C. Mantzavinos

The hermeneutic circle serves as a standard argument for all those who raise a claim to the autonomy of the human sciences. The proponents of an alternative methodology for the human sciences present the hermeneutic circle either as an ontological problem or as a specific methodological problem in the social sciences and the humanities. In this paper I would like to check the soundness of this argument. I will start with listing and shortly sketching out three variations of the problem. I will then critically discuss these and appeal to alternative solutions and I will close with a short conclusion.

There are three main approaches to scientific explanation in the philosophical literature. The unification approach claims that science explains by fitting the particular facts and events within a general theoretical framework. The mechanistic approach claims that science explains by identifying mechanisms. According to the manipulationist approach an explanation ought to be such that it can be used to answer a “what-if-things-had-been-different question.” The article examines whether these three approaches are compatible or not in the case of the social sciences, and it concludes by defending explanatory pluralism.

In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions’ emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. We explore the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose, individually and in collective settings. We then tie the processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as “cognitive institutionalism.” Besides, we show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level.

A philosophical theory of explanation should provide solutions to a series of problems, both descriptive and normative. The aim of this essay is to establish the claim that this can be best done if one theorizes in terms of explanatory games rather than focusing on the explication of the concept of explanation. The position that is adopted is that of an explanatory pluralism and it is elaborated in terms of the rules that incorporate the normative standards that guide the processes of discovery and justification of explanations as well as the modes of their communication, dissemination, and adoption. They constitute the rules of the explanatory game that the participants are playing. The philosophical project consists in describing and normatively appraising the rules that constitute these games.

After providing a brief overview of the economic theory of judicial decisions this paper presents an argument for why not only the economic theory of judicial decisions, but also the rational approach in general, most often fails in explaining decision-making. Work done within the research program of New Institutionalism is presented as a possible alternative. Within this research program judicial activity is conceptualized as the activity of "interpreting the rules of the game", i.e. the institutions that frame the economic and political interaction in a society. Such a conceptualization of judicial interpretation and judicial decision-making would have to depart from rational choice modes of reasoning, and should instead focus on how human beings actually reason, learn and choose drawing from research in cognitive science.

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen Föderalismus und individueller Freiheit. Es wird gezeigt, dass eine vollständige Analyse des Verhältnisses zwischen Föderalismus und individueller Freiheit zwei entgegengesetzte Effekte mitberücksichtigen muss. Auf der einen Seite verstärken föderalistische Strukturen die individuelle Freiheit indem sie die Auswahlmöglichkeiten der Bürger erweitern. Auf der anderen Seite führt jedoch ein föderalistisches System zur institutionellen Vielfalt, ein Faktum, das per se zu höheren Abwanderungskosten führt, die ein Bürger tragen muss, wenn er oder sie entscheidet, die Jurisdiktion zu wechseln. Dieser Effekt auf die individuelle Freiheit ist ein negativer, da jede Erhöhung der Abwanderungskosten die Minderung der individuellen Freiheit zur Konsequenz hat. Der optimale Grad der Vielfalt der Jurisdiktionen befindet sich dort, wo die beiden Effekte sich gegenseitig ausgleichen.

This article provides a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems and institutions, fleshing out a position best characterized as 'cognitive institutionalism'. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions, emergence, their working properties and their effect on economic performance should start with the analysis of cognitive processes. Exploring the nature of individual and collective learning the article suggests that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose. We also show how a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should look like; there is a path dependence at the cognitive level, at the institutional level and at the economic level and there are links among them.

There is a long tradition in philosophy and the social sciences that emphasizes the meaningfulness of human action. This tradition doubts or even negates the possibility of causal explanations of human action precisely on the basis that human actions have meaning. This article provides an argument in favor of methodological naturalism in the social sciences. It grants the main argument of the Interpretivists, that is, that human actions are meaningful, but it shows how a transformation of a "nexus of meaning" into a "causal nexus" can take place, proposing the "successful transformation argument."

Die herausragende Stellung Carl Mengers in der Volkswirschaftslehre wird in dogmenhistorischen Studien hauptsächlich darin gesehen, dass er den entscheidenden Schritt in Richtung einer subjektivistisch fundierten Erklärung des Wertes unternommen hat. Das Hauptziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, zu zeigen, inwiefern in seinem Werk darüber hinaus auch Ansatzpunkte vorhanden sind, die für das moderne Wettbewerbsverständnis theoretisch relevant sind und Menger außer als Preistheoretiker auch als Wettbewerbstheoretiker erscheinen lassen können. Es wird gezeigt, dass alle fünf wichtigen Elemente der modernen Wettbewerbstheorie in mehr oder weniger entwickelter Form in Mengers Werk zu finden sind: der prozessuale Charakter des Wettbewerbs, die Vielfalt an Wettbewerbsparametern, die Bedeutung der Zeit und der Wachstumsaspekt.

This paper defends the claim that social scientists who are interested in the study of institutions should not conduct fights about the meaning of the terms "institution", "organization" and the other terms that are used in the theory of institutions. They should instead concentrate on constructing theories in order to explain the phenomena they are interested in. Defining the terms that one wants to use is a legitimate part of the theoretical endeavor, but it is by no means as important as most institutional theorists tend to think. The paper argues in favor of this claim by drawing on a relevant discussion in the philosophy of science which deals with the role of definitions in the process of constructing a theoretical system.

Explaining phenomena is one of the main activities in which scientists engage. This book proposes a new philosophical theory of scientific explanation by developing and defending the position of explanatory pluralism with the help of the notion of 'explanatory games'. Mantzavinos provides a descriptive account of the explanatory activity of scientists in different domains and shows how they differ from commonsensical explanations offered in everyday life by ordinary people and also from explanations offered in religious contexts. He also shows how an evaluation and a critical appraisal of explanations put forward in different social arenas can take place on the basis of different values. Explanatory Pluralism provides solutions to all important descriptive and normative problems of the philosophical theory of explanation as illustrated in sophisticated case studies from economics and medicine, but also from mythology and religion.

Ce livre montre qu'il est possible de défendre la position selon laquelle les actions humaines ont un sens, et en même temps la position que les actions humaines et tous les éléments qui ont un sens peuvent être appréhendés scientifiquement à partir de la méthode prévalant dans les sciences naturelles. Il adopte une position originale et radicale : la thèse qu'il n'y a pas de différence méthodologique fondamentale entre les sciences naturelles d'un côté, les sciences sociales et les humanités de l'autre. Avec l'aide de la méthode hypothético-déductive, l'appréhension du sens des actions, de même que l'appréhension du sens des textes, peut se faire sans difficulté : dans les humanités et les sciences sociales, les données empiriques consistent dans une large mesure en matériaux significatifs, un fait qui peut dans certains cas compliquer le processus de test des hypothèses, mais ne le rend pas en principe impossible. C. Mantzavinos fait preuve d`une grande originalité. L’édition allemande du présent ouvrage a été publiée sous le titre Naturalististische Hermeneutik par Mohr Siebeck en 2006 et l’édition anglaise sous le titre Naturalistic Hermeneutics par Cambridge University Press en 2005.