“Two Types of Mind” is a short reflective essay, reprinted with additions from Encounter, in which Hayek turns an autobiographical contrast into an argument about scientific creativity and university selection. Its scope is not a technical theory of cognition but a scholarly self-analysis: Hayek distinguishes the “master of his subject” from the “puzzler,” then draws institutional consequences for higher education.
Accident has early drawn my attention to the contrast between two types of scientific thinking which I have since again and again been watching with growing fascination.
The first type is the admired scientific ideal: the person who commands “the whole theory and all the important facts” of a discipline, teaches lucidly, answers questions readily, and embodies the current state of knowledge. Hayek is careful not to disparage this type; such scholars are often indispensable expositors and practitioners. His central claim is rather that this visible ideal can obscure another form of intellectual contribution.
What I am going to plead is that there is a place in the various institutions for a few specimens of minds of a different type.
Hayek initially calls the standard type the “memory type,” then revises the term to “master of his subject.” Against it he places his own kind of mind: one that does not retain arguments, formulations, or bibliographical content in orderly form, yet is transformed by contact with them. The key conceptual move is to redefine learnedness: knowledge need not consist in retrievable propositions; it may consist in altered relations among concepts. Reading and listening do not give Hayek material to reproduce, but reshape the internal map by which he thinks.
My gain from hearing or reading what other people thought was that it changed, as it were, the colours of my own concepts.
This is the essay’s most important epistemic claim. Hayek argues that what looks like muddle or forgetfulness may be the condition of originality, because failure to recall accepted answers forces reconstruction. The “puzzler” cannot rely on established verbal routines and so may notice where they hide ambiguity, gaps, or tacit assumptions.
Alfred North Whitehead is quoted as saying that ‘muddleheadedness is a condition precedent to independent thought’.
Hayek’s “puzzler” is not simply a confused person, but someone whose thought often precedes adequate verbalization. Such a mind may “see” connections before being able to state them, and may discover only later that many separate ideas arose from a deeper, unarticulated conception. This makes the puzzler less efficient, less teachable by conventional standards, and less impressive in conversation, but potentially more resistant to intellectual fashion.
I am inclined to call minds of this type the ‘puzzlers’.
The later sections translate the distinction into educational policy. If examinations reward the masterly memory type, universities may exclude students whose capacity appears only after prolonged immersion in a chosen problem. Hayek therefore proposes an alternative route into higher education: not admission by general examination alone, but by demonstrated passionate commitment, even through voluntary austerity and sacrifice. This proposal is deliberately anti-credentialist: the point is to let desire for knowledge count where standardized selection cannot detect latent originality.
It seems to me that the readiness to give up for a few years some of the usual pleasures of the young is a better indication of the probability of an individual profiting from a higher education than the success in examinations in a variety of school subjects.
The essay’s relevance lies in its defense of intellectual pluralism. Hayek does not argue that puzzlers should replace masters, nor that discipline and competence are unnecessary. He argues that scholarly communities need both: the master who preserves and transmits organized knowledge, and the puzzler who, unable to move smoothly within inherited formulae, may expose their limits. The institutional danger is a monoculture of able examinees and fluent specialists.
Indeed, it seems to me that the type that would be attracted thereby should constitute an important ingredient of any scholarly community – and a safeguard against the good examinees establishing a reign of sacred formulae under which all minds move in the accustomed grooves.
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