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. More importantly, Popper renounced any psychological foundation for knowledge, something which later became important for Hayek's own rupture with Mises's a priori praxeology of human action. 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, loc. 61