies from others, such as the skill to make things or the felicity to use words and a complex system of language.

Picking up again the Hayek vs Post-Modernism thread.

In Hayek there is an ever-more robust network of inherited and improved shared ways of going on together, a social fabric subject to constant revision and improvement. See also Hume, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, Wright, and Kuhn.

The Post-Modernist tradition takes a hermeneutics of suspicion to the network of shared ways of going on together -- the demand is for a justification, and lacking that the approach is one modeled on the conspiracy theory -- these must be chains imposed to exploit by power.

Rousseau, Nietzsche & Marx are the original exemplars, and then you get all sorts of variations from the Germans, the French and eventually Americans adding in Hobson, Freud, Lenin, sexuality, linguistics, history, race, what have you.

There are two sides to the Nietzsche project that have been so influential to the Post Modernist program in its dizzying variety of forms. The first is the detonation of the picture of language as a foundation of fixed platonic essences with platonic binary contrasts.

The second is the idea that hidden behind the curtain of illusions of everyday life lie the true unmasked reality of the constellation of power vectors arrayed in a conspiracy against us.