In the social sciences, hermeneutics has come to mean something like "interpretive social science" although technically hermeneutics is one of a number of interpretive approaches that can be applied to social inquiry. In fact, many of those who use it are really drawing less on Gadamer and more on "phenomenological sociology", developed by Alfred Schutz as a synthesis of Husserl and Weber, made popular by Berger and Luckmann in their Construction of Social Reality book. Some also make the mistake of conflating postmodernism and hermeneutics, and many (and I would say most of the important) insights of postmodernism were anticipated by the interpretive social science approaches. This list may also be interested in the small but long-time and ongoing program in looking at Marx in relation to such approaches (references available upon request). Ricoeur and Charles Taylor would be two of the more well-known names in interpretive social science. mat
Carrol asked: Query on the word "hermeneutics." I'm familiar with that as a trend in 18th/19th-c Biblical scholarship which began to have an impact on literary criticism over the last 40 or 50 years. What does it mean in an econ paper? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
