Phenomenology as a Foundation of Economic Method

In recent years, the economic approach to human behavior has been challenged by contributions of cognitive science. Thus two methodological strands in economics disagree with each other: the objectivistic approach favors the methods of natural science; the subjectivistic approach takes the teleological structure of human action as its cornerstone. It is argued that the position of the latter has been undermined because it builds upon the primitive version of the teleological structure. Its deeper analysis is needed, which is the task for economic phenomenology: it identifies invariant pragmatic structures of human action, with various degrees of their anonymity. If the economic approach is founded on those structures adequately, then both rational choice theory and bounded rationality theories become compatible, as they differ in their degrees of anonymity only; they both belong to the body of the (subjectivistic) economic approach to human behavior