ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a failure of comprehension of the fact that institutionalist economics was the offspring of an entirely distinct philosophical tradition from that which gave rise to neoclassical economics. It summarizes the interactions of pragmatism and the conceptions of science in the key institutionalist economists, Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons. In 1903, the anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss proposed a hypothesis that has become one of the core tenets of research programs in the sociology of knowledge. The Cartesian tradition in philosophy has made its appearance in the British and American contexts with the tendency toward “analytical philosophy,” especially in the twentieth century. The mainstream tradition of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century has found itself driven from pillar to post searching for the appropriate entity in which to ground the certainty of scientific knowledge.
