ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the theory of finitism and scientific culture as an analogy to the practice of accountancy. It examines: the implications for the meaning and learning of rules; ostensive learning and the use of exemplars; the accounting paradigm; the role of institutions; Wittgenstein’s slogan meaning is use and interpretation; and authority and the impact of people’s goals and interests on their accounting. Hatherly, Leung and MacKenzie explain that finitism is an account of meaning which it views above all through the prism of classification. Specifically, Barnes, Bloor and Henry claim that finitism has five main implications: the future applications of terms are open-ended, no act of classification is ever indefeasibly correct, all acts of classification are revisable, successive applications of a kind term are not independent, and the applications of different kind terms are not independent of each other.