… are a complementary duo. The first is from the English translation of Ludwig Lachmann’s 1966 essay “The Significance of the Austrian School of Economics in the History of Ideas,” which appears on pages 45-64 of Ludwig M. Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process, Walter E. Grinder, ed. (1977); the quotation is from page 46 (original emphasis):
[T]he ideas and aims of the representatives of the Austrian school, perhaps unconsciously, were always directed not only toward the discovery of quantitative relationships among economic phenomena but also toward an understanding of the meaning of economic actions.
The second quotation is from page 15 of Brian Loasby’s fine 1976 book, Choice, Complexity and Ignorance:
If Galileo had accepted the advice of contemporary Friedmanites [regarding the proper method of doing science], he would have been spared his troubles with the Roman Church, which was perfectly ready to acknowledge, and indeed to make use of, the predictive success of Copernican theory; but for Galileo the structure of a theory mattered as much as its predictions.
