Friedrich A. Hayek, “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility” (1962)

This file is a single philosophical essay, reprinted from the Proceedings of the British Academy. Its scope is broad: Hayek moves across psychology, philosophy of mind, linguistics, ethology, and the methodology of the social sciences. The central thesis is that human conduct and understanding depend on rules that are followed, perceived, and communicated without being explicitly known.

Rules which we cannot state thus do not govern only our actions. They also govern our perceptions, and particularly our perceptions of other people’s actions.

Hayek begins from children’s grammatical competence and from skilled action: the craftsman, athlete, or billiards player acts “as if” he possessed explicit formulae, though the operative knowledge is practical rather than discursive. This distinction between knowing how and knowing that is extended to moral and juridical sensibility: a “sense of justice” may be the ability to apply rules one cannot state. Rules, then, are not primarily propositions in consciousness but operative constraints embodied in performance.

The essay’s next move is from rule-guided action to rule-guided perception. We recognize gestures, expressions, moods, intentions, and purposive movements without knowing the cues by which we do so. Imitation makes this especially clear, since the seen movement of another body must be mapped onto one’s own bodily possibilities before verbal description can enter.

Before imitation is possible, identification must be achieved, i.e., the correspondence established between movement patterns which are perceived through different sense modalities.

Sections 4 and 5 propose a mechanism of pattern transfer: rules learned in one sensory field can be carried into another because sensory elements share abstract attributes such as rhythm, order, duration, and spatial-temporal form. Hayek links this to his theory of classification in The Sensory Order: perception is not a passive reception of particulars but an active ordering of relations. Bodily movement patterns become “master moulds” for perceiving other actions and even for anthropomorphic or artistic experience of nature.

The fact that we sometimes perceive patterns which we are unable to specify has often been noticed, but it has scarcely yet been given its proper place in our general conception of our relations to the outside world.

This leads to the essay’s methodological core. Hayek distinguishes patterns we can perceive and describe, patterns mathematics can construct without intuitive visualization, and patterns we intuitively recognize but cannot specify. The last kind cannot serve directly as scientific explanation, because theory requires specifiable terms. Yet such perceptions are indispensable data for explaining human interaction, since actors themselves orient conduct by them.

What we recognize as purposive conduct is conduct following a rule with which we are acquainted but which we need not explicitly know.

The later sections generalize this into a theory of meaning and Verstehen. Rules of conduct are not fixed habits but layered constraints and dispositions, often excluding possible actions rather than dictating one determinate act. A symbol’s meaning is likewise not simply an image or referent, but a rule imposed on further mental processes. Understanding others therefore requires partial similarity of mental structure, not identical character or moral sympathy.

Intelligibility is certainly a matter of degree and it is a commonplace that people who are more alike also understand each other better.

The final section turns this into a limit on self-explanation. If communication depends on shared background rules, then not all such rules can themselves be communicated; stating some rules requires further rules that remain unstated. Hayek calls this a supra-conscious or meta-conscious order and cautiously relates it to Gödel’s theorem.

Mental events may thus be unconscious and uncommunicable because they proceed on too high a level as well as because they proceed on too low a level.

The essay’s lasting relevance lies in connecting tacit knowledge, perception, and social explanation. Against behaviorism, Hayek insists that meaningful perceptions are real data even when their physical cues cannot be specified; against naive introspection, he denies that agents know all the rules by which they act; against scientism, he argues that complex human orders must be explained through rule-governed intelligibility. Its core conceptual move is to treat rules as operative classifications: they guide action, structure perception, enable communication, and set principled limits to explicit knowledge.