Economics and hermeneutics

Hermeneutics has become a major topic of debate throughout the scholarly community, in sociology and social theory, political and legal philosophy, the philosophy of art and literature, theology, the philosophy of history, anthropology, and the philosophy of science. What has been called the ‘interpretive turn ’ has not only led to interesting new approaches in each of these disciplines, it has helped to forge an interdisciplinary language that is transforming the divided disciplines by bringing them closer together. Yet one of the largest and most important social sciences, economics, has so far been almost completely left out of the transformation. A yawning gap continues to divide scholars in economics from the growing hermeneutics literature. Economics and Hermeneutics takes a significant step toward rectifying the situation, introducing scholars on both sides of the divide to ways that hermeneutics might help economists address some of their most important problems. The essays are not philosophical commentaries from the outside of economics