ABSTRACT
In reflecting the methodological limits and the content matter of their own studies, social scientists (among whom economists) display attitudes that show to the cautious observer how boundaries and topics evolve between social sciences, in general, and economics, in particular. Epistemology was carved as a science in order to analyse, among other aspects, precisely those moves. Before ‘epistemology’ as such (and the word for it) were created, there already existed a ‘theory of knowledge’ – in German Erkenntnistheorie – that was to a large extent born within the realm of Kantian philosophy. One century later, the neo-Kantian schools (of Marburg, of Bade) were reviving it, but the rehearsals had been going on all through the nineteenth century, some of its most interesting parts by thinkers apparently most opposed to ‘conceptual’ philosophy, the advocates of the recourse to history and ‘testimony’ of experience in the process of economic life.
