Hayek and Popper grounded truth in intersubjective convention rather than foundations

Evidence

Paradoxically, Neurath and Popper were much closer to each other than to some other Circle members. Both embraced a revised conventionalism, combining anti-absolutism and non-foundationalism, which discarded the view that scientific knowledge “corresponded” to reality. … In the cases of both Hayek and Popper, the distance they took from their initial intellectual environments entailed an epistemological argument that science could not rely on either deductive apodictic structures nor empirically derived protocols to guarantee its validity. Instead, they reckoned that truth corresponded to the result of an intersubjective process—thereby “socializing epistemology.” The heuristics of this process depended on three interrelated provisions: the methodology employed for discovery and justification, the design of its institutions, and the values shared by the participants. In the end, the epistemological conditions of truth and of social order ultimately shared the same foundations: that of conventional rules which could be revised and improved according to an established method. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the anti-foundationalist, convention-based epistemology Hayek and Popper share — the intellectual core distinguishing their positions from both Mises’s a priori praxeology and Vienna Circle empiricism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the epistemological conditions of truth and of social order rest on the same revised conventional rules is a dense, paradigm-adjacent idea worth sitting with: it links Popper’s science to Hayek’s social order at the level of foundational method, not just analogy.
• XREF: connects to: Modern truth is underwritten by intersubjective control rather than given social status — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 217; German idealism legitimated knowledge by unifying truth and justice in a single subject — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 268; The truth of ideas is independent of their social origins — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 210

Broader Connections

• Modern truth is underwritten by intersubjective control rather than given social status #corroborates (0.90) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 217
• The truth of ideas is independent of their social origins #contradicts (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 210
• German idealism legitimated knowledge by unifying truth and justice in a single subject #contradicts (0.75) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 268