Economics and Hermeneutics

The Philosophical Foundations of a Radical Austrian Approach to Entrepreneurship

“…Scholars in a range of disciplines, including information science (Klein & Myers, 1999), consumer behavior (Arnold & Fischer, 1994), and organization science (Prasad, 2002), have explored the implications of hermeneutics for their respective fields and proposed guidelines tailored to these perspectives. Although beyond the scope of this article, a similar set of guidelines tailored to the concerns of scholars in the radical subjectivist stream of entrepreneurship research-and informed by recent work on narrative and hermeneutic approaches to both economics (e.g., Lavoie, 2007) and entrepreneurship (e.g., Hjorth & Steyaert, 2005)-would provide a useful foundation for applying hermeneutic principles to this field as well. In formulating such guidelines, scholars will need to consider the implications for entrepreneurial "stories" of such key hermeneutic concepts as the independence of a text's potential meanings from its author's intentions; the central role of language in constructing meaning; the hermeneutic circle, the site of the iterative relationship between a text and its parts that informs the meaning ascribed to the whole; hermeneutic horizons, the fluid boundaries that circumscribe the historical and cultural contexts of both text and reader; the fusion of these horizons that emerges as readers' initial expectations change through dialogue with the text; and the hermeneutics of suspicion, which encourages readers to critique the socially constructed assumptions implicit in the text (see Arnold & Fischer, 1994;Klein & Myers, 1999;Prasad, 2002).…”

Rational-choice hermeneutics

“…3 Although we believe that both hermeneutics and rational choice have something to gain from a synthesis, as economists our primary interest is in making rational choice more hermeneutic. Our position is akin to that of certain Austrian economists who have explicitly endorsed hermeneutics, including Lavoie (1986Lavoie ( , 1991Lavoie ( , 1994, Horwitz (1992), Boettke (1995), Prychitko (1995), and Ebeling (1995). It is probably true that our view is more "neoclassical" than theirs, and further from universal hermeneutics.…”

Uncertainty, human action and scenarios

“…Having the main source in the work of Don Lavoie (1991) and inspired by McCloskey's (1990McCloskey's ( , 1998 criticism of the mainstream's epistemology and methodology, this fresh development in the Austrian tradition has repositioned hermeneutics at the core of the analytical effort and produced not only a series of methodological and theoretical contributions but also a consistent set of empirical applications. This literature pre-dates the more salient rational choice analytical narratives and in a sense represents a bolder and more consistent introduction of the narrative and interpretive element via "thick descriptions" as complements of the "stylized facts" (Boettke and Prychitko, 1994).…”