ABSTRACT
Charles Taylor has been a major force in presenting hermeneutical thought to the Anglo-American community. The purpose of this chapter is to review relevant segments of Taylor’s (1985) two-volume work, Philosophical Papers (hereinafter referred to as Papers), and to explore the implications for economics. Two themes which run throughout Taylor’s work are: (1) man is a selfinterpreting animal; and (2) self-interpretation takes place within a linguistic background of distinctions of worth-a realm of qualitative contrast which is irreducible to the various formulae so popular in today’s social sciences. The main thesis presented herein is that the link between economics and hermeneutics lies in the notion of attention. It is argued that attention and language are intimately related, and that attention is to economics as language is to hermeneutics. Thus arises the intimate relationship between economics and hermeneutics.
