THE ECONOMICS OF RATIONALITY 229

expressed a ‘coherent’ world view. He also argued that truth could not be determined outside the context of language (Lilla 1984).

46In Rescher’s view, cognitive systematization ‘is intimately intertwined with that of planning in its generic sense of the rational organization of materials’ (Rescher 1979, p. 14). For Rescher, this planning and ‘control over nature leads us to an interventionist theory of knowledge’ (Rescher 1979, p. 103). In contrast with this view, Gadamer’s understanding of the subject/object relationship leads him to reject the view that subjects can stand outside their conceptual system or nature and exercise ‘control’ over them. For Gadamer, understanding does not mean that we have the ability to control nature but rather that ‘we are able to cope with an experience by grasping it in language’ (Gadamer 1975, p. 411).

47A similar ontological point is made by Lehe who notes that:

The only world that makes any sense to us is that which we understand within the context of our conceptual framework…. As soon as we specify anything at all determinate about the world, we are already operating within a conceptual framework or theory of some sort and are no longer concerned with a world radically independent of our thought. To be concerned with a world in that sense is to think the unthinkable.

(Lehe 1983, p. 182)

48 Gadamer, for example, notes: ‘We are simply following an internal necessity of the thing itself if we go beyond the idea of the object and the objectivity of understanding, towards the idea of the coordination of subject and object’ (Gadamer 1975, p. 418). When describing the ‘best fit’ criteria, Rescher has also characterized the coherence theory as one of co-ordination (Rescher 1979, p. 155).

49 Gadamer has recognized this similarity. He writes that:

the theory of trial and error that Popper worked out is not at all confined to the logic of specialized inquiry…it makes plain a notion of logical rationality that reaches far beyond the field of scientific research and describes the basic structures of all rationality, even that of practical reason.

(Gadamer 1981, p. 165)

50 See Lavoie (1987) for a more complete discussion of issues regarding the interpretation of economic data by agents.

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Part IV

Hermeneutical reason: applications in macro, micro, and public policy