TOWARDS THE NATIVE’S POINT OF VIEW 29

Likewise, Geertz (1963) goes beyond the square models of economic growth and development and shows a world in which rituals, myths, beliefs and economic constraints interact to produce a rich and dynamic reality.

These anthropological studies are not the final answer; they are also not the only vehicle for traversing the shifting grounds beyond the square. But they appear to get on to a track that promises new vistas on the economic life-world.

CONCLUSION

This essay does not conclude. It cohstitutes a beginning with a proposal for further exploration. The proposal is based on experience; it is a proposal, too, which cuts across disciplines.

The reason for writing is a problem which anyone in economics who pursues the proposal and becomes interested in the native’s point of view is likely to encounter. The problem emerges in the communication with the established economic point of view. It shows in comments such as ‘What you do is unscientific’, or ‘You cannot trust what people say they do’, or ‘Where is your model?—I can’t understand what you mean if you don’t write some constrainedoptimization model’.

I have pointed out as the source of the problem the change in mental pictures that this proposal entails. In order to perceive the native’s point of view we need to perceive space beyond the square and the circle. This is not a proposal to erase the square from the picture. As a matter of fact, the reasoning in this paper is to a great extent square reasoning. Starting from a few premisses we deduce four strategies for dealing with problems. But there is more to all this. After all, this essay proposes more than it concludes.

During the final days of work on this essay, chance did its work. Seeking distraction, I read through some notecards and discovered that a citation from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum which I had copied a while back because it sounded good, now sounded most appropriate. Bacon noted:

Those who have treated the sciences were either empiricists or rationalists. The empiricists, like ants, lay up stones and use them; the rationalists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves, but the bee takes a middle course, gathering up her matter from the flowers of the field and garden, and digesting and preparing it by her native powers.

(Bacon 1900) [1620]

NOTES

1The term ‘neoclassical’ can cause confusion. I refer to the type of neoclassical economics that one finds in Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis.

2Harry Johnson considered the book ‘fascinating’ because it related the anthropological findings to ‘questions of central concern to the economist’.

30 WHAT IS HERMENEUTICS?

3One case in point was a conference on economic rhetoric. See the evaluative papers of Klamer and McCloskey in the conference volume (Klamer, McCloskey, and Solow 1988). See also the exchange between Rosenberg and McCloskey in

Economics and Philosophy (forthcoming).

4A series of conversations with Barend van Heusden, a semiotician, were decisive in seeing the problem and finding a way out. Unfortunately, there are no writings of his to which I can refer.

5How we are able to perceive a tension? If something does not fit what I already know, how do I know?

6The distinction of the three ways of dealing with a tension and the following distinction of four strategies of subsuming the problem took much sorting out and is still far from settled in my own mind. I am relying in this very much on van Heusden’s research and my interpretations thereof.

7This does not imply the necessity of truth. The truth of inference through induction is obviously a matter of probability.

8As I stated earlier, I do not think that the square covers what neoclassical economists do. Lucas is right when he speaks of models as analogies; the new conversation only expands the picture further as it pictures not only analogies, but also arguments, stories, and a plethora of other rhetorical devices.

9One victim is the model of logical choice which is all but abandoned in rhetorical interpretations of discursive actions. There is no model of maximizing behaviour, no algorithm for rational choice in McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics. Implicit in the text of McCloskey’s essay is the proposal that we focus on human action instead of choice. A good articulation of such a proposal can be found in Harré et al. (1985).

10Neoclassical economics casts the analysis of ‘expectations’ in the square terms of information and mathematical probabilities. The resolution of the problem of expectations is sought within the context of Picture I with an emphasis on the deductive strategy.

11One defence of neoclassicists is the ‘false-consciousness’ argument: economic agents do not know what they do and hence we need to rely on economic models to understand what they do. The common sense of agents is irrelevant. Such a position cannot be dismissed outright but I try to show here how unpersuasive this way of thinking is.

12We have noticed, for example, that Picture I features in the official justification of what economists do, but that Picture II prevails in informal discussions among economists (cf. Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; and Klamer, in Klamer et al., 1988).

13They refer to a study of a mineworkers’ community in England where the men expect from each other that extra money would be spent on beer for their mates.

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TOWARDS THE NATIVE’S POINT OF VIEW 31

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