ABSTRACT
Naturalism exhibits a very short history in economics, but more and more evolutionary economists discover the idea of naturalism as a consilient concept for socioeconomic and cultural studies. In short, naturalism refers to a philosophical conception of science locating and embedding the human being in a social and natural context. Herrmann-Pillath (2008, p. 132) follows Bhaskar (1989) in ‘defining naturalism as a specific epistemological stance where all social science explanations follow certain methodological principles of the sciences, yet simultaneously rejecting reductionism and scientism.’ A central motive in Bhaskar's writing is to offer a philosophical stance between the lines. Bhaskar (1989, p. 15) identifies two dominant but different ontological positions in the philosophy of science, i.e. hermeneutics and positivism. The hermeneutics of Heidegger and his student Gadamer is especially interested in the ontological notion of interpretation, thereby emphasizing the existential understanding of experience. Hence experience gains the central attention in the search for true context. Consequently it has to be naturalistically founded, because understanding will somehow lead to the physical existence of being as such. We have already considered the idea of hermeneutics and simple Dasein in context of Schumpeterian economics and his central idea of a unified social science. We concluded that Schumpeter has envisaged a generic picture of institutional change, but never admitted its naturalistic dimension. Bhaskar criticizes hermeneutics for its reduction of social science to understanding experience: ‘that social science is (or should be) concerned with the elucidation of meaning and the tracing of conceptual connections — activities clearly lacking the inanimate world of nature’ (Bhaskar 1989, p. 17) This very basic claim stresses the point that reality is more than experience and consciousness, which are modalities only incorporated by animals and human beings.
